The Swap - Robyn Harding Page 0,2

“wedging,” pressing the clay into itself, making it malleable and releasing any air bubbles. I watched Freya intently, copying the movement of her small but powerful hands. Afterward, we filled two metal containers with warm water from the back sink and moved to the wheels. Here, we encountered our first hurdle.

“Are you right-handed?” she asked me.

“No, I’m left-handed.”

“Oh.” Her brow furrowed. “You’ll turn your wheel clockwise then. I’ll try to do a left-handed demonstration, but I’m not very ambidextrous.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m used to learning everything opposite.”

And so we began. Freya chatted as I got used to the feel of wet clay spinning beneath my hands, of the force of my touch to morph it into a vessel. She had moved to the island just four months ago, she told me. It was her husband’s idea. She had a husband. Of course she did. A beautiful woman her age would not be single.

“He wanted a fresh start,” she elaborated, eyes on the perfect clay cone taking shape upon her wheel.

“And you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. Her hand slipped over the top of the mini mountain, palm compressing it into a small, round hill. “I don’t want to be here. But I have no choice.”

“That makes two of us,” I muttered.

She looked up at me, a slow smile spreading across her face. She saw me. She really saw me. I was not simply a misfit teenager, tall and awkward and outcast.

I was a kindred spirit.

2

Mondays quickly became my favorite day. After school, I drove toward Freya’s waterfront property, pulling over at the secluded boat launch to eat a snack in my truck. Thankfully, my job as egg collector provided a share of the profits, which I promptly spent on meat. My mom was a vegetarian, and since she did most of the cooking, so were the rest of us. This diet was not the most satiating for someone with my height and metabolism, so I would often buy burgers or subs loaded with ham, turkey, and salami—no onions. I was conscious of my breath in the small studio environment. After checking my teeth in the rearview mirror, I drove to Freya’s home, arriving each day at precisely four o’clock.

She was always there, always prepping, as if she were as eager for our sessions as I was. Her smile, when I entered, was bright and welcoming even if her blue eyes were sometimes sad, sometimes red and puffy (From allergies? From crying? From a hangover?). Each time, I tried to hand her a ten-dollar bill, and each time, she waved it away. “We can deal with that later.” Eventually, I stopped offering and slipped most of the money back into my brothers’ stashes.

On my second lesson, I arrived to find that the side-by-side pottery wheels had been moved to face each other. “This way, you can mirror what I do,” Freya said. It was the most considerate thing anyone had ever done for left-handed me. As I took my seat across from her, a lump of gratitude formed in my throat.

I was not particularly good with my hands, but Freya was a patient and encouraging teacher. Within a few lessons, I was creating slightly lopsided bowls, mugs that were a tad off-center, and vases that wobbled on flat surfaces. Pottery is quite a forgiving craft. Freya would help me trim and patch my creations, would suggest a heavier glaze that would better hide the flaws in my work. In time, I created giftable, even salable crockery. But the product of my lessons was not the point.

Freya was the point.

As we worked, I learned more about her. She had grown up in Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood west of Los Angeles. Freya’s mother was Icelandic, had gifted her only child her Nordic good looks and artistic talent.

“She taught me to work with clay when I was five years old,” Freya said. “By the time I was eight, my pieces were good enough to sell. We spent hours together in her backyard studio. I didn’t realize she was batshit crazy until I was thirteen.”

“She was crazy?”

“Bipolar. But she never got diagnosed, so she never took medication,” Freya stated. “She’d stay up all night making pottery, then she’d sleep all day. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see her for over a week, just hear her banging around out there in the night.”

Freya’s father was a powerful entertainment lawyer and a workaholic. He’d been a distant and distracted parent, but she’d inherited her drive