I’ll Give You the Sun(8)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Okay, got it: How Would You Rather Die? Eating handful after handful of crushed glass, or a whopping case of necrotizing fasciitis?

The voice of Felicity Stiles—signifying the end is nigh!—pulls me out of this brain-squeezing conundrum where I’m leaning toward eating the glass.

“Can I do the closing, Sandy?” she asks like she always does. She has this gorgeous lilting South Carolinian accent that she uses to give a sermon at the end of every critique. She’s like a flower that talks—an evangelical daffodil. Fish covertly mimes a dagger going into her chest. I smile at her and brace myself. “I just think it’s sad,” Felicity says, then pauses until the room is hers, which doesn’t take more than a second because she doesn’t only sound like a daffodil, she looks and acts like one too and we all become human sighs around her. She holds her hand out to my blob. “I can feel the pain of the whole wide world in this piece.” It takes a full rotation of that world for her to drawl out all those Ws. “Because we are all broken. I mean, aren’t we now? I am. The whole wide world is. We try to do our best and this is what happens, time and time again. That’s what all CJ’s work says to me, and it makes me really, really sad.” She faces me directly. “I understand how unhappy you are, CJ. I really do.” Her eyes are huge, swallowing. Oh, how I hate art school. She raises a fisted hand and clutches it to her chest, then beats it three times, saying, “I. Understand. You.”

I can’t help it. I’m nodding back at her like a fellow flower, when the table beneath Broken Me-Blob No. 8 gives way and my self-portrait tumbles to the floor and shatters into pieces. Again.

“That’s cold,” I tell Mom in my mind.

“You see,” Fish declares. “A ghost.”

This time nobody hardy-har-hars. Caleb shakes his head: “No way.” Randall: “What the hell?” Tell me about it, countrymen. Unlike Casper and Grandma S., Mom is not a friendly ghost.

Sandy’s under the table. “A screw fell out,” he says in disbelief.

I get the broom I keep at my station for such occasions and sweep up broken Broken Me-Blob No. 8 while everyone mutters about how unlucky I am. I empty the pieces into a trashcan. After the remains of my self-portrait, I toss in the useless DIY-clover.

I’m thinking maybe Sandy will feel sorry for me and postpone our big meeting until after winter break, which starts tomorrow, when he mouths at me My office, and gestures toward the door. I cross the studio.

Always walk right foot first to avert calamity, which comes at you from the left

• • •

I’m sunk into a giant plush leather chair across from Sandy. He’s just apologized about the screw falling out and joked that maybe Fish was right about that ghost, eh, CJ?

Chuckling politely here at the absurd notion.

His fingers are piano-ing on the desk. Neither of us is speaking. I’m fine with this.

To his left is a life-size print of Michelangelo’s David, so vivid in the fragile afternoon light that I keep expecting his chest to heave as he claims his first breath. Sandy follows my gaze over his shoulder to the magnificent stone man.

“Helluva biography your mother wrote,” he says, breaking the silence. “Fearless in her examination of his sexuality. Deserved every bit of acclaim it got.” He takes off his glasses and rests them on the desk. “Talk to me, CJ.”

I glance out the window at the long stretch of beach buried in fog. “A white-out’s coming for sure,” I say. One of the town of Lost Cove’s claims to fame is how often it disappears. “Do you know that some native peoples believe fog contains the restless spirits of the dead?” From Grandma’s bible.

“Is that right?” He strokes his beard, transporting flecks of clay from his hand to it. “That’s interesting, but right now we need to talk about you. This is a very serious situation.”

I think I was talking about me.

Silence prevails once again . . . and I’ve decided to eat the crushed glass. Final answer.

Sandy sighs. Because I’m disturbing him? I disturb people, I’ve noticed. Didn’t used to.

“Look, I know it’s been an extraordinarily hard time for you, CJ.” He’s searching my face with his kind billy goat eyes. It’s excruciating. “And we pretty much gave you a free pass last year because of the tragic circumstances.” He has on The Poor Motherless Girl Look—all adults get it at some point when they talk to me, like I’m doomed, shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes. I drop my gaze, notice a fatal melanoma on his arm, see his life pass before my eyes, then realize with relief it’s a dot of clay. “But CSA is a tight ship,” he says more sternly. “Not passing a studio is grounds for expulsion, and we decided to just put you on probation.” He leans forward. “It’s not all the breakage in the kiln. That happens. Granted, it seems to always happen to you, which calls into question your technique and focus, but it’s the way you’ve isolated yourself and your clear lack of investment that deeply concern us. You must know there are young artists all around the country banging on our doors for a spot, for your very spot.”

I think how much Noah deserves my spot. Isn’t that what Mom’s ghost is telling me by breaking everything I make?

I know it is.

I take a breath and then I say it. “Let them have my spot. Really, they deserve it. I don’t.” I lift my head, look in his stunned eyes. “I don’t belong here, Sandy.”

“I see,” he says. “Well, you might feel that way, but the CSA faculty think differently. I think differently.” He picks up his glasses, begins cleaning them with his clay-splattered shirt, making them dirtier. “There was something so unique in those women you made out of sand, the ones that were part of your admission portfolio.”

Huh?

He closes his eyes for a moment like he’s listening to distant music. “They were so joyful, so whimsical. So much motion, so much emotion.”

What’s he talking about?

“Sandy, I submitted dress patterns and sample dresses I made. I talked about the sand sculptures in my essay.”

“Yes, I remember the essay. And I remember the dresses. Lovely. Too bad we don’t have a fashion focus. But the reason you’re sitting in that chair is because of the photographs of those wonderful sculptures.”

There are no photographs of those sculptures.