“Fair,” Grace said.
“Two,” Kendall said. “It’s very brown.”
“So brown,” said Lana.
“Not hazelnut, not toasty clove or whatever. Just plain brown. It’s not a color anyone would dye their hair,” Kendall said. “It screams nature.”
“But nature whispers,” Lana said. “Nature,” she hissed. “What I was saying: You have virgin hair.”
“Oh, no,” Grace said, blushing. “I’m not a virgin.”
Kendall shushed her with a hand. “It’s, um, school picture ready. And if you came all the way from backwater mystery or wherever and didn’t change your hair—”
“You’ve probably had the same boyfriend for, like, three years,” Lana finished.
“Unless he’s some old creeper,” Kendall said, raising a finger. “Who’s into virgin hair and Peter Pan collars.”
“He’s not,” Grace said quickly. She was ready to shock them. “He’s my husband. And we’ve been together for six years.”
Lana’s eyes went wide. “You’re married?”
“His name is Riley, and he’s a sophomore in college.”
“Where?” Kendall asked.
They would know too many people at Harvard, Princeton. “The Sorbonne,” she said.
They demanded evidence. Grace brought over her new laptop and settled between them on the bed. She showed them photos of her and Riley together until they looked seasick.
“They don’t make ones like that up here,” Kendall said when they had finished.
“You sound so surprised,” Grace said.
“I just thought you’d be with someone really, I don’t know, serious-looking.”
“Seminary student,” Grace added, but their faces showed no recognition. She tried again: “Eagle Scout?”
“It’s so fucked up that you’re married, though. Are you, like, hard-core Christians?”
“No,” Grace said. “We knew we’d spend the rest of our lives together, so why not? But it’s a secret. No one knows.”
Kendall nodded, uncomprehending.
“Who’s that guy?” Lana pointed to the last photo, in which Riley, Greg, and Alls were fishing from the Kimbroughs’ dock on Norris Lake.
“That’s Greg, one of Riley’s friends since they were little kids.”
“He looks like a glazed doughnut. A fat baby-man,” Lana said. “Look at those blond wisps.”
“He pulls the crust off his sandwiches,” Grace said.
Lana pointed again. “And that one?”
“Alls. His best friend.”
“They have super-weird names down there,” Kendall said to her. “Last names as first names—what’s the one you told me yesterday?”
“Tipton Hartley,” Grace said. “Goes by Tip. ‘Just-the-tip’ Hartley.”
They laughed, all together this time, and it felt good to Grace.
“Wait, tell me another,” Lana said.
“Um, Malone.” Grace said. “Vines.”
“Vines?” Kendall howled, and Grace felt a weight lift.
“Tell me about Allllls,” Lana said. “I like him. He looks disturbed.”
“He’s not disturbed, he’s just had a hard time.” She swallowed. “It’s short for Allston, Allston Javier Hughes.” She didn’t want to talk about him, so she told them about the Kimbroner instead.
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Lana was an artist. Kendall mentioned it in passing, in the same tone she might say someone was a Pisces or ten pounds overweight. Not in the reverent way people talked about Riley.
The previous year, when Lana was only seventeen, she’d gotten one of her videos into a Chelsea gallery group show. Her piece was a three-minute loop of Lana, naked and sick with the flu, lit in gauzy, softly glowing peaches and pinks. She blinked wet lashes up close to the camera lens and licked her chapped lips until they glistened. Too congested to inhale through her runny nose, she breathed audibly through her mouth. At two minutes, Lana hacked up phlegm and spat, strings of saliva clinging to her chin. At two and a half she stood up, weak and unsteady as a fawn, her naked body rising through the frame in fluid latitudes. Knees shaking, she turned and walked away from the camera until the whole length of her body filled the frame, and she disappeared through a doorway. Seconds later, she could be heard retching into a toilet.
The video had been pulled from the show on its second day when a critic discovered the naked subject had been only sixteen at the time of its filming. The gallery could have been charged with distributing child pornography, which had seemed to be Lana’s intention. Grace wanted so much to ask her about the video, which both fascinated and troubled her, but she was worried her questions were too basic. When she finally did, Lana nodded as though she’d been asked these same questions a thousand times. “I’m interested in ‘prettiness,’ debasement, and self-objectification,” she said. “But subverted through entrapment and the transference of contagious shame.”
To make her art, Lana lived it, playing the dumb damsel in front of her camera as well as the director behind it. Grace thought Lana was the most calculating person she had ever met. She could hardly look her in the eye for days after seeing the video, not because she’d seen Lana naked, but because she was ashamed to have so underestimated her.
? ? ?
On Grace’s first day of Western Art I, the professor’s voice heavy in her ears, she looked around the darkened theater and saw a hundred girls like her: nails clean, notebooks out, eyes screwed up at the screen. But their hair was slicked back in ballerina buns or wild and loose, and their ears held pearls or bold feathered hoops, wooden disks. She saw that they all wanted to be versions of the same thing, only they were so much further along.
Grace began to spend her Saturday afternoons wandering around Chelsea galleries, taking notes on free postcards and press releases. She ignored the heavy ache in her legs as she wound her way up metal staircases that looked as though they went nowhere promising. She learned to push through unmarked metal doors into spaces two stories high, white and hollow, that housed what she had begun to realize were ideas. Art was not there to look nice. Art was there to scratch at people’s brains, to help ideas find traction in metaphor that they could not when made explicit. She was exhausted with thinking and with unlearning so much of what she had thought before.
She returned to her dorm at dusk, her brain abuzz. When she saw something and really got it, she knew it, she felt it, and it thrilled her to slip into the crawlspace of someone else’s mind.
Though she couldn’t quite position Riley’s careful oils of historic buildings among the work she saw now, she assured herself that this was only because she didn’t know why it so compelled him or what his intentions were. How could she? She hadn’t known enough to ask. She was only just learning about art and intent. It didn’t matter if Riley’s paintings looked sedate, as long as the idea behind them was not. That mystery excited her too: that Riley had ideas that were still opaque to her, corners of his brain still unexplored.
She tried to explain Lana’s video to him on the phone. She couldn’t bring herself to show him Lana’s naked body, a jealousy she knew would please Lana to no end. “But where is the skill?” Riley asked. “Anyone could make that.” Anyone couldn’t, Grace tried to explain. Only Lana could make her art because it was her idea. Then Grace changed the subject. Maybe it just didn’t translate into words.
? ? ?