When we got in, Amie’s door was open, the light off. Lesley’s door was shut, cello music drifting from beneath the door. She played the cello and spent a lot of time practicing. Luckily, she was really good at it, so it was kind of like having a tiny orchestra in the room. Not a bad way to live, as it turned out.
When Scout and I walked in and shut the door behind us, the music came to a stop. A few seconds later, Lesley emerged from her room. She wore a pale green dress with a yellow cardigan over it, her blond hair tucked behind her ears, her feet tucked into canvas Mary Janes. She stood in her doorway for a moment, blinking blue eyes at us.
Lesley was definitely on our side, but she was still a little odd.
“What’s up, Barnaby?” Scout asked, dropping onto the couch in the common room. “Sounds like the cello playing is going pretty well.”
Lesley shrugged. “I’m having trouble with some of the passages. Not as vibrant as I want them to be. Practice, practice, practice.”
I took a seat on the other end of the couch. “It sounds good to the plebeians.”
“Ooh, nice use of today’s Euro-history lesson,” Scout complimented.
“I am all up in the vocab.”
Lesley walked around the couch and sat down on the floor, her skirt fluttering as she moved. She wasn’t an Adept, but she was pale and blond and had a very old-fashioned look about her. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she’d stepped out of some fairy tale and into modern-day Chicago.
“How’s it going with your secret midnight missions?”
Although she wasn’t totally up to speed on the Adept drama, she knew Scout and I were involved in something extracurricular at night.
“The missions are going,” Scout said. “Some nights are better than others.” She bobbed her head toward Amie’s door. “Amie’s little minion saw us coming in on Monday night. Has she said anything about it to you?”
Lesley shook her head. “Not to me. But I heard Veronica tell M.K. and Amie about it. She said Lily was out with a boy.” Lesley looked at me. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Kinda,” I said, my cheeks heating up.
“They say anything else?” Scout asked. “Or did they believe us?”
Lesley shrugged. “Mostly they wondered who the boy was. They didn’t think you’d been here long enough to meet a boy.”
“Our Parker moves pretty fast.”
I kicked Scout in the leg. “Stifle it,” I said, then smiled at Lesley. “Thanks for the update.”
“I could do some opp research if you want.”
Scout and I exchanged a puzzled glance. “Opp research?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“Opposition research. I could follow them around, eavesdrop, take notes. Maybe find something you could blackmail them with?”
“For a nice girl, Les, you’ve definitely got a dark side.”
Lesley smiled grandly—and a little wickedly. “I know. People look at me and they don’t really think I’m up to it. But I’m definitely up to it.”
“We will mos’ def’ keep that in mind,” Scout said. “But for now, since we’ve got an hour”—she paused to pick up the remote control for the small wall-mounted television—“how about a little oblivion?”
I gave her forty-five minutes before I headed back to my room to assemble my supplies.
I had no idea what we’d be doing in art studio—drawing, painting, ceramics, collage—so I put together a little of everything.
First step, of course, was to take stock of the supplies I’d brought with me from home. A couple of sketch pads. Charcoal. Conté crayons. My favorite pencils, a sharpener, and a couple of gummy erasers. A small watercolor box with six tiny trays of color and a little plastic cup for water. Three black microtip pens I’d nabbed at the Hartnett College bookstore, where my parents had been professors. (College bookstores always had the best supplies.)
I tried not to think about Sebastian or the things he wanted to talk to me about, and instead focused on the task at hand. I put the supplies into a black mesh bag, zipped it up, and threw the whole shebang into my messenger bag.
When I was ready to go, I headed out and locked my door behind me. The common room was empty again. Scout’s door was shut, and when I tried the knob, it was locked.
Weird. Since when did Scout lock her door?
I knocked with a knuckle. “Hey, you okay in there? I’m heading out for studio.”
It took a second before she answered, “I’m good. Just about to head to study hall. Have fun.”
I stood there in front of her door for a few seconds, waiting for something more. But she didn’t say anything else. What was she up to?
I shook my head and walked toward the hallway. I definitely did not need another mystery.
The surplus building was a steeply roofed box that sat behind the classroom building. The classroom building was pretty new, but the surplus building was definitely old—the same dark stone and black slate roof as the main building. Maybe it had been a stable or a storage building when the nuns still lived at St. Sophia’s.
I had to walk around the building to find the door. And when I opened it, I stared. Small or not, the building definitely had pizzazz. It was one big room with an open ceiling all the way up to the pitched roof. Skylights had been cut into one side of the ceiling, so the room—at least earlier in the day—would have been flooded with light.
One wall was made of windows, the ceiling a high vault with huge crisscrossing wooden beams. A dozen or so standing wooden easels made a grid across the floor.
“You can take an easel, Parker.” I turned and found Lesley behind me, a canvas tote bag brimming full of supplies in her hand. For anyone else, I would have thought it strange that she hadn’t mentioned she was in art studio when we were in the common room. For Lesley—not so much.
She walked to an easel, then began pulling supplies and sketchbooks out of her tote and arranging them on a small shelf beneath her easel. I took the one beside hers.
“You’ll keep your easel for the year,” she said, arranging empty baby food jars and cups of pencils and brushes. “So you can unload your stuff and come back after study hall. The TAs usually keep a still life ready so you can practice drawing forms, or whatever.” She inclined her head toward a table at one end of the room.
“What’s a TA?” I asked, pulling out my own bag of pencils and sketch pads.
“Teaching assistant. They usually get an art major from Northwestern or Illinois Tech or whatever to teach the class.”
With great care, she organized her supplies, creating a little nest of tools around her easel. I didn’t have much to arrange, but I placed everything within arm’s reach, put my bag on the floor, and took a seat on my stool.
The room filled after a couple of minutes, the rest of the small studio class taking their own easels. Just like in any other high school, the room was a mix of types. Some looked preppy, some looked average, and some looked like they were trying really hard not to look preppy or average. There were girls I didn’t know, who I assumed were in the classes behind and ahead of me.And when everyone had taken an easel and arranged their things, he walked in.
I kept blinking, thinking that my eyes were deceiving me, until he walked by—as if in slow motion—and gave me a tiny nod.
Daniel was my studio TA.
I bit back a grin as he walked to the front of the room, and began thinking of ways to break the news to a very jealous suitemate. And she wasn’t the only ones with eyes for His Blondness. The other girls’ gazes followed him as he moved, some with expressions that said they’d be happy to spend an hour drawing his form.
He turned to face us, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “So, welcome to studio art. I’m Daniel Sterling. I’ll be your TA this year.”
“There is a God,” whispered the grateful girl beside me.
“We’re going to spend the first few weeks on some basic representational exercises. Still lifes. Architecture. Even each other.”
Lesley and I exchanged a flat glance. It looked like she was as thrilled at the idea as I was—namely, not at all. I was perfectly happy with my body, but that didn’t mean I needed it to be the source of other people’s art.
“Today we’re going to start with some basic shapes.” He began to pick through a plastic milk crate of random objects, then pulled out a small lamp and its round lamp shade, a couple of wooden blocks, and three red apples. He draped a piece of blue velvet over the table, setting the blocks beneath it to create areas of different heights. Then he put the lamp and apples on the table and organized them into a tidy arrangement.
When he was done, he turned back to us. “All right,” he said. “Use whatever media you choose. You’ve got two hours. Let’s see what you’re made of.”
Drawing was a strange thing. Probably like other hobbies—basketball or cello playing or baking or writing—there were times when it felt like you were going through the motions. When you put pencil to paper and were aware of every dot, every thin line, every thick shade.
At other times, you looked up from the page and two hours had passed. You lost yourself in the movement, in the quiet, in trying to represent on paper some object from real life. You created a little world where there’d only been emptiness before.
This was one of those times.
Daniel had come around a couple of times to offer advice—to remind me to draw what I actually saw, not just to rely on my memories of what the objects looked like, and to remind me to use the tip of my pencil instead of mashing the lead into the paper—but other than those trips back to the real world, I spent the rest of the time zoned out, my gaze darting between the stuff on the table and the sketchbook in front of me.
That was why I jumped when he finally clapped his hands. “Time,” he said, then smiled at us. “Great job today.” When everyone began to pack up their supplies, he held up a hand.
“You didn’t think you were going to get out of here without homework, did you?”
There were groans across the room.
“Aw, it’s not that bad. Before we meet again, I want you to do a little Second City appreciation. Find a building in the area and spend an hour getting it on paper. You can use whatever materials you want—paint, ink, pencil, charcoal—but I want to see something representational when you’re done. I want you to think about line and shadow. Think about positive and negative space—what parts of space did the architect choose to fill? Which parts did he decide to leave empty?”
We waited for more, but he finally bobbed his head. “Now you’re dismissed.”
The girl beside me grumbled as she stuffed a small, plastic box of watercolors into her bag. “I liked him a lot better when he was just the pretty new TA.”
“Ah,” he said, suddenly appearing to walk past us. “But that’s not going to make you a better artist, is it?”
She waited until he’d passed, then raised hopeless eyes to me. “Do you think that’s going to hurt my grade?”
I glanced back at Daniel, who’d paused at the threshold of the door to talk to a student. He held her sketch pad in one hand and used the other one to point out various parts of her drawing.
“I think he’s going to be pretty fair,” I decided. What I hadn’t yet decided was whether he was here by accident . . . or on purpose.
I practically ran back to the suite after class was over, then slammed into Scout’s room.
I probably should have knocked.
She was on her bed and wearing gigantic headphones. She’d already changed into a bright green tank top and pajama bottoms, and in her hand was a hairbrush she was using as a microphone to belt out a Lady Gaga song at the top of her lungs.
I slapped my hands over my ears. Was Scout generally cool? Yes. Unfortunately, she was also pretty tone-deaf.
She yelped when she saw me, then fell to her knees on the bed. She dropped the brush and whipped off the headphones. “Seriously—knocking?”
I chewed my lips to keep from laughing.
“Parker, if you so much as snicker, I will bean you with this brush.”
I turned my head into my shoulder to stifle the snort and winced when the brush hit my shoulder. “Ow,” I said, rubbing it.
Scout sniffed and put the headphones on the floor. “I spend my days in class and most of my nights saving the world. I’m allowed to have a little Scout time.”
“I know, I know. But maybe you could, you know, focus it in a more productive direction. Like drawing.”
“I don’t like to draw.”
“I know.” I shut the door behind us. “But you know who does like to draw?” Don’t you love a good segue?
“You?”
I rolled my eyes. “Other than me, goofus.”
“I give up.”
“Our intrepid leader. Daniel’s my studio teacher.”
“No. Freaking. Way.”
“Totally.” I dropped my bag and sat down on the edge of her bed. “He walks in, and I was like, ‘Holy frick, that’s Daniel.’”
“You would say that. Is he good at drawing?”
“Well, I didn’t see a portfolio or anything, but since Foley hired him, I’d assume so.” And then I thought about what I’d just said. “Unless she hired him because he’s an Adept. Would she do something like that?”
Scout frowned. “Well, she does know about us. I wouldn’t put it past her to offer an Adept a job. On the other hand, the board of directors would have her head if she hired anyone less than worthy of her St. Sophia’s girls.”