Liberal Art

1.

Three students stand still in front of a bare cherry blossom tree across the street from the library, creating a sort of accidental tableau as they gaze ahead. That’s the first image Mara is conscious of. She doesn’t quite grasp what’s happening but she notes the unplanned choreography of their positioning and almost reaches for her phone to take a picture, then thinks better of it. Her ears are ringing, which is odd. She continues walking towards them, aiming to commit the whole thing to memory. A girl is standing stoic and expressionless while her boyfriend clutches at her, vibrating. Mara wonders why he’s so upset. Another girl stands nearby, alone, jerking her head between her phone screen and the library. She throws a glance in the couple’s direction, begging them to address her, mouth hanging partially open. Spit it out, Mara thinks.

When they see her, register her bloody leg and torn pant leg, her casual, unhurried stroll, they all three spring into action, hurling a series of questions at her she can’t make out. Before understanding why, something clicks into place and she’s screaming at them to move, get away from here, now. The couple scatters. Alone Girl hesitates a moment before grabbing Mara’s arm. She feels herself dragged along by the hand like a toddler into the nearest building and down two floors to the end of a dark hallway she’s never seen before. Alone Girl places a fob against a black box mounted on the wall. It lights up green, she hears a click, and then they’re standing inside a room filled with equipment she doesn’t know how to name. She can’t believe how new and shiny everything is.

Alone Girl releases her bag and slides to the floor, leaning against the back of the door. I’m a chem major, she explains, I do research in this lab. Oh, I’m Erin, by the way. Mara drops down next to her, sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum. Cool. After a few minutes, Erin pulls herself up and walks into a small office in the back. The opening and closing of metal cabinets echo from the corner. She comes back with a first aid kit and starts going to work, saying nothing. She wipes down Mara’s calf with an alcoholic prep pad, leaving a lot of blood behind, smeared all over the place, Mara notices, a bit annoyed. She has the urge to take her pinkie finger and draw a smiley face in the mess. Erin wraps her wound with gauze and tapes it up carefully.

Finally the messages and notifications come through, the automated calls and the pop-up alerts. The promise of an advanced campus emergency communication system, arriving a bit too late. Mara waits for an alarm to sound outside. High pitched and urgent, it should sound like war, but it doesn’t come. Her phone is buzzing and she tries to type out responses but her fingers won’t move like normal.

When it’s safe to come out, they do. A medical tent has been set up on the quad. Campus security officers try to look important amongst the local police. Students sit staring blankly in folding chairs. The crying morphs and bubbles up in different pockets, spreading. Mara looks around; nobody is keeping her here. Nobody knows she’s hurt. She gets up tentatively and backs out like she’s leaving an awkward conversation. Erin waves goodbye in slow motion. She is impossibly tall and thin, giant blue-grey eyes blinking sadly. She has a crooked nose and light orange hair. Each feature is shocking and she is beautiful.

Almost instantly, parents pull up in hoards, shuffling hysterical nineteen-year olds into SUVs and mid-sized sedans. The college doesn’t know what to do. It’s the end of the semester and they are scrambling to offer an online option for finals. Students are furious they’re not canceling altogether, but Mara doesn’t see the point in that. Nobody died. Nobody even really got hurt. She only tripped and fell. This school is full of underachievers, she thinks.

She’s the only one who doesn’t see it coming, when they finally do cancel finals. More students go home. She decides to turn in her papers and projects anyway, because they’re done. She walks into the library and wanders around, taking in a still life of exam week: laptop charger coiled around itself neatly, organic chemistry textbook lying open next to some collage drawn on a piece of A3 paper, half-eaten blueberry muffin. She tries to send an essay to a library printer but they all flash a red error message: OFFLINE.

2.

Mara wakes up from the dream with her leg throbbing and heartbeat audible. She is crying; she has never woken up from a dream like this before, has only seen this reaction in films and on TV. She races through what she knows to be true, things that have happened today that place her back in time. It is not today, that is the first thing. It is tomorrow. She came to the studio after dinner. It was taco night, but the dining hall was nearly empty, almost everyone had gone home for the holidays already. The coffee didn’t help; it was after midnight when she last checked her phone but she fell asleep in front of the painting she had been planning to finish shortly thereafter. The art building is empty, unsupervised by campus security. There are no police. Her final piece for “Large Canvas Painting” is sitting before her undisturbed.

She spends the morning and early afternoon putting on the finishing touches and feels a good sort of nothing as she appraises her work, empty from all the effort. When the painting is done she lies down on her back facing away from the canvas and arches her back so she can see it new. The black and blue swirling backdrop, the varied, brilliantly colored spheres, inside each orb hundreds of globules of varying hues. She floats in space. That is how he finds her.

3.

“Knock, knock,” he says, rather than actually knocking. The door is partially open. She might have been startled in a different life. She responds from the floor, “Hi.”

“Hey. Sorry, I didn’t think there’d be anyone here. I’m Ben. My housemate mentioned that you guys just leave your work in the studios and I thought — I don't know.”

“Oh. Well, come sit.”

He obliges, gestures at the canvas, “Is this yours?”

“Yes.”

“Woah.”

An unfamiliar smile cracks her cheeks open.

“Why are you still here?” he asks.

“I live on the west coast. I always stay until the last minute. You?”

“I like the quiet.” She can feel the warmth coming off him. She sits up, takes his left hand in hers and starts to trace and inspect the lines of his palm.

“I’m clairvoyant, you know.”

He laughs, “What do you see?”

Since she’s escaped death and knows now how precious life is, she wraps her fingers around his wrist and kisses the base of his thumb.

4.

She sketches manically; Ben stays with her in the studio. She draws the scene in front of the cherry blossom tree over and over again in various iterations, tweaking the expressions of each face several times. She draws Erin looking at her phone, then looking straight ahead, then looking at the couple. In one version she draws a pietà, the couple as Jesus and Mary while Erin takes a selfie in front of them. She draws them all as animals, a giraffe, a zebra, and an antelope. In another they are all birds, singing out a warning. She makes three bodies with spinning cherry tops for heads.

Nothing occurs to Mara outside of now. Not what happens next. That she still needs to buy Christmas presents. What courses she’ll register for in a few weeks. Her mind draws one long blank. She never really knows what time it is. It’s just the cherry blossom drawings and fucking Ben for three days, leaving only when they’re about to faint from hunger or when they start to smell. Their togetherness seems rather matter-of-fact, this is what life has become. She really thinks it, too.

But. The veil of their little world starts to shimmer and blur the night before she has to fly home. Ben comes to her apartment and watches her pack, pacing around. His bodily commands have switched from automatic to manual, doesn’t know what to do with his hands or his feet, where or how to sit. He helps her clean out the fridge and sweeps the floor. She bends down with the dustbin and looks up at his hands wrapped around the broom handle. She wishes he would reach out his fingers so she could put them in her mouth. They watch a movie on the couch instead, not exactly sure how to arrange their bodies together on the not-floor.

When the credits start to roll, she closes her laptop without pressing pause, gets up from the couch and walks towards her room. She turns around and waits to see Ben following her. Something is off about him tonight but she’s acting strange too. Part of her wants to hurry up and say goodbye. It’s only a month, but it’s hard to imagine what will happen during that time, if she’ll call him from her childhood bedroom at her parents’ house on the other side of the country, touch herself while he talks to her. In bed, she gets on top of him more rushed and needy than normal and it’s all over in a few minutes. After, she lies against his torso and she starts to feel his chest rise and fall too quickly, a strange sucking sound coming from his mouth. She sits up and rests her palm against his chest.

“Are you okay?”

“I have a girlfriend.”

5.

On Christmas morning, she opens an email from him. I’m really fucking sorry, Mara. I don’t know what I was thinking or why I didn’t say anything. It just happened out of nowhere and it all seemed like it didn’t count, which is — she hits the trash icon. She navigates to her archived folder, selects the message and clicks delete forever.

She’s awake before her parents, still on east coast time. In the kitchen she feeds the cat and brews coffee. She fills up the biggest mug she can find and takes it out to the garden. She ponders the novelty it’s become to sit outside in December and thinks about not going back at all. She enjoys the fantasy of being a mystery to others. She wouldn’t answer texts or calls or emails; she would disappear and leave everyone to worry and speculate. She would sit in this garden and tend to her bitterness.

At Christmas dinner, she puts herself in charge of the kids’ table, grateful for the noise. She swings two-year old Charlie around and around in the backyard until her arms are heavy and sore. She lets seven-year old Franny give her a makeover, eating lamb and mashed potatoes with pink lipstick on her eyelids and glittery unicorn stickers on her cheeks. After everyone exchanges presents, she makes twelve-year old twins Max and Anya put their phones away and play Monopoly with her in the basement. They all get tired of the game after a while and she puts Star Wars on for them instead and watches their little bodies give in to sleep on the couch. When it’s time to nudge them awake and send them home, she hugs them a bit too hard.

When she tries to sleep that night, words flit behind her eyes. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… it just happened out of nowhere and it all seemed like it didn’t count.

As she gets ready to return to campus, she has more sketches to pack than anything else. She’s added so many drawings to the collection: each person’s face rendered small and cherub-like in the blossoms of the tree, an angel and a pair of furry demons, Erin as Death with a black cloak and scythe, the couple begging for mercy on their knees.

6.

Back at school, Mara looks for Erin and fears Ben around every corner. It’s less freezing than usual for February so she sits bundled up on a bench across the street from the science building. She tries the morning, and then the afternoon. She paces back and forth, borrows a few cigarettes from a friend to look like she has something to do, standing outside in the cold letting them burn away between her fingers. Mara hasn’t seen her since they said goodbye outside of the medical tent, but she needs to find her, to ask her permission to draw her portrait, which she’ll want to display at the Art Department’s exhibition at the end of the semester. Every day she walks around with deceitful cigarettes and doesn’t find what she’s looking for. She spots Ben one night, jogging along the edge of campus as she’s leaving the library. She hides behind a cement column until he’s out of sight.

7.

Mara’s face is hot and red in the stuffy gallery space. She’s had a glass of red wine and finds it very adult to be drinking at a school-sanctioned event. She’s been so polite to so many people, her jaw feels permanently clenched from all the smiling. From across the room, a classmate signals to her empty glass and mouths, another? She gives a little shrug and then a thumbs up in response. As she hands her glass over for refilling, Ben walks in with a boy who Mara recognizes as a senior art major. His housemate, she realizes, the one who told him about the studios. She stands frozen, animal instinct to run and hide overridden by the other bodies in the room.

For about fifteen minutes she stands there trying to hold her face in the most neutral position possible, looking either straight ahead or into her glass or at her own drawings hanging on the wall. It’s been four months and eleven days since she last had sex. The semester will be over in twenty-three days, after which, to her knowledge, he will be walking across a stage to receive his diploma. Cap thrown in the air, gone. For the one hundred fifty-seven days of her final year, he’ll be elsewhere. But now he is circling slowly, stopping occasionally in front of certain pieces to perform contemplation. His friend gets stuck talking to a professor and she knows that he has no choice but to approach her.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Great,” she says, gesturing to the evening unfolding around them. He waits for her to ask him back but is met with silence.

“It’s really cool to see your work like this.”

“Thank you.”

He looks at his feet, and she suddenly feels cruel and spiteful, noticing that his eyelashes are longer than she remembers.

“It’s nice to see you,” she concedes.

His gaze passes over her face to the wall behind her.

“I live on Harrison, you know, that ugly purple house across the street from the bus stop.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going home now.”

“Alright.”

8.

An hour later, she stands on the sidewalk under a maple tree across the street from the purple house. She lets another borrowed cigarette burn between her fingers.

9.

The end of the year passes by. Mara walks to class, eats with friends in the dining hall, and turns in her finals on time. She talks to professors about a thesis project for her senior year. After exams she helps her roommates load their cars up to drive home for the summer. On the last night of the semester, she drinks too much and throws up, sobbing in the unfamiliar bathroom of an off-campus house.

Walking home alone, she takes a shortcut through a patch of trees and trips hard over a fallen branch hidden by the dark. Lying on the ground, her leg is throbbing again. She looks up at the stars peeking through the branches above and listens to her breath.

“Hey, are you okay?” The familiar face comes into frame, looking down at her in concern. Blue eyes and crooked nose and orange hair all visible.

“It’s you.”

“Sorry, what’s your name again?”

“No, I’ve just seen you around campus, that’s all. I’m Mara.”

“Diana.” She helps Mara off the ground and explains that her dorm is right here, behind this mini forest. She’s a volunteer EMT and can help with her leg, if that’s okay. Mara nods and lets herself be guided away. She watches Diana pull out her keychain and tap her ID card against the black box mounted next to the door. It lights up green, she hears a click, and then they’re inside, walking up the stairs, opening the door to a room labeled 304.

With the light on she can see that her tights are ripped and her left shin is bleeding. Diana gets her a cup of water and sits down next to her, rubbing small circles on Mara’s back while she cries. She doesn’t ask for an explanation, but after a while, lets out a deep sigh and declares, “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She comes back a minute later with a first aid kit and starts going to work, saying nothing. She wipes down Mara’s calf with an alcoholic prep pad, leaving a lot of blood behind, smeared all over the place, Mara notices, a bit annoyed. She has the urge to take her pinkie finger and draw a smiley face in the mess.