“This matter will be met with discretion,” he says. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
When I don’t answer, he says, “This is a matter more common than you might think. Many students receive counseling for a number of different reasons, and it all turns out fine.”
Fine. I mouth the word at my lap, desperate for the taste of it. What I wouldn’t give for things to turn out fine.
“All right,” I say.
He smiles, all the creases in his pudgy face curling like the wind the sky god conjures in my textbooks. “There will be no need to sneak off the premises to seek counsel from your classmates. I hope we have an understanding.”
“We do, sir.”
“Wonderful.” He scribbles an excusatory note on a piece of paper and hands it to me. “You’re dismissed. Have a pleasant afternoon.”
After classes, Pen and I linger on the outskirts of the playing field, watching the athletes chase one another within the confines of the low stone wall that marks game territory. Basil and Thomas are on opposing teams, and I could swear they’ve turned their practice into a private competition to impress us. Thomas is about as tall as Basil, quick and lean while Basil is more solid. It could be anyone’s win.
It’s an especially windy day, which is common for the short season. I bunch my fists inside the sleeves of my red academy sweater as we sit and watch them.
“Look at that,” Pen says. “If I were one of those poor, dumb, love-struck girls, I’d say there’s nothing in the sky more fetching than that, our boys with their sleeves rolled up, going at each other like beasts.”
I wonder if she knows her hand is to her chest. Her face goes flat. “Thomas doesn’t look too bad from this distance, does he? What a disappointment to know he’s not so exquisite up close.”
“He’s perfectly attractive,” I say.
“He has a nose like a broken bridge.”
“Oh, he doesn’t,” I say.
“You want him for yourself, is that it?” Pen says. “Have him. I’ll trade you your day-old compost scraps. At least then I could use them to grow something I could stomach.” She is smiling as she watches him, though. I watch the boys, too, trying to follow Basil across the field, the beads of sweat making his hair jagged when he doubles over to catch his breath.
I wrap my arms around Pen’s shoulders and lean my head against hers. “I hope we live in apartments next door to each other once we’re grown and married,” I say.
“I’ll be a mapmaker by then,” she says, “penning maps by candlelight until all hours. Maybe I’ll turn irrational. But not the bumbling, stupid irrational. The quiet sort, whispering things to glass jars as though they’ll hold my secrets. No one will ever know.”
There’s a moment of silence before she snorts and giggles. I can never tell when she’s being serious. She seems to prefer it that way.
“Hey,” she says. “I have to get something from the art room. Come with me.”
“I think Basil wanted to walk home with me.”
“We’ll be right back,” she says, and tugs me to my feet. She leads me into the academy, up the stairs, to the art room.
There’s a sort of eerie peace to an empty classroom. The easels display colorings like windows, each one a distorted view of Internment. I know which one is Pen’s even before she has marched over to it. The easel’s ledge is a mess of coloring pens, and bladder sacks haphazardly tied shut with twine, fat with colors. The bladders of small animals are the most common way of storing colors; paper wouldn’t do the job, and collapsible metal was deemed too wasteful when an inventor proposed the idea a hundred years ago. The colors themselves are made from plants.
She’s colored the glasslands the way they would look late in the afternoon, the domes and spires mirroring the orange sky and smoky clouds. She’s memorized that place. Not only does her father work there as a sun engineer, but she has a perfect view of it from her bedroom window.
She frowns at her work. “My contribution to the festival,” she says. “The instructor thinks it’s quite good. She wants me to color it in the center of the clock tower canvas, assuming we get the king’s approval.”
“Really?” I say.
She shrugs.
Every year, a large canvas is prepared by the city’s most talented artists. For the final week of December, the king allows the canvas to be wrapped around the clock tower. There’s a final week of festivities under that canvas, and even the rarely seen prince and princess come out to mingle.
“Pen, that’s a huge honor,” I say. “Why don’t you seem at all excited?”
In answer, she tears her coloring from the easel and crumples it in both hands. The colors are still wet, and oranges and grays stain her fingers. “It wasn’t right,” she says. Gritting her teeth, she pushes the balled paper together before yanking it into two pieces.
She drops the ruined project into a recycling tube, where it’s immediately sucked away, leaving a smear of color on the rim.
“How could you say that?” I say. “It looked perfect.”
“It was going to bother me all night knowing it was just sitting here all wrong,” she says. “I’ll make something better tomorrow. A portrait, maybe. You can be my model.”