I stared at the printed sheet in front of me now, the ink swimming. My eyes felt perpetually hot, overheated, my heart poorly digested in my gut. I tapped my pencil on the page, stared at a block of text I was meant to analyze, a painting I was meant to recognize. For the third time in the last half hour, I felt a pair of eyes on my face.
This time, I did not pretend them away.
This time, I lifted my head, looked in their direction. The eyes quickly averted, the familiar face bowed once again over her paper, hand scribbling furiously at nonsense.
Due to the nature of the art history course—and the interminable amount of time we spent staring at slides—our class was held in the only amphitheater on campus. We were all arranged in an incomplete circle, our raised seats gradually descending toward a single podium in the middle of the room behind which was a massive screen. The teacher currently stood sentinel in the center, watching us closely as we worked. Our class didn’t have assigned seats, but I always sat toward the back, where the desks were illuminated by only dim lighting, and when Zahra glanced my way for the fourth time, I marveled that she could see me at all.
Her attention toward me did not bode well.
I glanced at my exam again. Thirty minutes in, and I’d written only four things: my name, my class, the period number, and the date. My eyes homed in on the year.
2003.
I felt my mind spiral, rewind its own tape, a pencil in the cassette reel spinning backward. Memories surfaced and dissolved, sounds streaking into flashes of light. I conjured a vague, distorted impression of my slightly younger self, marveled at her naivete. Last year I had no idea the extent of what was coming for me. No idea, even now, how I would survive it.
My breath caught.
Pain speared me without warning, a javelin through the throat. I forced myself to take a calming breath, forced myself to return to the present moment, to the pressing task at hand. We were down to twenty minutes in class and I hadn’t yet answered a single question. I reached for my pencil, compelled myself to focus.
My fingers closed around air.
I frowned. Looked around. I was about to give up on the writing instrument I thought I’d had, about to reach into my bag for a new one when someone tapped me, gently, on the shoulder.
I turned.
Wordlessly, my neighbor handed over my pencil. “You dropped it,” he mouthed.
I stared at him for just a moment too long, my mind catching up to my body as if on a delay.
My heart was pounding.
“Thank you,” I finally said, but even my whisper was too loud. I ignored a few fleeting looks from my classmates, sat back in my seat. I glanced again at my neighbor out of the corner of my eye, though not surreptitiously enough. He met my gaze, smiled.
I averted my eyes, worried I’d just made myself seem more than casually interested in this guy. Noah. His name was Noah. He was one of the only Black kids in our school, which was enough to make him memorable, but more than that—he was new. He’d transferred in about a month ago, and I didn’t think I’d ever spoken to him prior to this moment. In fact, I couldn’t presently recall ever sitting next to him. Then again, there were forty-five students in this class, and I couldn’t trust my memory; I was terrible at noticing details these days. Then again again, I didn’t think I was so checked out that I couldn’t even remember who sat next to me in class.
I slumped lower in my chair.
Concentrate.
The painting poorly printed on my exam came suddenly into sharp focus. Two women were working together to behead a man, one pinning him to the mattress as he struggled, the other sawing into his throat with a dagger. I tapped my pencil against the picture; my heart thudded nervously in my chest.
I closed my eyes for a second, two seconds, more.
Ali’s reappearance last night had dredged up feelings I hadn’t allowed myself to think about in months. I seldom allowed myself to think about last year, my junior year; I often thought it a miracle I was still alive to remember those days at all. September of last year my heart had been left for dead under an avalanche of emotion delivered in triplicate:
Love. Hate. Grief.
Three different blows delivered in quick succession. I was stunned to discover, all these months later, that hatred had been the hardest to overcome.
Artemisia Gentileschi.
Her name came to me all at once: Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most critically acclaimed and simultaneously overlooked painters of the seventeenth century. My mind parroted back to me the information I’d once memorized, names and dates I’d made into flash cards. Born in Rome, 1593. Died in Naples, 1653.
I knew the answers, but my hand would not move. I felt my lungs constrict as panic flooded my chest. The tips of my fingers went numb, sparked back to life. I could hardly hold my pencil.
This painting can be attributed to a follower of Caravaggio based on which of the following formal qualities?
A) Monochromatic palette
B) Dramatic tenebrism
C) Pyramidal composition
D) Prominent grisaille
My relationship with Zahra had been strained for a while, but last September tensions between us reached their pinnacle, an achievement for which there seemed no obvious impetus. Still, I spent the last year of our friendship navigating a maze of passive aggression, parrying every day the thinly veiled insults she lobbed my way. It only occurred to me now that Zahra had held on to our friendship a year longer than she’d wanted. She’d not been so reprehensible a person to kick me while I was down; she had enough mercy, at least, to spare me such a blow so soon after my brother died.
I should’ve seen it coming.
I should’ve, but I’d been willfully blind. I’d been so mired in grief I could hardly survive my parents’ nightly fights, could hardly survive the rigorous demands of my junior year. I was desperate for even the scraps of the familiar, desperate to hold on to the friend who knew my history, to the escape that was her home. I’d not been able to spare the emotional expense necessary to see what was right in front of me—that my best friend had begun to hate me.
Hate me.
When the bell rang, I turned in a blank exam.
Last Year
Part III
My mom was waiting for me after school, her champagne-colored minivan wedged between two nearly identical models. I knew her minivan was a champagne color—not a variation on beige, not a sort-of-brown—but champagne, specifically, because the salesman who’d sold it to my parents had emphasized the color as a selling point.
My poor parents had been scandalized.
They’d sat the salesman down and explained to him that they did not drink alcohol, they did not want a champagne car, could they please have a different one.
I smiled now, remembering this story—Mehdi loved telling it at social gatherings—and trudged toward our drunken minivan, Zahra trailing behind. The after-school pickup was always a logistical nightmare, but my mom had long ago found a way to manage it: she arrived half an hour early, and usually she brought a book. Today, however, she was squinting through her reading glasses at the glossy pages of a magazine, a publication I wasn’t immediately able to identify.
I rapped on the window when we arrived, and my mom jumped a foot in her seat. She turned and scowled at me, set down the magazine.