“Hey,” he says, “so your name’s really—?”
He deadnames me. He might as well have punched me in the gut. Ezra tries to stand up, and I think he might actually walk over and hit James, so I grab his arm and shake my head at him. Not worth it. Ezra would get kicked out of St. Catherine’s for the school’s zero-tolerance policy on violence.
James snorts and turns back to the front. Declan just keeps staring at me. That sneer still on his face.
Declan. Declan fucking Keane.
Is it just a coincidence? The day after he calls me a fraud, there’s a gallery with my old photos, my old name? Would it really be that surprising, if he and his shitty friends figured out how to hack my social media accounts, printed out my pictures, and hung my photos up in the lobby?
Jill lets us get started on our projects for the day. Ezra and I choose spots next to each other at a wall, canvas already stretched and prepped.
“It was Declan,” I whisper to him.
His eyes snap to mine. “What? How do you know?”
“The way he was looking at me just now. And yesterday—he called me a fraud, remember?”
“Yeah, but—” Ezra pauses. He turns back to the canvas and starts—unsurprisingly—squeezing black out of a tube. I start squirting red, orange, and yellow blobs.
Ez lifts his brush. “I mean, it’s not like I’m defending him or anything, but that’s not really proof, is it? What if it isn’t him?”
I know Ezra’s right—but I can’t explain this feeling I’ve got deep in my chest, wedged in there right next to the pain, which has become a dull ache—an ache I’m not sure will ever leave, not even twenty years from now, maybe not ever. Declan Keane did this. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
“It’s him,” I say firmly. “I know it is. Who else would do something like that?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but—”
I can already sense what he’s going to say. Maybe I’m just fixating on Declan because I need a place to put all this anger building in me. I know that’s what he’s thinking, so I cut him off.
“It was him,” I say again.
“Okay,” Ezra says. It pisses me off, that he sounds like he’s trying to soothe a kid throwing a tantrum. “Okay. Say it was him. What do you want to do?” He glances around. “Tell Jill? Go to the dean?”
“No,” I tell him. “Fuck that. Declan Keane? They’d call his dad, let him off with a warning maybe, but they wouldn’t do shit to him. No, I’m not going to tell the dean.”
Jill comes around the corner. She strolls behind us serenely as she looks over our shoulders to observe our work, which is nonexistent.
“Less chatting, more painting,” she says with a smile.
When she moves on, Ezra glances at me.
“So what’re you going to do?” he asks.
Isn’t it obvious? “I’m going to fucking destroy him. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Ezra shrugs, smirk twitching on his face. “Well, whether it was Declan or not, I wouldn’t mind seeing that.” He starts a sketch with the black paint, brushstrokes loose. “What’s the plan?”
Four
EVEN THOUGH I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO DESIRE TO GO TO Dean Fletcher and tell her what’d happened with the gallery, word must’ve spread enough that the teachers overheard, because right as acrylics ends, a student pops his head into the classroom and says I have to go to the office. Dean Fletcher, with her Afro and single silver streak, is a no-nonsense, terrifying badass in a business suit and six-inch heels. Her office—all rich, deep mahogany panels except for the single glass wall—is surprisingly bare and minimalist. Not exactly what you’d expect of an arts school. She waves me inside, asks me to sit on the hard chair in front of her heavy wood desk, and wastes no time asking about the gallery.
“Do you know who might’ve been behind it?”
“No.”
“Has there been anyone bullying you, or making remarks about your identity?”
“No.” God, I just want to leave.
Dean Fletcher folds her hands together. “It was unacceptable, and installed without the permission of this administration,” she says, and I get the hollow feeling that this was really why I was called into her office—to cover their asses. She’s afraid I’ll sue St. Catherine’s or something. “I’m sorry that this happened to you, Felix. Do you want to speak with the summer counselor?”
“No,” I say, a little too quickly. The counselor would just ask a whole bunch of questions, and eventually those questions would veer into abandoned-by-mother territory, and that’s definitely something I don’t want to talk about. “No,” I say again, “thank you.”
Dean Fletcher pauses and looks like she might want to pressure me into some counseling sessions, but she finally gives me a single nod. “We’ll begin an investigation.” I stop myself from rolling my eyes. The most they’ll do is ask a few students if they saw anything, and when those students say no, the gallery will be declared a cold case. “If you hear anything, please tell me right away,” Dean Fletcher says. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for this sort of hateful behavior.”
And even if I’m annoyed, and the school won’t do shit to find who it was, it still feels good to hear her say that.
It’s after the fourth I’m so sorry, Felix and the third question about my deadname that I take Ezra up on his offer to peace the fuck out of classes and head to his apartment early. We stop at the Chinese place that’s on the corner one block down for two cartons of what are the best chicken wings and French fries in the entire city, and then hop into the wine shop that’s right next door, using Ezra’s fake ID to grab two bottles of cheap chardonnay because, as he says, it’s time to get fancy. At the counter, the owner looks from the ID to Ezra’s face and back to the ID, like she knows it’s total bullshit. She takes Ezra’s credit card and tells us this story about when she was sixteen and sneaking off into her neighborhood bar in Paris. We take that as permission to escape with our illegal bottles, taking the wine and chicken back up the block to Ezra’s apartment.
There’re men with bulging muscles and white tanks across the street, shouting in Bajan accents and standing around cars that have their rumbling engines on, blasting an old Dixie Chicks song. Ezra unlocks the front glass door and lets us into the asphalt-gray-tiled and scuffed-white-walls hallway. We stomp up the three floors, Ezra muttering a prayer that his neighbors aren’t home—“I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing—no one has sex like that at three in the morning, they were rolling around and slamming shit on the ground, seriously”—before he unlocks his apartment.
The apartment has a single brick wall, dark wood floors, and a pretty nice kitchen area with granite countertops, along with a stainless-steel refrigerator and gas stove—but other than that, the place is basically empty. Ezra’s been here for almost an entire month now, but he hasn’t bothered buying any furniture with the exorbitant amounts of money his parents gave him to spend. So far, all he has is a mattress out in the living room, facing a tiny-ass TV stand with a 12-inch flat screen. He doesn’t even have any lightbulbs. At night, we’ll just turn on Netflix and use the orange of the streetlights outside to see. The bright sunlight shines into the apartment now. There are some plotted plants over by the window—one mint, one basil, one cannabis. Two of those are more for aesthetics.