((Edited to add 18+ warning as well as dates on each post, since the timeline jumps around frequently due to scatterbrain.))

"I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it's the loudest city on the planet Earth. It's so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that's going on in my own head. It's really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don't even know why. Garbage men come; they don't pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together." "Lewis Black

February, 2014

"We think you need to get out of the city for awhile." Raye's drawl was a warm sliver of southern sun that cut through the sleet pelting the windowpanes of Senna's East Village walk-up. Across the street the elementary school let out, and bundled figures poured in a dark nucleic mass from the doors, dividing into jewel-toned spots that trundled and ran, bounced off each other and stuck bold, pink tongues out to catch the promise of more snow. Winter had a far more imperial hold in Minnesota than in New York. It wasn't the unwelcome stranger there that it was here, gruffly shoved aside, left to collect dirty and black in the gutters and potholes, by the constant scurry of too-busy people. Even in the summer, the brutal majesty of Minnesota's winters held watery court in the lakes like 10,000 fresh-melted snowflakes. A frigid breeze would lift from the surface of Lake Nokomis in mid-July, during the hottest part of the day, and rise goosebumps of remembrance around the shoulders of pale girls in bikinis.

"Senna, are you listening?"

The artist pressed her forehead against the chill of the windowpane. She was hot, always, as if she'd been born with a fever that attached so virulently to her cells that she'd never been able to shake it. Minnesota had suited her in that regard. Three short seasons were momentary pauses—the entirety of summer's heat could be spent in a single week—while Winter drew behind the door of emerald foliage to powder a frost-tipped nose before reappearing once more, too quick for the Summer's blooms. Every year Senna greeted the longest season's arrival with the delight of a young girl in love with the cold that first announced itself in the height of Summer with those frigid bursts of lake-swept breezes and then closed arctic fingers around the branches of trees, curling leaves into brown and red crisps before doing away with the demure facade altogether and making a sudden, dramatic entrance in a gown of white that could blanket the city in the span of hours. She exhaled a warm breath against the pane, drew a finger through the resulting fog. XOXOXO. She missed it, the persistent cold. She had not thought she would.

"Yeah, I'm listening. For the weekend, you mean' I have a gallery appearance Friday, remember?" More doodles on the windowpane. X's and O's exhaled into oblivion, replaced by fluffy cumulus clouds.

"No, honey, we were thinking more along the lines of a month, maybe more. Just until things die down."

Senna's finger stopped at the apex of a sun's ray, her voice tightening with the same suspicion that slitted her eyes. "Is this the royal we?" The royal we, a half-joking, half-sarcastic moniker for the protective triumvirate of Senna's adoptive parents (though Senna's rep/Svengali, Rob, had been pulled into the gaping space left by her father's early death) and Raye, the lawyer who had presided over her adoption at the age of seven. Their rule was gentle, laissez-faire on the surface, but always present and tended to emerge randomly from the background of the artist's life to guide with with tender "suggestions." New York had been her decision, but Rob was quickly brought into the fold to complete the triumvirate once he started representing Senna, and he'd assumed the position as if he'd been rightful heir.

"Well, yes. Rob says you can go to the opening and then leave Sunday. It'll be a good thing. You can get away, relax, take your mind off of things." Raye's chattering started to sound like the detective who'd questioned Senna the previous week, vague and oh-so-casually suggestive as he ticked off a string of dates and asked if she remembered what she might have been doing those nights. Senna paced in the box of her efficiency with the phone against her ear, stalked around stacks of magazines, photographs, boxes of paintbrushes and charcoal, the cozy detritus of inspiration that had long spilled over half-hearted attempts at confinement in such a small space. She'd wanted to pace the small, antiseptic room the detective had taken her into, too, but she'd sat still as the statues that stood like half-formed sentinels in her efficiency, instead. Cold, quiet. Such stillness came at a high price to the artist, who seemed to share the frenetic state of motion with the city itself. The aftermath of such forced stillness and composure lived in a tension headache that creased her brow for days afterwards. The confinement and compartmentalization of space was a typical New York style of living that the artist had quickly taken to. But at this moment, she began to feel very aware of the same press of walls around her that she'd felt in the precinct station, and she instinctively thought of the flat reach of infinite farmland she'd left behind.

"I don't need to relax and take my mind off of things. I'm booked for the next month. I have a new opening in six weeks and three pieces that still aren't complete. I don't have anything to take my mind off of. I didn't do anything wrong. Speak plainly, Raye, I'm tired of all the niceties."

There were a few moments of silence on the other end of the line during which Senna could imagine, as if Raye sat in front of her rather than tucked into an office complex 1200 miles south, the lawyer biting at the same fleshy corner of thumb that she'd been working on for as long as Senna had known her.

"Alright, well, this is it." Raye's drawl crept like oozing delta mud with hesitancy. "I've been looking in on things, calling on a few favors, and I'm not sure this is going to blow over as quickly as we'd like, especially after?" she paused for a moment before she said the name, as if she had to draw up the strength to hoist it to her lips, knowing the weight its utterance would have on the artist. "...Dean. And your father's death, too".There are so many extenuating circumstances, Senna, we think you should get out of the public eye for awhile. I've talked to the DA and-"

"The DA" But the detective said I'm not a suspect. He knows exactly where I was on all of those dates. He said—" The artist's tendency to fidget flamed anew. She snapped bits of charcoal between her fingers and pressed the dark dust into the creases of her palms. Paige had called them surgeon's hands. Henry had called them pianist's, but when Senna had presented her first drawing to her adoptive parents with the shy flourish of youth, they clapped, exchanged looks, and said they'd known they were the hands of an artist all along.

"Senna, things have changed. You're on a short list, now. They don't want you to leave the country but have agreed you can go up to a rehab facility in Maine to be treated for exhaustion for 90 days."

Senna stopped pacing. Raye's words dropped onto her shoulders and she'd felt such heaviness only a few other times in her life. She dropped slowly to the floor, tucked a shoulder against the wall and leaned into it, as if the painted brick might share the burden of such weighty realizations. Things had been happening around her and she'd not even been aware of it.

"Jesus, Raye." a long exhale. "I don't want to go to Maine, or to a rehab facility. I don't want to be shut up or locked away." The prospect was unfathomable. The artist had created a life she enjoyed, all things considered. And though the triumvirate always cast a shadow, New York allowed distance enough that she felt she was making her own choices. Or had.

"You're not going to either. You're going somewhere else. We've got it all worked out." There it was again, the voice of the triumvirate, their tender, insistent rule. "And for God's sake, don't breathe a word of this"any of this"to Nell. The girl's got a bottle rocket for a mouth." Nell was one of the choices Senna had recently made that the trio did not particularly approve of, if only for dramatic fights and breakups so regular they seemed on a biweekly schedule. Senna didn't mind the frequent spats, the constant emotional bulimia, the binging jolts of electricity from the live wire that was the petite photographer and always, afterwards, there were crisp, cool sheets and Nell's hand laid like a cool cloth over the artist's feverish brow to erase the heat that had gathered there.

"Why can't I tell Nell?" but the more pressing question was really "Where" Where else?"

"Dr. Markham is going to come talk to you about it tomorrow." There were suddenly too many knights on a chessboard that seemed to have only one pawn. Senna was rattled, confused, and for a moment she thought that she might indeed be suffering from exhaustion. Between her art, gallery appearances and Nell, the recent months had passed in a blur that she could recollect only in wisps and frames like a cinematic montage.

"My psychologist' Why?"

"Because you're going to have trouble believing it."

January, 2010

"All things evolve, Senna," Henry said. In the light spit from the fireplace, his heritage played stronger: the column of his nose still proud against cheeks made sinkholes from the ravages of chemo. He was compact and dry as a mummy in his usual chair across the chessboard from her. His voice was still strong, though, and carried the sense of life that was being leached from his body otherwise. "It is a filter through which everything unnecessary will eventually be trapped, while singular mutations pass through and flourish: the disappearance of wisdom teeth and the changing color of spots upon a pepper moth. These are concrete things in nature that can be studied easily." It was one of his favorite topics: the march of time, how it marched, what it trampled in its wake, what survived; evolution; human nature. Of late, this talk had become more frequent and always after dinner in his book-lined study with the accompanying pops and hisses from the fireplace. It was this room Senna would come to after the funeral where his body had just looked like a discarded carapace. The leather-lined room was the more appropriate memorial, his words lingering in fine dust on the windowsill, their conversations collected like dustbunnies around the legs of the furniture. This was the space where she would truly mourn the coffin-quiet that he left in his absence.

As her father spoke, his words were touched with the same rue that made his eyes so deeply brown. A carryover, maybe, a moment's mutation, that became a trait passed on the day his ancestors traded their lands for precious, alien cowrie shells they tucked in their hair and wove into their belts; these same shells Senna saw in souvenir shops at the beach, gaudily festooned on fumey, cheap plastic purses or glued into the shapes of sandcastles and marine life. They always made her sad. Who bought these things" Did they know the true price of their purchase"

"But it happens, too," he continued, "with the things that lie beyond the tangible: religions and gods that rise and fall or solidify into one god, and there is every reason to expect that someday religions will be eliminated altogether or relegated, like magic, to live on the fringes: as a momentary glimmer in the cracks of the sidewalks, the additional finger on a shadow that doesn't match up to its inanimate counterpart, or an added opalescent sheen to the heat waves lifted off the streets in the summer. But it's still there, even if it's vestigial. You should remember that."

"Do you see it, the magic?" Senna asked. She was not interested in gods, but the possibility of magic was still appealing to a girl in the latter half of her teens. It was a grasping sort of hope for girls like her that scuttled along the edges of school hallways, that something beautiful, ancient and persistent might exist that could not be ruined by the subtly bullying cliques of girls, the endless musical chairs game of gossip that was never predictable in determining who was going to be left out when the whispers reached their terminus. Confidences were traded daily during lunch periods, tenuous friendships brokered and dumped at a dizzying pace that was bewildering. Truly there are no monsters more gorgeously predatorial, more devastatingly gutting, than girls in their teens.

"Sometimes," he answered.

"Can I?"

"I'll bet you already do. Artists are good at pulling the back the veil of reality to peer into the cracks beneath."

"Like the way I draw a face?"

"Yes, very close."

To forget the face altogether was the lesson Senna remembered most from her art periods. Ms. Cuthbert wheezed it between slugs of coffee from a mug shaped like one of Dali's clocks, perpetually threatening to melt onto the paper of the students below her hover. She had stacks of bangles on both arms that she said had been given to her by a Parisian lover and could no longer be removed because she had grown where they did not—much like the affair itself. They would have to be cut off when she died. The intimate permanancy of such an accessory was intriguing to Senna. To let the reminder of a past lover permanently clatter about your wrist. To be that bold and careless! Senna shrank back from her sketchpad to make room for Ms. Cuthbert's arm as it swooped down. "Stop looking at the face," she barked, "Forget the face! It does not matter! You are looking for shapes and shades only. Don't be romantic about it; be harsh, be calculating!" She pulled the gum eraser from Senna's hand and drew it in a wide streak across the forehead she'd stalled over. "Planes, angles, trapezoids, ovals, the distance between, the values of light and dark. It's cold like geometry. It doesn't care about winning personalities. Stop looking at the person. Look beneath." Words filtered slowly through the racket of the bracelets.

Henry looked pointedly at the phone Senna flicked her fingers over.

"Those things are the Bibles of the new gods of technology and industry that have replaced the older, fickle ones that required sacrifice, prayers, penance and faith," he said with distaste. He hated things that prevented the meeting of eyes in conversation. Cellphones were the worst offender. "The new gods don't judge us from mounts or heavens. They are among us. They require sacrifices, as well. They keep our eyes firmly to the ground, suspicious of theories that cannot be scientifically proven, dismissive of things that cannot be encountered by all five senses. They want emails, reports and actionable items. They trick us and give us the idea that we are our own gods and our own magicians. We control with texts and great hulks of metal sent in wars to liberate others from service to their "woefully outmoded" gods. Promises of freedom are dangled. Our new magic is the illusion that we know best. Look for the old magic, Senna. It is always beneath."

"Mmmmm," Senna murmured. Her attention was only half-span as she fiddled with her phone, restless and sprawled over the chair opposite him, kicking her feet back and forth where they hung over the arm of the chair and wondering if the boy from school would call. He said he would. After the initial shock of Henry's death sentence had worn off, the initial haze of grief burned through, there were still spaces to fill. Sudden deaths or terminal illnesses with shorter projections were compact and rife with the effusion of heavy-hearted sentiment, tears, and confessions. Casseroles appeared in dutiful succession. In a slow death counted in multiples of months, it was disconcerting to discover that those empty spaces could, must even, be filled with the same old routines that had come before, that the appearance of casseroles would wane and cooking and laundry would have to be resumed. No one tells you those things. Or that there'd still be enough room left over for a common crush to blossom in the terrible ordinariness that descended.

In the kitchen there was the slosh of water as her mother rinsed dishes followed by the muted sound of pills spilling over the countertop as she sorted them by color and size for the following day. Her father's illness had become a chore that fell between doing the dishes and folding the laundry, and the clatter of pills just background noise to the thoughts of the boy in Senna's head. That boy, that stupid boy, the way he bent over the water fountain with one leg already taking the next step. Careless the way the water arced towards the fullness of his lips and splashed to the tiled floor when he pulled away with the forward momentum that had never truly stopped. Nothing ever looked so blessedly cold in her life as that stream of water where it met his mouth.

January 5th, 2014

Detective Pierce was lying in bed looking at the clock and wishing it was a rotary so he could see the second hand sweep away the minutes. Digital created a cruel sense of anticipation with its unnatural blue-green glow and the way the unlit segments could still be seen faintly beneath the glow of the current time display. It meant he was waiting tensely rather than watching, wondering when the number would change and then startling every time it did, like the clock was taunting him.

His marriage was in free fall, having tripped off an unannounced cliff somewhere between a forgotten anniversary and a (mostly) accidental insult of his mother-in-law's chicken tetrazzini. His stomach was constantly in his throat as he felt the displacement of it around him, the vestiges of vows stripped away one-by-one like garments in the descent, undone the way many marriages were: incrementally. Quirk became annoyance became argument became contempt became silence. At some point soon, the detective knew, he'd reach terminal velocity and would cease to feel the fall. If he didn't look down, he'd never feel the final impact. He'd done this twice before, after all.

In the meantime, Pierce chewed on his own remorse for the way things were and tried to tune out his wife's snores. Sounded like a rain boot stepping in thick mud. Over and over again. Oozing exhale and wet inward suck. He hated how much he hated that sound.

He shouldn't have taken this case. It was making him irritable. More so than normal. He liked dealing with street crime better; the messes were easier to clean up. Dealing with New York's elite was like playing a game without having a clue how the pieces moved: names gained powers by the addition of a hyphen and were displayed as often as possible like a gaudy ring, white t-shirts became high fashion by the addition of a certain label and a $300 price tag. And the art. Christ, the art. When he'd gone a few weeks back to double check the statement given by the woman who'd filed the initial missing person's report"a Ms. Lansing-Ware, of course"he was greeted in the foyer by an 8-inch-thick gilded frame around a used condom decorated with gold-leaf splatters in her foyer. A used condom. In her foyer. He could see the semen still in the balloon tip in a coagulated, graying half-moon.

"Oh, that's a Sverin piece I got a few years back before he became a big deal," Ms. Lansing-Ware murmured as she caught Pierce's stare. She had a particular low tone Pierce found the wealthy often invoked to make you feel like you were sharing in some great secret or intimacy. It was just another trick of perception, like the art on the wall in front of him.

"Looks like an original. You must be very close." He said with a droll chuckle, and was not at all surprised when she twitched around the eyes a little before her face settled stonily.

****

Pierce anticipated a similar concoction of illusions when he finally called Senna in for questioning. The magazine and news articles had been exceptionally kind to her, but short recaps in the gossip rags added just enough grit and filth about her love life, her father's death, her lover's death less than a year later, and occasional indiscretions to color her as a tragic hero rather than a cold statue on a distant pedestal. Pierce was not sure how much of that was actually Senna and how much of it was the work of her agent, who had a reputation for subtle and highly effective manipulations that resulted in a rapid ascent of his coterie of artists from paintings that gathered dust in small coffee shops to commanding high prices at Sotheby's.

Pierce expected Senna to be far more carefully put together than the pallid rumple of haste that arrived breathless and perspiring on a cloud of December air and the astringent sting of turpentine, a coat hanging from one shoulder like an afterthought. Her jeans were filthy with splotches of paint half matte and half glossy where it hadn't yet dried, and pustules of clay that seeped and flaked with every flurry of motion. A bit of blue oil streaked across a white knee when she sat. A child-size t-shirt was a wreck of a rainbow, the neck cut down in a deep vee from the column of the artist's extraordinarily pale neck. Disheveled, the detective thought; a vocab word he remembered from mispronouncing it at the front of class sophomore year, leading to a nickname that had only acquired cool the following summer after he managed to nail the pep club's gum-cracking president in the bed of a pick-up truck and return her to the party with a mass of pink Dubble Bubble plastered in a hank of long hair.

Senna sat but couldn't be still. Pierce noted that. More remarkable to him, however, was the lack of cosmetics. Women in the tri-state area donned make-up like war paint. His own wife favored the same smoky blue grey that lifted in smog off the Jersey Turnpike. He could hardly look at her anymore without thinking of AM rush hour. It was a terrible association. The utter nakedness of Senna's face was so stark that it almost felt intimate. Naked. It pushed away the clutter and color of the room: the jarring orange of the chairs, the islands of papers floating in the blue melamine sea of the conference table, the multitude of media and colors on the artist herself. Pierce felt uncomfortable and ridiculous in the same two heartbeats. Senna was beautiful in a way that suggested rather than assaulted. The light flush of her cheeks spread and naturally faded around unpainted lips. The detective could see the little creases and furrows on each lip, the darker shadows where they met at the corners. Right of center on her lower lip was a miniscule, smooth circle of skin lighter than the rest where she'd bitten it, maybe, and it was healing. A little, white bit of dead skin was lifted at the corner of the faint scab and Senna kept touching it with her tongue and distracting Pierce as he flipped open his notebook and began running through his questions. Pink dab of tongue circling the mark. Pause. Repeat. He cleared his throat and tried to keep his attention focused on translating his hasty child scrawl into intelligent questions as he felt a wreath of warmth drop along his brow.

"You grew up in Minnesota?" Pierce scratched at his scalp with a pen. Dumb question. He was going for an easy lead-in, a friendly atmosphere, but now he just felt stupid. And then felt stupid for feeling stupid.

"Yes." Senna started braiding a long strand of hair damp with snow and sleet, twirling the end around her finger and brushing the silk bristle of it against her cheek. "A flatland of snow and endless horizon."

That was how it went, at first. His dumb-sounding questions and Senna's polite, mostly succinct answers. She was forthcoming"mildly engaging even"between long silences when he felt the warmth around him become heat.

She kept fidgeting with that spot on her lower lip, sucking it between her teeth, worrying it like a loose tooth. At some point, Pierce realized she was watching him watch her, that he had been asking questions and couldn't remember the answers or the questions. Surely Senna had answered. He looked down at his notebook and saw he'd written nothing. The artist looked at him expectantly, her tongue making gradual headway in its prodding, the translucent wisp of skin folding farther back. Pierce flushed, feeling like a voyeur to a private moment. The odd and unwarranted feeling had him shifting in his chair as he looked aside at his folder, but his eyes kept coming back to Senna's mouth. He thought of the Georgia O"Keefe retrospective his second wife had dragged him to in a fit of culture. A bunch of close-up paintings of flowers in bloom. His eyes had glazed over until his wife leaned in close, "They're *******. Don't you see it?" Pierce remembered the sour mash of coffee, cigarettes, and bagels and lox, the hot damp of her breath like wet wool when she whispered in his ear. When Pierce had looked up again at the wide open petals of the flowers, the deep, dusky shading around the cores, the vivid hues and split folds, he felt the new context tighten his groin. Strange how the slightest nuance of perversion could thrill in a way plain nudity could not. He'd actually taken part of a lunch break several days later to visit the library, scowling at the librarian who laughed at the linebacker hulk of him stretching his hand for the O"Keefe book from the study carrel. Even after he read and discovered that his wife's intimation was urban legend, he could only see a woman's **** when he saw flowers now.

They were almost the same color, Senna's lips and her tongue. There was a little difference. Two shades, he guessed. Maybe enough to warrant another name. Her lips were slightly darker. Pierce found his thoughts getting hung up trying to name the exact hue, crayola colors turning rolodex-style in his mind but he couldn't pinpoint the right one, and it was agitating to the point that he'd etched a hole through the top two sheets of his notebook.

"Are you okay?" Senna asked, her voice sharing a concern that didn't quite align with the suspicious way she regarded him.

"Yes," Pierce said, a defensive edge souring his tone. He was sweating. He felt it beading on his brow and dampening the collar of his undershirt. "Let's talk about your father." Saying it felt like a betrayal when he saw the skin around her eyes tighten and crinkle.

"You have the article right there." Senna said, pointing her small chin at the Times article where her black and white eyes—more black than white—peeped over the top of the file folder. Haunted or hunted. Pierce couldn't decide. His hands felt clammy. His armpits were a swamp.

"I don't have anything to add to those words," Senna said as she folded her hands in her lap and smeared her thumb across the blue streak on her exposed knee.

"It's almost a year old. You haven't thought of anything else to say about it since then?" Pierce scrutinized the artist carefully, the Rorschach of color on her clothes, the white of her arms and face, the unnameable pink of her lips. Fuschia" No, too bright. Mauve" No, that wasn't it, either.

"No." Senna nibbled at the little flap of skin again; this time she caught it just right and tugged. The skin peeled back and deep red flooded the divot and bled into the gum around one tooth. But there was a moment just before the blood welled up when Pierce saw the raw skin underneath, fresh and slightly mottled. He stood abruptly and excused himself.

Outside the room, he lumbered to the vending machine and fished around in his pocket for coins that had lost their metallic cool. Shoved them in the machine and got a Coke, its refrigerator chill a small mercy against the fire in his cheeks.

He rested his forehead against the painted cinderblock wall of the hallway and thought of his wife. She was a good woman. He never should have married her. Back outside the room, Pierce looked at the video display. Senna was sitting utterly still. Her hands had quit fluttering at the fray of her jeans and lay in her lap, palms up in a meditative repose. He stared at the monitor, and for more than a minute she didn't move. Then her eyes swam slowly up to the camera and remained. Blue as the water in the postcard his first wife had sent him telling him in detail how glad she was that he was not there. ****. Pierce sighed, strode back inside and was immediately hot again, aware of his heart thundering dangerously inside his chest. He shoved a hand in his pocket and touched the bottle of pills he kept there.

"You look tired. Like a man who hasn't dreamed in years." Senna's eyes raked him over and he felt it like the furnace blasts of heat that whipped around the skyscrapers during the worst New York summers.

Pierce grunted, popped the tab on the coke and offered it to her, hoping the brief interaction would get them back on track or, at the least, diffuse the heat of her gaze. She shook her head and he put it to his lips instead. It wasn't as cold as he expected it to be fresh from the machine. It was room temperature, though it was still dripping condensation. Warm and stale. More so with each sip. He set it aside but kept his hand curled around the shell.

"I don't dream at all." Pierce couldn't remember the last time he'd dreamed. He went to sleep and woke up with nothing to fill the elapsed time between but a vague sense of exhaustion that never quite dissipated.

"That's too bad. I like dreaming. You never know who or what will show up in a dream. You're mostly vulnerable to the whims of your mind when you dream. Even the ugly ones. Even the terrible ones that you are glad no one else can see. It's very liberating to dream." Her voice was soft, the repetition of 'dream' drifting like a mantra, creating a numb haloed effect around his thoughts.

"You must dream a lot," Pierce was getting uncomfortable again. His fingers tightened around the grip of the can; it was no longer dripping with condensation but with his own sweat. He looked down at his notes and made an attempt to redirect the conversation. "Jonathan Lansing-Ware..." he started.

"I do." Senna interrupted, touching a finger to the spot on her lip where the blood had coagulated again, darker and thicker this time. Pierce found himself praying she'd leave it alone. "Almost every night. All sorts of things that I am powerless to control."

"Do you like feeling powerless?" The question flew out before he could contain it, and Pierce felt the flare of horror like needles in his chest around a staggered beat of his heart.

Senna smiled, taut and lurid with that mottled scab in the middle. "Isn't there supposed to be someone else in here with you?"

"We're overworked and overloaded with cases. Besides, there's the tape." Pierce was flustered and tired and hot, a sandpaper tongue in a sandbox mouth. Senna's eyes looked like a burning oasis. Without thinking, he reached for her hand wondering if it, too, was hot. His hand hung limply in the air as the entirety of her small figure retreated into the chair. She didn't answer his blurted question, and he pulled back his hand, embarrassed, and mopped it along his brow.

"I'm going to go now." Instead of putting on her coat, Senna took it off completely and folded it primly over one arm. Goosebumps had risen along her forearm in stark contrast to his own wet slicked skin, where he could practically feel the widened pores oozing salt.

"You should dream more," her voice was hushed and confidential, intimacies murmured from a pillow still cool from the night. "I bet you will."

(continued?)

February 2010

In art class the following week, Mrs. Cuthbert hovers over Senna making little hums and murmurs as Senna makes a disaster of a continuous contour study. Senna feels Mrs. Cuthbert's eyes like a living weight, their perceptive faculties a threat to the thick skin she has attempted to drape protectively over herself. This armor deflects and narrows Senna's vision just enough so that she does not see the boy in the back of room making crude drawings on his page. Whatever interest he had"in both her and her artistic techniques"was only the length of the zipper on her jeans. Senna knows about foolish girls; they're reading Tess of D"Urbervilles in English and Senna can hardly get through a paragraph for the tediousness of Tess's pitiful situation. The deepest cut is the resonance she suddenly feels with such an idiot heroine.

Mrs. Cuthbert shakes her bangles near Senna's shoulder and says too loudly, "What has gotten into you?" Across the room the boy looks like he might laugh but has only to spy the red flush crawling Senna's cheeks before he turns away. All the heat that she's ever felt, the constant fever of her forehead, the hot frenzy of her pulse, collects in that flush. A bead of sweat drops from her brow to the nonsense lines scrawled over her page, and she thinks dying might be preferable to this humility.

The bell rings and the collective pinpoint focus of the room scatters kaleidoscopically in all directions. Mrs. Cuthbert signals for Senna to remain behind, steepling her fingers behind her desk before asking gently, "Is it your dad?"

"No!" Senna says with such a vehement shake of her head that her hair tumbles free from the pencil she knotted it with an hour ago. The art teacher looks momentarily stung before her usual airiness settles back around her like a cushion. She observes Senna shrewdly: the fevered indigo wash of the girl's eyes, the burgeoning curve of breasts, the flush still pinking her cheeks, and comes to a decision. "It'll pass,? she says knowingly. As if it's an affliction, and maybe it is. First heartbreak: a virus without vaccination. You walk around with it seeping from your pores, running from your eyes. People shrink away, avoid making direct eye contact for weeks on end in fear of catching it. There's nothing for the contagion, no panacea, no quick cure. It simply must run its course.

The bangles around Mrs. Cuthbert's wrist jostle sympathetically as Senna manages to sink an inch deeper into her own shoulders.