Chapter 22: Thesis Night

I went anyway.

I wasn't going to let her have the room.

The Coldhouse looked exactly the same.

Brick walls. Iron hooks. Champagne on every surface.

At the back, past the bar, was the swinging steel door to the kitchen corridor.

I looked at it for a long time.

"You don't have to go near it," Beckett said beside me.

"I know."

I walked to it anyway and put my palm flat on the cold steel.

Then I took my hand away and went to find my bay.

Bay 7 had my name on the wall in black vinyl letters.

LAUREL PREWITT. BLIND CONTOURS.

Eleven portraits, life size, charcoal on paper, drawn with my eyes closed.

Daisy, laughing with her mouth full. My dad, asleep in his chair.

The butler, who'd sat for me in white gloves and called it the most fun he'd had in years.

The twelfth easel at the end was covered with a gray cloth.

The juror's card beside it said, To be unveiled.

The whole Academy came.

Students in thrift black. Faculty. Trustees in their good watches.

My dad in a real suit this time, his own, that Dorinda had taken him to buy.

"I look like a banker," he said.

"You look like a roofer at a wedding," I said.

"Same thing."

Daisy's bay was across from mine, all huge loud paintings of Indiana cornfields on fire.

She'd sold two before the doors opened, and she wouldn't stop telling people.

Bay 8 was beside mine.

Blaire's work was big glossy photographs of herself, printed on metal.

She came in at eight on her father's arm, in white.

The room parted for her.

People stopped talking. Nobody raised a glass.

She smiled through all of it, all the way down the gallery to her bay.

She didn't look at me once.

I kept watching her anyway.

So when she drifted away from her father at nine and reached into her little white purse, I was already moving.

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