The urge to slam my portfolio shut hits me so hard I have to physically sit on my hands to resist it. But then I look at her again, and it’s different this time. Her nails are long and spiky, painted black. A gold hoop pierces one of her eyebrows. She’s frum, but she’s unlike any frum person I grew up with. And her eyes—large, dark brown, framed by gold eyeliner—are kind.
“Yes,” I say eventually, and glance back down at my work. My cheeks flush hot with mixed embarrassment and shame.
People used to stare at me too, when I was frum. They used to stare at my father with his long beard and black hat, my brothers with their kippot secured to the crowns of their heads, my mother wearing her wig and stockings. They looked at us like they thought we didn’t belong in the same city as everyone else. And the fact that I left the community—was kicked out, rather—doesn’t mean I should become part of the same judgmental, derisive, xenophobic culture I despised.
It’s just…
“Can I see?” says the frum girl, and I have no choice; I push my portfolio over to the edge of my desk as she leans over to take a closer look.
The photos tell a story. They’re my life in LA in two parts: before I got sober and after. They show the way the same bridge can look different if I took the photo while I was high and if I took the photo after I was clean—the photo of my feet in the sand next to used syringes, my weight off-kilter, uncertain, juxtaposed with that same angle as water crashes to shore, sea-foam swirling about my ankles and my skirt caught in the wind.
Plenty of people have seen these photos; they were in a gallery in Venice, later in Santa Monica, and they served as part of my application process to Parker. But it’s one thing to know that people are looking at my art—seeing past the flimsy film and into my life, my history, my soul—when I don’t have to personally witness it. I drift through my own gallery shows like a ghost, there but not. I can hit Submit on an application portal and never think twice about what it means. But every time I have to watch someone look, watch them see me in this way…
It feels like I have opened up my stomach for them and let them reach their hands inside to fumble with my organs, twisting my guts between their fingers.
“These are really good,” the girl says, and she gestures, implicitly asking permission to turn the page. I nod and let her. My heart is beating too fast, and I stare at the side of her face rather than look at my own work. She’s probably just being polite. Everyone here is good; being good isn’t impressive anymore.
I need to be spectacular.
“What’s your name?” she asks when she’s done.
“Elisheva. Ely.”
“I’m Michal,” she says. “Michal Pereira. Are you the—”
But before she can finish, the door opens, and a hush drops over the classroom as our professor, Wyatt Cole, walks between the rows of desks to the front podium. I’m staring alongside everyone else as he goes, drinking in the sight of him, our first glimpse of the mysterious, notorious artist who rewrote the landscape of mixed-media photography. The man whose work has been on the cover of Time, who otherwise avoids the public eye as if it will scald him, who is single-handedly responsible for my application to Parker, who can break my heart with a single photograph.
“I can’t believe it’s really him,” Michal whispers, and I can’t either, because the man at the front of the room, our new professor—Wyatt Cole—is the man I had sex with last night.
5
The whole class is like a fever dream.
Wyatt keeps speaking words, probably important ones, but it’s like my brain is made of oatmeal; I don’t process a single thing he says. He doesn’t look at me the whole time. Every time he scans the class, his gaze jumps right over me and onto Michal, as if I occupy a black hole, as if G-d just clipped this random fourth-row seat on the sixth floor of the Parker visual arts building right out of existence.
I kind of wish I actually were invisible. Life in the soul-crushing core of a black hole is probably better than whatever awkward-as-fuck conversation Wyatt and I are gonna have after this class is over.
What is wrong with me? How did I end up in this situation? Normal people don’t. I have never in my life met another human being who accidentally had a one-night stand with their professor. This is not a thing that happens to responsible people. This is a thing that happens in sitcoms.
How am I going to survive an entire summer like this? How are either of us? Is he going to be able to take me seriously now that he’s seen me naked? Am I even going to be able to learn a single word in this class when I’ve seen him naked?
But then I hear Wyatt’s voice say, “Ely,” and I glance up, and he’s finally looking back, his eyes on my eyes, and he says, “Please stay after class for a few minutes.”
Shit.
I haven’t felt guilty in front of a teacher like this since I was a teenager and got caught using an unfiltered phone during Midrash class. At least Wyatt is unlikely to call my mother.
Still, Michal arches her pierced brow at me as we pack up our things. She graciously doesn’t ask me why Wyatt knows my name; it’s not like he took roll or anything. And she doesn’t ask what I did wrong.
I wonder what I’d tell her if she did.
The other students filter out the door, some of them casting curious glances at me over their shoulders as they go. I pack my things away slowly, lingering over the clasp on my bag like delaying this interaction will somehow make it better.
“Ely.”
When Wyatt says my name, all I can hear is the way he said it last night, low and soft, sweet as honey. I close my eyes for a moment, digging my nails into my palms. Then I make myself look.
He stands at the front of the room, one hand braced on the edge of the table and his weight shifted over onto his left foot—uneasy. Or maybe just embarrassed. He looks the way I feel, like I want to break apart into my component atoms and disappear.
I make my way up to the podium. He seems to be having trouble meeting my gaze; his eyes keep flicking down and to the left, as if to stare at me is to stare directly into the sun. So, obviously, I keep my own attention fixed on his face. One of us will refuse to be embarrassed about fucking the other one.
“Hi,” I say. “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”
His cheeks flush a dull red. “Did you realize? Before?”
It takes me a solid fifteen seconds to process what he’s trying to say. And then once I do, I’m embarrassed all over again. It’s not like New York is positively littered with guys named Wyatt, after all.
“I couldn’t hear you in the club,” I admit. “You kept saying your name, but I couldn’t understand it, so I just…went with it. I didn’t know you were—well—you.”