When he was done, he turned back to us. “All right,” he said. “Use whatever media you choose. You’ve got two hours. Let’s see what you’re made of.”
Drawing was a strange thing. Probably like other hobbies—basketball or cello playing or baking or writing—there were times when it felt like you were going through the motions. When you put pencil to paper and were aware of every dot,
every thin line, every thick shade.
At other times, you looked up from the page and two hours had passed. You lost yourself in the movement, in the quiet, in trying to represent on paper some object from real life. You created a little world where there’d only been emptiness before.
This was one of those times.
Daniel had come around a couple of times to offer advice—to remind me to draw what I actually saw, not just to rely on my memories of what the objects looked like,
and to remind me to use the tip of my pencil instead of mashing the lead into the paper—but other than those trips back to the real world, I spent the rest of the time zoned out, my gaze darting between the stuff on the table and the sketchbook in front of me.
That was why I jumped when he finally clapped his hands. “Time,” he said, then smiled at us. “Great job today.” When everyone began to pack up their supplies, he held up a hand.
“You didn’t think you were going to get out of here without homework, did you?”
There were groans across the room.
“Aw, it’s not that bad. Before we meet again, I want you to do a little Second City appreciation. Find a building in the area and spend an hour getting it on paper. You can use whatever materials you want—paint, ink, pencil, charcoal—but I want to see something representational when you’re done. I want you to think about line and shadow. Think about positive and negative space—what parts of space did the architect choose to fill? Which parts did he decide to leave empty?”
We waited for more, but he finally bobbed his head. “Now you’re dismissed.”
The girl beside me grumbled as she stuffed a small, plastic box of watercolors into her bag. “I liked him a lot better when he was just the pretty new TA.”
“Ah,” he said, suddenly appearing to walk past us. “But that’s not going to make you a better artist, is it?”
She waited until he’d passed, then raised hopeless eyes to me. “Do you think that’s going to hurt my grade?”
I glanced back at Daniel, who’d paused at the threshold of the door to talk to a student. He held her sketch pad in one hand and used the other one to point out various parts of her drawing.
“I think he’s going to be pretty fair,” I decided. What I hadn’t yet decided was whether he was here by accident . . . or on purpose.
I practically ran back to the suite after class was over, then slammed into Scout’s room.
I probably should have knocked.
She was on her bed and wearing gigantic headphones. She’d already changed into a bright green tank top and pajama bottoms, and in her hand was a hairbrush she was using as a microphone to belt out a Lady Gaga song at the top of her lungs.
I slapped my hands over my ears. Was Scout generally cool? Yes.
Unfortunately, she was also pretty tone-deaf.
She yelped when she saw me, then fell to her knees on the bed. She dropped the brush and whipped off the headphones. “Seriously—knocking?”
I chewed my lips to keep from laughing.
“Parker, if you so much as snicker, I will bean you with this brush.”
I turned my head into my shoulder to stifle the snort and winced when the brush hit my shoulder. “Ow,” I said, rubbing it.
Scout sniffed and put the headphones on the floor. “I spend my days in class and most of my nights saving the world. I’m allowed to have a little Scout time.”
“I know, I know. But maybe you could, you know, focus it in a more productive direction. Like drawing.”
“I don’t like to draw.”
“I know.” I shut the door behind us. “But you know who does like to draw?” Don’t you love a good segue?
“You?”
I rolled my eyes. “Other than me, goofus.”
“I give up.”
“Our intrepid leader. Daniel’s my studio teacher.”
“No. Freaking. Way.”
“Totally.” I dropped my bag and sat down on the edge of her bed. “He walks in,
and I was like, ‘Holy frick, that’s Daniel.’”
“You would say that. Is he good at drawing?”
“Well, I didn’t see a portfolio or anything, but since Foley hired him, I’d assume so.” And then I thought about what I’d just said. “Unless she hired him because he’s an Adept. Would she do something like that?”
Scout frowned. “Well, she does know about us. I wouldn’t put it past her to offer an Adept a job. On the other hand, the board of directors would have her head if she hired anyone less than worthy of her St. Sophia’s girls.”
“True. I can tell you this—he likes to give out homework in studio just like he does in the Enclave.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Draw a building downtown.” I pulled up my legs and crossed them. “I had an idea —I’m thinking about drawing the SRF building.”
“Really?” I saw the instant she realized what I was up to. “Your parents,” she said. “You think you might learn something?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. And Foley basically told me not to ask questions about my parents. But it seems like a way to get a good look at the building, maybe glance around inside, without causing trouble.”
Scout bobbed her head left and right. “That is true. I don’t know how they could connect you back with your parents, anyway.” She gestured toward my skirt. “They might guess you go to St. Sophia’s, but they’re practically next door. They probably see the uniforms all the time, so they wouldn’t think too much of it.”
“That sounds reasonable. You can actually come up with pretty good ideas when you put your mind to it.”
“Even though I’m not going to win a talent contest anytime soon?”
“Well, not at singing anyway.”
She hit me with a pillow. I probably deserved that.
“So, at lunch today, Jason didn’t ask me to Sneak.”
“Lils, you’ve barely even planned Sneak yet. Give it time. He’ll get there.”
“He did ask me out on Saturday.”
“OMG, you two are totally getting married and having a litter of babies. Ooh, what if that’s literally true?”
I gave her a push on the arm, then changed the subject. “Did Michael ask you to Sneak?”
“Not exactly.”
She sounded a little odd, so I glanced over at her. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Did it come up?”
“Yeah, I mean, we talked about it . . .”
It took me a minute to figure out what she was dancing around. “You asked him,
didn’t you?”
Her cheeks flushed. “Maybe that was discussed in a general sense.”
I poked a finger in her shoulder. “Ha! I knew you had a thing for him!”
I’d expected a look of irritation; instead, she was blushing.
“Oh, my God,” I said, realization hitting. “You guys totally made out behind the concrete things.”
“Oh, my God, shut up,” she said.
We spent the next couple of hours like true geeks. We studied trig, then rounded out the night with some European-history review, and I sent messages to my parents. I walked a weird line between missing them, worrying about them, and trying—like Foley had suggested—to keep them out of my mind. But I was surrounded by weirdness, and that just made me think of them even more. There was so much I wanted to tell them—about Scout and Jason, about being an Adept,