Magnum Opus

If she hadn’t joined that art history class back then, she doesn’t think she’d be sitting in a jail cell now, awaiting sentencing. But, as she looks down at the dry, cracked skin on the back of her hands, her bruised knuckles, and her scuffed-up boots, she doesn’t think she’d do anything differently. She knew what she did was legally wrong, but morally? She doesn’t feel an ounce of guilt in her body.

Her lawyer told her to act apologetic tomorrow, to cry as she read out her written-up statement to her victim, but she doesn’t think she’d have it in her to even say the words “I’m sorry” without laughing. Because she isn’t. She would do it a million times over.

--

Ruby joined an art history class about ancient Greece and homosexuality. It seemed like the most fun class compared to learning about Egyptian dirt and obscure Japanese murals. She sat next to a boy with enough B.O. to singe her nose hairs, and when the professor began to speak in a monotone voice that made every sentence stretch out a minute longer than necessary, she opened her laptop to begin the process of switching to another class.

“We have an Attic cup pictured here on the screen. Does anybody have any first impressions of the image?”

Ruby had her cursor hovering over the ‘drop’ option for the class when a hand raised.

“This is black-figure pottery, most likely made between the 7th and 5th centuries. It shows two figures engaged in—” She cocked her head, her coiled hair falling to the sides like bundles of lavender, “—intercrural sex?”

The class laughed uncomfortably. Ruby’s eyes, however, were set not on the figures engaging in indecent acts on the projector, but on the woman a few rows ahead of her in the lecture hall, earthen skin glistening under the warm morning light floating in from the Palladian window each time she moved her hand back and forth as she wrote in her notebook. Ruby’s eyes drifted to each person in their class, but none shone as brightly as she did. Every voice other than hers fell away as if she held the only microphone in the room and sang with every sentence that left her lips. She made most of the class laugh, which was a feat in and of itself at nine o’clock in the morning on a Monday for a gaggle of college students.

“Now can anybody answer what style of pottery this is?” the professor asked. She smiled when nobody’s hands went up—she had expected so and began segue into the lesson. However, the woman in the third row, three seats to the left foiled her plans.

“I believe it is red-figure pottery, which replaced black-figure pottery and developed in Athens. It’s personally my favorite form of Greek pottery,” she answered.

Usually, such smartassery was annoying to Ruby. But coming from somebody who spoke with such softness in her voice, with a voice that made her lean in from intrigue, hearing her speak was nothing short of a privilege. Ruby never would have held a minute straight of concentration in class. But, thanks to this woman with lavender coiled hair and skin the color of freshly ground coffee, her notes numbered three full pages when she left class that day.

As she walked out of the classroom, she pretended to fiddle with something on her phone until those heeled boots crossed the threshold between classroom and hallway, her head snapping up just in time to catch the woman’s eye.

“Hey,” she said quietly, and the woman raised a brow and looked over her shoulders before pointing to herself. Ruby chuckled and nodded. So she was dorky, too. “Yeah, you. I was wondering how you knew those two guys were having sex on the vase.”

The woman laughed, hiding a snort behind her hand. She reddened at that, but that only made Ruby take a step closer. “Oh, well, I study a lot of ancient Greek art.”

She turned to walk away, but Ruby saddled up next to her, her eyes falling to the woman’s open notebook that revealed sketches that seemed straight out of a museum exhibit. One particular freehand sketch of the statue of David with highlighter yellow lines coming out of his head in radiating columns made her hand drift forward and press her fingers into the ruled paper, her mouth agape in shock.

“Did you draw this?” Ruby asked, breathless. She traced the sketch, the strokes so heavy the lines seemed carved into the page.

The woman was as speechless as she, her eyes finding anywhere else to look other than Ruby’s face in some sort of misplaced embarrassment. “Oh…yes, I did. It’s just a silly little sketch, though, it doesn’t mean—”

“This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” Ruby said, but when she looked up at the woman’s bashful face, her blush red enough to be seen on her dark skin and her heart-shaped lips pulled into a pursed smile, she realized she had lied. “It’s museum material.”

“Thank you,” the woman whispered, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. She spared a glance at Ruby, her voice wavering as she asked, “I’m Samantha. What’s your name?”

That fateful question led to Ruby and Samantha sitting together in class from then on, the boy with horrendous B.O. long forgotten. The only information Ruby gleaned from class was whatever analysis or factoid came out of Samantha’s mouth, and the rest of her attention was set on what Samantha’s hand decided to create that day. She saw Samantha as some sort of god, a kind and creative god that drew only beautiful things, even if they weren’t pretty.

She learned that Samantha liked to sculpt, oftentimes rushing away after class to hole herself up in the art studio and play god with a different medium. Sometimes Ruby would sit on a stool and watch Samantha sculpt for hours, her PDFs unread and her essays unwritten. She’d watch Samantha transform a mound of clay into an aquiline nose, almond eyes that looked back at her in gratitude as she scraped away. Ruby liked to think of Samantha as some sort of Frankenstein, except she never abandoned her creations. She’d stick to a project until she was done, often at the cost of being locked in the studio by security after eleven at night. Ruby would tell off the security guard, and she would stare at her feet until she was dragged off by the arm and nodded along to whatever rant Ruby spouted. She oftentimes found herself smiling to herself, mirroring Ruby’s anger in her next art project in the form of those thick furrowed brows and dimpled chin on a new face.

“That one kind of looks like me,” Ruby remarked one day.

Samantha halted in her movements, her hand stuttering as she searched for the words that were wreaking havoc in her mind. “Oh. Must be a coincidence.”

A silence fell between them, taken up only by the scratching of Ruby’s pencil on paper and the awkward squelching of wet clay underneath Samantha’s thumbs.

“You should submit your art to a museum or something,” Ruby said, surprising both herself and her friend. Ruby had been thinking about telling Samantha for a while, but even though the words came out of her mouth, she couldn’t believe that her lips had formed them.

However, Samantha looked back down to her creation, smiling along with the clay. She ran a thumb over the gray lips she had formed a few minutes ago, smoothing the slay and leaving behind her unique thumbprint. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while now, haven’t you?”

Thus began Ruby’s new career as Samantha’s manager. She quit her job at the mailroom since it had been cutting into all her hours at the studio, where Samantha’s creations were becoming more and more elaborate. She was crafting halos that looked like delicate glass from heavy mounds of clay, was forming facial expressions so complex Ruby couldn’t crack them. Ruby spent all her time at the studio on her computer or her phone, looking up art competitions or showcases where she could submit pictures of Samantha’s art and network with well-known artists. Samantha was excited, the growing pile of coffee cups in the trashcan and the tremor in her hand as she sculpted indicative of her joy.

“I got in contact with a local artist who’s putting on a show tomorrow,” Ruby said.

Samantha stilled in her movements.“I have class tomorrow.”

“I already emailed your professors saying you’re feeling sick,” Ruby replied

nonchalantly, staring at her nails before going back to speedily banging her laptop keys.

Only then did Samantha dare to raise her head, her eyebrow quirking. “You have my email?” Her eyes drifted to her laptop on the table next to her.

“Oh, yeah. Your password is your dog’s name followed by 1-2-3. You should change your password. Anybody could hack it.” Ruby gnawed on her thumbnail. “Want me to change it for you?”

Samantha turned back to her project, her head faltering like a broken animatronic. “Oh. No. It’s okay. Good to know.”

Samantha went to art showcases. Ruby bought her a Rolodex for all the business cards she had amassed. She sat and listened as Ruby marketed her to museum curators, who looked upon her like a specimen rather than the picturebooks containing her projects. Ruby would glance over her shoulder at her as if she was some prized cow at an auction; even her cadence matched an auctioneer. Perhaps that was why so many curators took an interest in her. After a couple of rejection letters, the acceptances rolled in like a tide and swept Samantha away. She was caught in a riptide, and the last thing she saw before drowning was a lifeguard with Ruby’s face staring down at her with a big grin and waving proudly as she watched her go under.

It came to a point that she didn’t care if she was locked in the studio or not. She hid a mattress and blanket underneath one of the tables in the back, but it was hardly used since Ruby would bring her enough caffeine and Ritalin to keep her eyelids stapled back until her eyes were burned by the nascent sun. Her professors forgot who she was, even her art history professor. She was an art history major, but it was as if she was never in college in the first place. Ruby used to stay with her at every moment of the night when they worked late together, but she’d leave after midnight under the excuse that “managers need their sleep.”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Samantha cried during a mental breakdown, caused directly by the combination of stimulant drugs that were enough to fry every synapse in her brain. She rocked back and forth in the corner of the studio; once it had been her home, and now it felt like she was Fortunato. Ruby stood stoically above her, her arms crossed and her chin high as she spared a glance down at her crumpled friend.

“You are better than this, Sam. You are meant for greatness. I can see it. I just have to bring it out. But go ahead, pay me back for all I’ve done for you by crying on the floor. I gain nothing from this. I’m doing this because I love you.”

Ruby had told her this before. Back when they first started these late-night sessions, when time passed between them like sweet honey and didn’t leave her stuck like a fly in molasses. When Ruby had said that before, she was smiling. Now, she looked down on her with scorn, a deep wrinkle extending from her nose to the corner of her mouth. Samantha stood up and walked to her desk, grasped a loop tool, and began to sharpen it against a sheet of sandpaper.

“Good girl. Now, I have a curator who’s interested in you. I brought you these pills, so if you could finish this next project by tomorrow that’d be—”

With a roar and bounding leap, Samantha descended upon her friend with the loop tool and pressed it into her skin, covering up her screams with her own laughter. She was intrigued by how the skin came away more easily than clay in her hand, exposing the pulsing meat underneath that rosy cheek. She ignored the claws scratching at her chest and arms and punched the thing into submission. She continued to carve in utter fascination until it dropped to the floor at her feet in a heap of flesh. She let the bloody tool fall, maroon dripping from her fingers as she walked away from the writhing, moaning creature she created like Frankenstein. Except she proud, owned that she let a demon go loose by not carving out the thing’s heart instead.

--

Samantha stands at the defense table in the courtroom, delivering her apology in a monotone voice that reminds her of her art professor. She wonders if Ruby, sitting behind her, unrecognizable in face bandages, is reminded of that time, too. She heard that Ruby sold all of her art now that her name meant nothing with a crime attached to it. But no matter how much money Ruby made, it’ll never compare to the satisfaction Samantha now feels that every day, she will look into the mirror and be reminded that she is her god. She is her mound of clay, sculpted to her liking, her most beautiful and horrid creation. Her magnum opus.