Chapter 10 THE NOTEBOOK
POV: CAMERON
Studio Four was empty at four in the afternoon, which was exactly why I liked it.
I sat at the wide worktable nearest the northwest windows and opened my sketchbook to the page after the one I'd torn out. Clean paper. Good weight. I picked up a pencil and just held it for a minute, not drawing anything yet.
The light in here was actually as good as I'd told Vickey. That part hadn't been a line. The northwest corner caught the late afternoon sun at an angle that made everything look slightly more honest than it was, which was useful for art and counterproductive for almost everything else I did in this room.
I kept thinking about Vickey Harris.
She'd almost walked away. That was new.
Most of the time, by the time I got to the sketchbook reveal, the target was already decided. The portrait worked because it said "I see you" in a language that people who felt invisible were specifically hungry to hear. I'd used it six times in two years with variations depending on the subject. Different details emphasized. Different moments chosen to show the drawing.
Vickey had looked at the portrait and then taken one step back.
Not away. Just back. Creating space. Reassessing.
I'd had to adjust, which I hadn't had to do in a while.
I opened the desk drawer and took out the other notebook. Not the sketchbook. The actual notebook, narrow-ruled, black cover, my name written inside the front in my own handwriting so if anyone found it they'd know immediately whose it was, which was the kind of confidence that only came from knowing nobody was going to look.
My father had taught me that. Keep your records visible. Hidden things looked like secrets. Visible things looked like organization.
I opened it to the current page.
There were six names on it. Four had lines through them, the kind of line that meant completed, not abandoned. One was circled, which meant ongoing. One was blank next to the name, which meant assessment still running.
I wrote Vickey Harris at the bottom.
Next to her name I wrote: adjusted approach required. Resistant to performed spontaneity. Responds to honesty more than charm. Will need actual effort.
I underlined actual effort.
Then I wrote: art is real. Use that.
Because that was the thing about Vickey Harris that made her both harder and easier than the others. She was genuinely talented. I'd looked at her portfolio images online before today and the work was real, the kind of raw visual intelligence that couldn't be faked and that I hadn't actually encountered in person before.
I could use that. I could meet her there, in the actual work, and let that be the real thing inside the approach. Let the art be genuine so everything around it felt genuine by proximity.
It was a more sophisticated version of what I usually did. My father would approve.
I thought about my father watching from across the quad.
Derek Hayes did not attend student registration days out of school spirit. He attended them because the Echelon's intake assessment started on day one and Derek believed in firsthand observation over secondhand reports. Every scholarship student who came through Thornfield's gates got assessed. Most of them were filed under no action required. A small number got filed under monitor. A very small number got filed under approach.
I was the approach mechanism.
I'd understood that since sophomore year when my father had sat me down and explained it without using those words exactly, but with enough clarity that there was no mistaking the meaning. You have access to spaces I don't, his father had said. Students trust other students. Especially students who seem like they don't belong to anything.
I had understood.
I'd been useful ever since.
I told myself it was a choice. That I could stop if I wanted to. That understanding how the system worked and operating within it was different from being owned by it.
I told myself that less convincingly than I used to.
I looked at Vickey's name in the notebook.
The portrait I'd given her wasn't the one I'd drawn just now. That had been a copy. The original was in my bag, drawn three weeks ago from a photo on her school's public art department page. I'd spent two hours on it, getting the expression right, because the expression was the whole point. The expression had to say "I understand what you are" before you'd said a single word.
She'd believed it was spontaneous.
Almost.
That almost was going to require more work than I'd planned for.
I closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer.
Outside the studio window, the quad was emptying as students headed toward the dormitories. I could see the path Vickey had taken when she'd walked away from me. That small step back before she'd left. The way she'd spotted my father without being told to look.
She was going to be a problem.
The interesting kind.
I picked up the pencil and opened the sketchbook to the clean page.
I started drawing her again. Not from the photo this time. From memory. From the version of her I'd seen for real that afternoon, the one with the step back and the assessment in her eyes and the way she'd said "good to know" like she was filing something away for later.
That version was more interesting than the file had suggested.
I was going to have to be careful.
I kept drawing.
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Author's Note: Cameron Hayes ! Watch out for this one. He is his father's son. — J