As They Slip Away (Across the Universe 2.50)

Underneath the clay and sweat is a scowl angrier than any I’ve seen. .

The next thing I notice is the sculpture. While Luthor’s face radiates with emotion, the clay face of the sculpture is blank. No wonder Luthor’s hands are caked with mud. He’s smoothed every feature from the sculpture’s visage, making the cheeks so flat that they’re almost gone,

smoothing the nose into nothing but a bump, completely erasing the lips. The eyes—he’d worked a solid day on the eyes alone, using a tiny pick-like tool to carve in eyelashes—are now nothing more than slight indentations under the barely-there brow.

There is an eerie quality to the sculpture now: The body is still intact, perfectly beautiful and meticulously detailed, but the face is nothing but a flat shadow.

Still, it seems to stare at me with its nothing eyes.

“It’s better now,” Luthor says flatly.

“It was lovely before. ” My voice comes out weak.

Luthor levels his glare at me. “It’s better now,” he repeats.

My hand reaches behind me for the door, my body seeking an escape before my mind can tell me what I need to do.

“ What were you doing with Bartie?” Luthor asks.

“ What?”

“Last night. In the common room. What were you doing with Bartie?” He bites off each word as if it tastes foul in his mouth.

“ Nothing. Singing. Nothing. ”

Luthor reaches toward me with his clay-covered hands. I flinch. He notices, and, rather than becoming gentler as he would have a day before, his hand tenses and his eyes narrow. He touches my brow, his fingers raking across my skin forcefully as he drags them down, over my eyelids, leaving brown streaks on my face.

“You’re mine,” he whispers. “Mine. ”

I get the frex out of there.

7.

From that point on, I don’t work in the studio. I go at night—with Bartie and Victria, both wearing looks of concern and worry—to get my notebooks and sheet music from the Hall. Luthor’s covered his sculpture up with a large cloth, and I don’t have the courage to look at the blank face again.

My music takes on a different tone as I write with Victria and Bartie, who’ve turned the garden behind the Hospital into their studio. It’s nice to be able to get help from a poet when I work on lyrics, or advice from a fellow musician when I’m struggling to find chords. I work quicker—but at the same time, it feels as if I’ve lost some of the emotion behind the music. I’d started out writing love songs, and ended up writing sad ones. Perhaps appropriate for the Sirens, but not for me.

And then, almost before I’ve really had a chance to put everything together the way I want, it’s time to present our work to Orion.

Kayleigh and Harley enlist all of our help to get their pieces from the pond behind the Hospital up to the Recorder Hall. Harley wanted to do the presentations by the pond, but Orion insisted they be done inside the Hall. Besides, the projects are supposed to be installed in the galleries on the upper floors once we’re done with our presentations. I assume that means Luthor had to clean up as well, that our studio is once more just the gallery, but I try not to think on it too much. The gallery seems darker with three hulking new additions—Kayleigh’s metal sculpture, Harley’s fresco, and Luthor’s covered-up clay sculpture.

Orion asks us each to explain our work as part of our presentations. Kayleigh goes first, followed by Harley, but I barely hear them. I’m too busy staring at the bumpy cloth over Luthor’s sculpture. It doesn’t have that same familiar shape I’d come to know. It seems shorter.

Orion nods to Luthor, indicating that he should go next, but Luthor shakes his head. Instead, Victria begins reciting her poetry.

It’s not until Bartie goes that I am able to draw my attention away from Luthor’s too-short sculpture.

His music is hollow in the best possible way. It speaks of longing and sorrow, and I want to fill it with my voice, but I don’t. It’s better this way.

As his music fades, I step forward with my own. I close my eyes and forget about everything and just sing.

And for that short moment, everything is right.

But then the moment disappears.

I open my eyes, and I’m still here. And so is Luthor.

“Thank you, Selene,” Orion says. “Now, it’s your turn, Luthor. ”