Sirens & Muses

by Antonia Angress

And that, she knew, was the most important thing: to care less than the other person did.

Karina had never heard her speak so assertively. And she didn’t avert her eyes from Karina’s body the way she did when Karina undressed in their dorm room. The opposite: she looked at her straight on, with bold, electrifying frankness. She perched herself on the stool and pulled the easel toward her. She lifted her eyes and took Karina in. Then, without preamble, she began to draw.

Just as Karina was drifting off, Louisa said, “Do you have time to pose for me again tomorrow night?” “Sure.” Karina smiled into the dark.

It was as though Louisa had flattened the secret room of her, laying it out in oil and linen for the whole world to see. “It’s really good,” Karina said. “I might need to adjust the—” Without stopping to think, Karina took a step forward and closed the distance between them, hip bones and breasts colliding, and kissed her.

And in that moment she felt the way she sometimes had with Wally, a sense of total privacy, of being sealed off from the world, protected from it. She wanted it to be like that with Louisa. She wanted to keep this pure and good, like a very old painting preserved forever behind glass.

Karina painted because she believed that art was power. “It can make people feel the way you want them to feel,” Karina had said to Louisa one night. “Art is the ultimate seduction.”

Why were people at this school so averse to sincerity? Why did everything have to be coated in ten layers of irony?

What are you worried about?” It emerged from Karina without forethought: “That we don’t understand each other.” Louisa put her pencil down. She tipped her head, smiling slightly. “What do you think it is I’m trying to do here?”

“You hurt people, but none of your little schemes ever cost you a thing. And you call yourself anti-establishment?