Elizabeth dotted the last “i” and crossed the last “t” on her script when her telephone rang. Her roommate was staring at her laptop with her headphones on.
“Hello mother,” Elizabeth said when she picked up the receiver.
“Hello dear,” she replied, slurping something through a straw. “How are you doing, Elizabeth?”
“I’m doing well, thank you. How are things at home?”
“They’re fine. Your father finally got the car fixed. Joseph didn’t make it, though.”
“Did he make it onto junior varsity?”
“He didn’t make it at all. He’s really bummed out.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yes. We’ll be hoping to get a card or a letter from you. It would really cheer him up.”
“Okay.” She looked over her shoulder, relieved that her roommate still had her headphones on.
“So what happened today?”
“Nothing. I didn’t have any of the classes today.”
“Nothing? No one decided to try to offer you anything? Nothing that you or I or your father wouldn’t like to deal with?”
“I think you should relax, mother.”
Elizabeth cleared her throat, a wobbly hand straightening out the piece of paper it held. The sound of her chair moving appeared to startle who roommate, who took off one headphone. Elizabeth watched her do this with horror, quickly turning to face her side of the room.
Her mother also cleared her throat. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mother… I am in college now… People here are…” Her eyes roved over the paper in uncoordinated fashion. “…Different from me… But it would be dis-en-gen-u-ous of me if I just walked around being… negative of them all day. I am going to look for the good in people… and I wish you would stop asking me to dig up the bad-“
“-Well, we’ll talk about that,” her mother interjected. “But I have to get going for now. Please think of something for your brother. Have a good day, dear. I love you, dear.”
“I love you too, mother.” She said, and they hung up simultaneously.
“Dig up?” Her roommate repeated. “You’re a spy?”
Elizabeth thought she would feel better. She stood, looked at the piece of paper, slid it into a notebook, which she in turn slid into her backpack.
“Spying for Jesus,” her roommate announced. “I should’ve known. Can I borrow your skirt tonight, that blue one?”
“Oh, shut up,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t touch my stuff – your hands do nothing,” and she left the room.
“This is my favorite work, which is easy I suppose because I’ve only shown like three things in shows,” Harrison said with limited reaction from the audience. “Its literal content, pardon the pun, turns a lot of people off, but I think it’s also useful for getting attention. The visual punch is a big part of getting your work out there. People kind of want to downplay the spectacle aspect of video art but, come on, we all know it’s important.”
Several students squirmed, eager to point out that they did not, in fact, watch TV. Harrison Faraday looked around. Behind him, Jaresh Monaghan was looking on in admiration. Jaresh Monaghan liked down-to-earth artists.
Someone raised her hand, and Harrison pointed at it. “What’s the public reaction to your work, usually?”
“Well, usually, people don’t go to see it,” he said, with a more appreciable murmur rising from the audience. “But people who are into video art really seem to like it. It’s kind of tame, really, compared to some things. But it still carries a message that lots of people really seem to get.”
“Do people ever walk out?” she continued.
Faraday was confused at the audience’s reaction to that question. Many of them smirked, giggled. “I have not had that experience. I know, I’m surprised, too.”
“I wanted to conclude by saying I really liked your work.”
“Thank you,” he replied, beaming.
The heavy doors at the rear of the class opened noisily and in strode a woman who immediately appealed to Faraday’s biological impulses, as well as to his creative intuition. When he began Making Fire he intended to use female actors, with bare breasts intended to convey the same message, and hers struck him as sufficiently enormous to communicate that point, even as they were hidden under a dark red sweater, that perfectly matched her dark red hair that flowed over her narrow shoulders.
“Hi,” he said to the back of the room with a broad grin. She returned the greeting curtly, taking a seat at the very rear of the auditorium and commenced burning holes in the teacher with her eyes, who failed to react in any significant way except, perhaps, that his arm appeared to suddenly become itchy.
Elizabeth turned her head along with the rest of her peers to look scornfully at this newcomer, but she immediately struck Elizabeth as beautiful, as beyond reproach; indeed, this obvious fact blasted the looks of her peers away entirely. Harrison stared at her for a second too long, causing the resumption of his speech to falter, but she didn’t notice anyone’s eyes except those of Jaresh Monaghan, which were trained on his sleeve. His short fingers daintily picked at the cat hair sticking to him until he looked up, gazing expectantly over the crowd.