Chapter 157: the winter arts evening

The main auditorium had vanished. In its place stood a glowing maze of paper snowflakes, hanging lanterns, and painted screens, with the adjoining hall spilling over into it like a river through a doorway. Student paintings lined one wall, framed in cardboard and gold paint. Photographs of frosted gates and sleepy dormitory cats hung from strings along another. Somewhere, a cello was being tuned with great suffering.

Roxanne stopped just inside the doors with Isla and Tessa on either side of her. "I didn’t realise this many people had taken part."

"Half the academy," said Isla, who had already found the food stalls and was leaning in their direction like a plant toward a window. "Is that a chestnut stand? I’m going to be unbearable about it."

"Dance performance first," Tessa said firmly. "It starts in twenty minutes, and I refuse to miss it for a pastry."

"You refuse to miss it for a pastry?" Isla looked wounded. "Who are you?"

They compromised on a quick circuit, and Roxanne spotted Nora near the literary magazine display, bent over a table so low that her braid brushed the cloth. She was reading a printed proof of the programme with her lips moving.

"You’ve checked that five times," Roxanne said, arriving at her elbow.

"Four. I’m saving the fifth." Nora did not look up. "If my name is misspelled, I’m leaving the academy."

"Over one letter?"

"It’s a matter of principle."

"Of course. Very serious business."

Nora finally glanced up, saw her face, and burst into nervous laughter. The name, Roxanne noted, was spelled perfectly.

The event coordinator found her near the stage door and ticked her off a list. Her reading would come after two musical performances and a poem about winter boots, which struck Roxanne as an unfair order, since the boots would be a hard act to follow. She stood in the wings for a while, watching the other participants. A violinist rubbed her fingers and muttered scales. A boy with a poem folded in his fist kept reciting the first line under his breath, and a girl in a paint-smeared apron was pacing in a circle. It was oddly comforting. Everybody, it turned out, had their own private version of the same fear.

"Is there a character in your story I might recognise myself in?" Jace had materialised beside her with a cup of cider and the expression of a man preparing to be flattered.

"You’ll have to read it to find out."

"That sounds like a no."

"It sounds like a mystery."

"I hate mysteries. They never feature me." He drifted off, satisfied for reasons she did not examine.

Liam arrived behind him, a little apart, hands in his pockets. He did not make an entrance. He only caught her eye across the crowd and said, quietly, "Good luck," and then went to find a seat. She was grateful for how small he made it. Near the back of the hall she noticed Lucien standing beside a pillar with a programme folded in one hand, and Roshan nearby, looking at a painting with great attention. She registered both of them, and let them be. They had come to watch, like everyone else.

When her turn came, the coordinator announced her as one of the student contributors, and Roxanne walked onto the stage with her printed pages held in both hands. The lights were softer than at the showcase. The faces beyond them were a dim, patient sea, and for a moment her heart climbed into her throat.

The opening felt strange in her mouth. The words had lived so long on the page that hearing them in her own voice was like meeting a stranger who knew her handwriting. She read the first two sentences too fast. Then she remembered the pause before the teaspoon, and the tap, and she slowed down.

The rhythm came. She read about the girl and the shoebox, the bus ticket and the button and the folded recipe nobody could cook from. She read how the girl decided the box was full of nothing, and how she picked up the chipped teaspoon anyway, and remembered her grandmother stirring tea with it, tapping the rim twice, always twice. She let the silence sit after the tapping, as Nora had told her to, and the whole room seemed to lean into it.

She reached the last paragraph and paused for what felt like too long. Then she lifted her eyes to the dark and read the final line.

"Some things are not valuable because they last forever. Sometimes they matter because they remind us that something beautiful happened at all."

For a heartbeat there was nothing. Then the applause rose, warm and unhurried, and Roxanne let out a breath she had been holding since the cello. She walked back to her seat feeling lighter than she had expected, as though she had put down a bag she had carried so long she had forgotten it was there.

Nora’s turn came after the choir. The coordinator introduced her story as one of the pieces chosen for the upcoming magazine, and Nora stood with her pages crushed against her chest, so quiet that the first row leaned forward.

"Louder," someone whispered, not unkindly, and Nora flinched.

She stopped. She breathed in through her nose, glanced at Roxanne, and began again from the top. This time her voice was steadier, small but clear. By the end of the second paragraph it had a shape, and by the third the audience had stopped shifting in their chairs. She read about Edda standing in the quiet kitchen, unable to name one thing she wanted, and she did not rush the line. The hall held its silence around her like a pair of cupped hands.

When she finished, Roxanne was one of the first on her feet. She clapped until her palms stung. Nora walked back to the row with a smile she did not bother to hide, collapsed into the chair beside her, and whispered, "I actually did it."

"You did."

Nora waited a moment, as though expecting the old question to rise. It did not. For once, she did not ask whether it had been good enough.

Afterwards the girls wandered through the displays in a happy, drifting knot. Tessa dragged them to the dance performance, where four girls in grey spun across the floor like falling ash, and she watched with her mouth slightly open and said nothing for a full ten minutes. Isla insisted on the dessert stall next, and returned with a paper boat of hot chestnuts and a look of triumph. Jace delivered a long, grave review of a student sculpture shaped like a very sad fish, concluding that it was either genius or soup.

Liam found Roxanne near the photographs, studying an image of the frosted gates. He stood beside her for a moment before speaking.

"I liked the reading. Particularly the end."

"Thank you." She turned to look at him. "Did you understand it?"

"I understood enough to know you wrote it with care." He shrugged, a little sheepish. "I’m not going to pretend I have a profound interpretation. I’d only embarrass us both."

She smiled. It was a better compliment than any flourish, and she told him so, and he looked briefly and genuinely pleased.

Near the close of the evening, the coordinator climbed onto a chair and announced that the literary magazine would be released the following week. A cheer went up. Nora clutched Roxanne’s sleeve and mouthed something that might have been a prayer. The coordinator then glanced down the programme and added that she hoped to see more submissions from tonight’s readers.

"Would you consider another piece?" Mira Collins asked, appearing at Roxanne’s side with a notebook and a shy smile. Roxanne realised she must be the girl from the message.

"I’d like to think about it."

"That’s all I ask." Mira hesitated. "I enjoyed it. I’m sorry again about the message."

"It’s forgotten."

As the crowd thinned and the lanterns began to gutter, Liam fell into step beside her at the doors. "Did you enjoy yourself?"

"I did. Even though I spent all day worrying about it."

"You do that."

"Maybe I should stop anticipating everything that can go wrong."

"Please don’t. I enjoy watching you prove yourself wrong."

"Liam."

"What? It’s one of my favourite hobbies."

She shook her head, smiling, and he grinned and wandered off toward his brothers.

She was crossing the foyer, her scarf half wound, when her phone buzzed with an email from the workshop coordinator. She read it standing under a paper snowflake.

The academy’s cultural committee had selected three student pieces from the evening for a special collaborative publication. Hers was one of them. A second paragraph followed. The chosen writers would be invited to work alongside students from a visiting academy on a joint creative project.

Roxanne read it again, slowly. A collaboration. New people, new ideas, a completely different kind of work.

She smiled, and opened the attachment.