Chapter 158: beyond our walls

Roxanne read the cultural committee’s invitation twice, standing under a paper snowflake with her scarf half wound. The selected students would collaborate with writers, performers, and artists from another royal academy to produce a collection of short creative pieces. The project would run for several weeks and end with a presentation at Moonstone Academy. Her story had been chosen as one of three. She had not expected it to travel beyond the evening itself.

Nora found her at breakfast the next morning, waving her own copy of the email like a flag. "They shortlisted mine for it too. I read it four times to make sure it didn’t say someone else’s name."

"Is it spelled correctly?"

"Don’t." Nora sat down heavily. "I thought we were submitting stories."

"We did."

"Then why are they asking us to collaborate with strangers?"

"Perhaps they want us to suffer creatively."

Nora laughed. "You’re very encouraging."

"I’m told it’s my best quality." Roxanne buttered her toast. "We’ll go to the introductory meeting together. If it’s dreadful, we’ll leave through a window."

"It’s on the second floor."

"Then we’ll leave with dignity."

The meeting took place that Saturday in one of the academy’s conference rooms, a long, polished space with tall windows and a table far too large for the number of people who had agreed to sit at it. The visiting students arrived in small, self-conscious groups, wearing coats in a different shade of grey from Moonstone’s and carrying sketchbooks, cameras, and one enormous portfolio that required two people to steer it through the door.

A tall boy with a camera slung across his chest drifted toward Roxanne while the coordinator was still arranging name cards. He had untidy fair hair and the unhurried look of someone who had never once been late because he had never once been on time.

"Adrian Cole," he said. "Photography, mostly. You’re Roxanne Silver. I read your story in the selection packet. The teaspoon is wonderful."

"Thank you." She was surprised how pleased it made her. "What do you photograph?"

"Ordinary moments. People tying their shoes. A kettle left on a windowsill. I’m not much good at portraits. People stiffen up, and then you’ve photographed their stiffness." He shrugged. "I’d rather catch someone not knowing they’re being looked at."

"That sounds a little sinister."

"It sounds a little sinister to me too. I’ve been trying to rephrase it for years."

She laughed, and the conversation moved easily on, with no particular weight behind it. He was friendly without being forward, and she noticed that he did not look at her the way people usually did when they had heard her name before. He had only read a story and liked a spoon.

Across the room, Nora was deep in conversation with a visiting girl who had braids to her waist and a battered paperback tucked under her arm. Roxanne caught the words dragons and unreliable and absolutely not canon, and understood that Nora had found her people.

The coordinator, a gentle, harried woman with a stack of folders, clapped her hands. "Welcome, everyone. Our collection will be called Between Two Worlds. Each group must combine at least two creative disciplines. Written pieces with visual work, music with poetry, whatever you can manage. You’ll have several weeks, and a presentation at the end."

She read out the groupings. Roxanne was paired with Adrian and a visiting student named Maya, a small, brisk girl with charcoal on her sleeve who specialised in illustration and spoke in short, decisive bursts.

"I’d like a continuous illustrated story," Maya said at once, once they had found a corner. "One long thread. Panels, maybe."

"I’d like photographs with captions," Adrian said. "Quiet. A series."

They both looked at Roxanne.

"What if it’s neither?" she said slowly. "A short narrative told through ordinary objects. A teaspoon, a bus ticket. And the memories attached to each. The writing carries the story, and each object gets an image."

Maya tilted her head. "That could work."

"It could," said Adrian, "if it’s visually engaging. A shoebox of keepsakes sounds lovely in a paragraph. I’m not sure it photographs well. Objects on tables are dull."

"Everything on a table is dull until someone cares about it."

"That’s a nice sentence. Can you photograph it?"

"I can write it."

"I’m beginning to see the problem," said Maya, and began sketching on a napkin.

They argued gently for most of an hour. Adrian wanted something visually striking, an image that could stop a person in a corridor. Roxanne wanted the writing to carry the emotional weight, and she said so plainly. She did not want the pictures to be decoration. Adrian replied, without heat, that a good photograph should be able to tell part of the story without paragraphs of explanation.

"You want the reader to feel something before they understand everything," he said.

"And you want them to understand something before they feel anything."

"Exactly."

"That’s going to be annoying."

"Probably."

They looked at each other, and for the first time they both laughed.

Maya set down her pencil. "What if it’s one character? Someone documenting the last week before she leaves a familiar place. Each photograph is something she’s about to leave behind. Each piece of writing is what it meant."

Roxanne turned the idea over. It had the shape of the box and the spoon, but it moved. "A week. Seven days."

"Seven photographs," Adrian said, and his eyes had lit up. "Seven small goodbyes."

"I could draw the character from behind," Maya murmured. "Always walking away. You never see her face."

They had a concept. It sat in the middle of the table, rough and unfinished, and none of them wanted to be the first to admit how pleased they were.

During the break, the visitors and the Moonstone students drifted down to the cafeteria in a noisy, mixed crowd. Roxanne ended up at a long table with Nora, Adrian, Maya, and the girl with braids, whose name was Tamsin, and who was already explaining the plot of a trilogy to anyone within range.

"What are your academy’s traditions like?" Nora asked, to change the subject before Tamsin reached volume two.

"We have a festival every spring," Adrian said. "Cooking challenges. Entirely ridiculous ones. Teams make dishes from whatever is in a mystery basket."

"Is the food edible?" Nora asked at once.

"Mostly."

"Define mostly."

"Maya once served an entire table a dessert that was almost entirely salt," said Tamsin, with great relish.

"It was a mistake with the labels," Maya said, with dignity. "I thought the jar said sugar."

"It said salt in capital letters."

"I was under pressure."

The table collapsed. Roxanne put her head in her hands and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes. She realised, somewhere in the middle of it, that she had not once felt the familiar flicker of being studied. Nobody here knew her history. Nobody had heard the story of her fall, or the rumours, or the dances. They only knew her as a girl who wrote about spoons, and she found she liked it very much.

Before the meeting ended, the coordinator asked each group to bring a rough concept and some sample material to the next session. Adrian suggested meeting at the weekend to take photographs around the academy grounds.

"We’ll need to coordinate everyone’s schedules," Roxanne said. "I have training and a reading group."

"Fair." He nodded. "Send me your free hours."

"I can do preliminary illustrations before then," Maya offered. "Rough ones. Just so we have something to look at."

They set up a group chat before they left, with a name Adrian typed and Maya immediately changed. Roxanne walked out of the conference room with a rough plan, a full head, and the pleasant sense of having stepped through a door she had not known was there.

That evening she was brushing her hair when her phone buzzed.

I was thinking about our project.

She typed: Already? We just left the meeting.

Some of us take creative work seriously.

Some of us enjoy sleeping.

A photograph arrived. It showed an old stone archway at the edge of the academy grounds, half covered in ivy, with a thin shaft of low light falling through the gap. She knew the arch. She had walked under it a hundred times without looking.

I think this could be our first picture, Adrian wrote. Come see it tomorrow?

Roxanne studied the image. The archway looked different through someone else’s eyes, quieter and more deliberate, like a place that had been waiting to be noticed.

Send it to the group, she replied. Let’s see what Maya thinks.

You’re very difficult to recruit.

You’ll survive.

She set the phone down, smiling at the ceiling.