on the polished wood surface, that soft, reassuring sound as she searched for words.
Before she found them, Vince said, “I read it.”
Dee glanced at him. “You read what?”
“Pride and Prejudice.”
Dee gaped. She nearly tripped and slowed to regain her balance. Vince slowed with her. He was looking at her with concern.
She looked back at him, wide-eyed. “You can read?”
Vince pushed her shoulder lightly. “Shut up.” He shrugged. “We weren’t hanging out, and I didn’t have anything better to do.”
“What’d you think?”
He shrugged again. “It was long. But I liked it.”
“Who was your favorite character?” Dee was hoping he’d say Lizzie, Jane or Mr. Darcy.
Vince tilted his head. “I guess...that Bingley dude.”
Dee’s eyes widened. “Mr. Bingley?”
“Yeah. He was okay. I think I related to him most. How he knew he liked Jane, but was too polite and chickened out of telling her. And it took him twenty years to finally get around to it.”
“It wasn’t that long.”
“Well, it felt like reading it took twenty years.” At that, Dee pushed him away. He smiled and arched back toward her, and she found herself smiling, too. “What I mean is, I get how hard it is to tell someone what you’re thinking. Especially when you like them. And sometimes you’re so close, you assume they know what you’re thinking, but it’s not really fair... I mean, I’m kinda rambling, but—”
“No,” said Dee quickly. “I get it.”
She took in a deep breath and let it out again. She understood what he meant, not just for him, but for her, as well. She curled her fingers into her palms, readying her words like armor. Because what was she waiting for? She was no Mr. Bingley.
I am a twentieth-century black Lizzie Bennet. I like a boy. I like talking to him, I like his eyebrows, I like his laugh when I tease him, I like how he debates me on nineteenth-century heroines and twentieth-century superheroes, I like his secret sports conversations with my dad, I like how he focuses so hard when he dances even though he’s not good at it, I like how he skates like he was born to do it. I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t. I have nothing to apologize for.
“Kissing makes me laugh,” said Dee quietly.
Vince turned sharply, peering at her through his long bangs. “Who’ve you been kissing?”
“No one. Just...the thought of it. It’s just weird to me. All of it’s weird to me, dating, and couples, and making out...” She rolled her hand and left it at that.
“Oh.”
“I’m just a prude, I guess,” said Dee.
“I’ve never called you a prude.”
“No, but everybody else does.”
As the song ended, the DJ seamlessly slid on another record. The lights dimmed low, way low, almost to full darkness but for the slowly turning tinted lights that passed over the floor and the walls. Dee held her breath against the flutter in her heart.
Couples’ skate. Here they were again. Some skaters took this opportunity for a break, going to the restrooms, grabbing snacks from the bar. Other skaters found each other in the dark and linked hands.
Vince kept skating, and so did Dee.
“It’s just, I don’t know what it all means,” said Dee. “I don’t know why I feel this way, or if I’m gonna change—if I’m supposed to change, or—”
Vince laughed, and normally Dee would already be puffing herself up to give him an earful, but it just made her sad.
“I guess I’m being dumb,” she said.
“Nah,” said Vince. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just skate night, Dee. We’re just skating. I’m still trying to figure out things about myself, too. Who I am, who I want to be. But it’s not gonna happen all at once.”
“How do you know?” said Dee. “Maybe this is going to be the moment that the spotlights turn on and you have a big epiphany right here in the middle of the floor.”
They fell silent. They looked around. But the lights stayed dim and the music kept playing, and they laughed.
“All I’m saying,” said Vince, “is we don’t need to have ourselves figured out in one night. You know?”
Dee’s heart was fluttering again, but in a different way. She felt a warmth there that was spreading to her stomach and her limbs. She turned her head away a little, because she couldn’t suppress the smile growing on her face and she didn’t want Vince to see it, not quite yet. “Yeah. I know.”
Dee dropped her hand by her side. She didn’t want to wait to see if Vince would grab it. She didn’t want to guess what he would think if she made him wait. So she turned up her palm.
And Vince’s fingers grazed her skin, prodding and searching. Their fingers slid together slowly. They rolled along, their arms brushing, blue and purple lights casting an artificial twilight over skaters in like, or in love.
Lizzie Bennet would enjoy skating, Dee thought.
* * * * *
Two weeks into the new year—the third of our apprenticeship—the master painter Cornelius van der Loos declares me the best of his students.
Though not for my skill behind the easel—I have yet to master shadows in the still lifes, so my light often seems to be coming from a cosmically improbable sun that has been spread across the sky like a pat of melted butter.
But I am the boy most accomplished at not becoming distracted by the first naked woman we draw. Which is something, I suppose.
It has been all vanitases and still lifes for us for years, though just before Nieuwjaarsdag we graduated to plaster casts of the human frame, so the appearance of the living versions in our studio seemed inevitable. But the first day that van der Loos plucks a round-hipped girl from De Wallen and perches her in the center of our circle atop a stool for us to sketch, the study for the other apprentices seems to be more about keeping themselves in control as van der Loos calls for her to change positions and she presents us with an arched back that make her breasts reach for the ceiling.
But for me, it’s as easy as not going hard over the Delft candlesticks and Jakartan pomegranates we have been sketching since we were twelve.
Though if it were Joost Hendrickszoon reclining naked on a ragged sofa in front of me, a barely there whisper of silk draped over his most vulnerable bits—or, God help me, perhaps no silk at all—it would be me gasping down lungfuls of the frigid January air with my breeches tented, trying not to think about how desperately I would like to put my hands on some tackle that wasn’t my own.
It’s been a time since I spoke to Joost—though spoke seems too generous a term for the blushing conversations I occasionally stammered my way through with him after Sunday services. That hasn’t stopped me from fantasizing about him without his clothes on when I am supposed to be staring at van der Loos’s girls and sketching them in repose. His family put their money in Viceroy bulbs and when the tulip market shattered, he had to abandon his own apprenticeship with the faience maker and take up work with the dockhands