Hannah’s silent expressions didn’t clear up anything at all. She and Peter exchanged meaningless conversation as Cat led the way to the ceramics studio.

“Your brother have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, right. Did he when you last spoke to him?”

“Uh, kind of, but not officially. You know how it is.”

Cat pulled open the heavy door to the studio, and looked at Peter and Hannah as she said, “Don’t touch anything.” Peter rolled his eyes, and Hannah bounced through the doorway with her phone out, ready to take pictures.

There were only a couple people with headphones on working at the wheel, making bowls and cups and plates, so Cat had half of the studio all to herself to finish her bust. She chose a wooden table near the cubbies, gathered her supplies, and plopped her clay head down on a lazy susan to get started.

But with Hannah and Peter sitting right across from her, Cat could only stare at the trash bag that covered her project.

“Oh, is it weird we’re watching?” Hannah asked suddenly.

“I’m not watching.” Peter continued to poke and prod at his phone, even after Cat started to take the trash bag off her piece. She fought the urge to pick up a slab of clay and throw it at his stupid face.

“Kind of weird,” Cat agreed through her teeth.

“What’s your project?” Her roomie stood up and rounded the table to stand next to Cat, squinting as she did so. “Is it you?”

“I guess. I don’t know. Just supposed to be a bust. I don’t really know what I’m doing with it. I can’t get the face to be even.”

“Can I take pictures of your other stuff? Like Instagram-status pics?” Hannah picked up a wooden paintbrush with hardened clay on it and started to pose it among the other tools, and Cat frowned.

“Um, sure. The kiln is back there.” She pointed to the part of the room kitty corner to her, where there was a massive roll-up door that led to the giant clay oven. “Might be some stuff out there that’s cool, too. I’ll just work on this for an hour or something.” Hannah seemed pleased with her answer, and immediately took to taking some of Cat’s tools, placing them about in different lighting, and taking pictures with her phone. Cat tried her best to ignore her, to stare at her clay disaster until some sort of inspiration took over and told her how to fix the stupid face.

“Oh!” Hannah sounded suddenly, after only a couple pictures. “Peter, we can work on the profile.”

Cat immediately reached for her headphones in her ceramics cubby, and gave a small smile to Hannah as she gestured with them to let her know she wasn’t going to pay any attention. Hannah nodded, then took a seat next to Peter to crowd over his phone.

It took two full songs before Cat’s hand finally reached for the tiny squirt bottle full of water. She sprayed the face of her bust, took the paintbrush, and began to run it over the indents where the eyes were, erasing the details she’d done last time she was here. A paper towel and extra water helped erase some of the deeper features, until finally all she saw was this shell of a face, staring at her in an earthy red color. For whatever reason, it seemed to show more expression than when she actually put anything on it. Well, that sucked.

Cat glanced up from her work periodically to check on Hannah and Peter, see what they were doing. The first time, they seemed to be muttering and mulling about a couple photos; the second time, each were on their own phones, silent and not talking to one another. Then, the third time, Hannah waved for Cat’s attention. She pulled out a headphone from her ear.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Um, fine,” said Cat.

“It’s just been, like...an hour and a half.” What? Oh. Cat glanced down to her phone to check the time, and grimaced.

“Sorry. I haven’t gotten very far. Just another half hour?” Hannah adjusted herself on her seat a bit and glanced around the studio. Only one person remained, throwing lumps of clay onto a pottery wheel over and over again.

“Okay. I guess I’m going to take some more pictures, just for like, the aesthetic. Maybe I’ll make a profile banner out of it or something.” And, like a child given a set of activities to do on a rainy day, Hannah sighed and slowly made her way around the studio. Cat shook her head.

“What’s the problem?” Peter asked. Cat jumped at his sudden question, finally looking at him. His eyes were tired, every bit of him slumped in the chair and onto the table. If he was so bored, why didn’t he just leave?

Cat pursed her lips and glanced back at the only eye she’d been able to construct. “I can’t get the face to be even.” Or to actually like any of it. Sure, the rest of it might have looked like her--the general shape, the hair style she’d given it, but nothing else looked right, other than the left nostril.

“Can you do that thing little kids do and cover half the face with hair or something?” He stared at the back of her piece, gesturing to the gentle waves of clay “hair.” Cat bit her lip.

“Don’t think I’d get very many points for that.” Sighing, she retreated to her cubby to pull out the instructions of the assignment and set it on the table. Dried clay fingerprints reminded her of where on the page the assignment was detailed. The blurb was just like every other creative class she took: a little vague, not much to go on, lots of room for interpretation.

“A human bust with an identity,” she mumbled to herself. “So it doesn’t have to be you?” asked Peter. She shook her head. “Just do abstract, like Picasso.” The gentle taps of his fingers on his phone let her know he wasn’t even looking anymore. Lot of help he was.

“Picasso wasn’t an abstract artist,” she muttered. Peter didn’t seem to hear her. But she didn’t know what kind of artist he actually was, so she didn’t say anything more.

Cat scooted her chair back to stare at her work, the metal scraping against the floor with an ugly echo. Everything about this thing was ugly, lopsided, disjointed. No amount of extra layers, or “hair” would cover up this mess. The more she stared, the more she frowned; the irritation that struck her earlier was beginning to return.

The worst part was that only half of this thing was ugly. Even the eye she just did kind of looked okay. But the other side, blank and waiting for something to happen, sagged a little, showed cracks, fingerprints. Parts of it were drying out because she hadn’t covered it properly. It looked almost as dirty as it was misshapen. But if this assignment had to do with identity, it certainly had more of a reflection of a person than the other side. Now that eye and nostril looked fake, like a mask.

The idea controlled her hands before it even got to her brain. Cat grabbed the piece of wire used to cut clay from its stack, placed it over half of the face, and pulled it down, severing half of her creation clean off.

“Woah,” sounded Peter as she caught the piece of clay face in her hand. She set it down on the table gently, then began to stretch and smooth the rest of the bust to hide the fact that she just ripped half of it off.

“Dr. Hannibal, you just destroyed your project.” But Cat ignored Peter’s snide comment before she returned to the clay she’d just removed. She pinched the edges, smoothed them out to make it look more purposeful, more rounded and manufactured, before she plopped it back onto where she had removed it.

Now, staring back at her, was a lopsided mound of clay vaguely in the shape of a bust, with only one side of the face, the mask, containing any normal-looking features. For whatever reason, now that she stared at it, it gave off a wave of somber energy.

The tiniest hint of chlorine and detergent hit her nose before she heard his voice, almost sad: “That’s not...how you see yourself, is it?” He seemed to sense the energy from her project, too.

Well. It wasn’t strictly literal, and it wasn’t strictly creative. If she had been able to get the other half right, she wouldn’t have done it like this. But the part of the bust that looked half-decent didn’t feel right, either.

“It’s just clay,” Cat settled with. “Don’t get all psychoanalytical.” One therapist was enough.

“I’m not.” He sounded defensive. “It’s just--I mean, you’ve had a rough couple of months--”

“Shut up.” She didn’t need reminding. To emphasize her point, she grabbed the trash bag that protected the clay from drying out and shoved it over her bust.

“I was only saying--” She glared at him, and at the sight of her expression, his frown revealed dimples.

“You don’t see me saying you swim all different because you’ve got daddy issues,” she blurted faster than she could soften any of her words. But before she had to face the consequences of saying something like that, she turned around with her bust to store it in her cubby. When she returned to the table to gather her leftover tools to rinse off in the sink, she saw him watching her out of the corner of her eye, still slowly erasing some of the shock.

“You’re impossible.” His voice grew taut with every word. “You’ll say literally anything to--” But she turned on the sink to drown out his words and shut her eyes tightly, struggling to shut him out. Couldn’t he take a hint? Did he not see that it already felt like her skin was inside-out, all her secrets out for the world to poke and prod at? Reminding her at every turn wouldn’t make it any better, wouldn’t change anything. Honestly, she could hardly look at a sweater. What made him think that bringing it up in public would be any better? Idiot.

By the time Cat finished cleaning up her materials, her hands shook more from the freezing water than from unwanted memories. Hannah returned to them, seemingly antsy to get going to somewhere else; Peter had recovered to a predictable grimace by then.

“All done?” she asked once Cat set her supply bucket in its designated spot.

“As much as I’m going to get done today,” she answered with a shrug. “Did you guys set up the profile?”

“Yeah.” Hannah picked up the tote bag and swung it on her shoulder, then fell in step between Cat and Peter. “We made it look like Catrina had a bad breakup and deleted her profile, and now she’s back. To explain all the new activity and all that.” Cat nodded to indicate she heard, but her stomach fluttered a bit the more she thought of it. It was a little fun, for a short while, to pretend to be a model today, but was any of it going to work? Would some rich high school kid look at the pictures and fall for it, that some random girl wanted to friend him? What if he rejected the friend request, and all of this was for nothing? The awkwardness, the anxiety…. They should’ve used Hannah or Kelsey or something. They were more sociable, looked friendlier, smiled bigger, and most of the time looked leagues prettier--

“What if Oscar doesn’t….” Her words trailed off. What if Oscar what? Looked at the pictures and thought it was too fake? Or what if he thought it was too weird that an older girl was trying to friend him, or that maybe she wasn’t that attractive anyway and that--

“He will,” was Peter’s short answer.

“How do you know?” What if instead, he flagged the profile and they got in trouble? Did people get in trouble for making fake profiles? “Can we get in trouble if this doesn’t work?”

“Relax, it’s fine.” But his eyes still stared at his phone, checking it for whatever it was that was so important. Cat grit her teeth.

“I don’t--I don’t think we can get in trouble,” Hannah said, frowning. “I think it’d just get deleted, if someone reports it. But like, Kelsey’s little sister’s friends all said they were fine with accepting the friend request and pretending like they know Catrina.” The rabbit hole just got a little deeper. “I think it’s convincing.”

Cat quieted herself with a sigh, and opted to stay silent until they made their way back to the dorms. Peter kept the energy tense, but Hannah didn’t say anything about it, just continued attempting to make smalltalk until they parted ways in the elevator.

But once the doors shut Peter inside and left them to the hallway, Hannah switched gears immediately.

“Remember what you asked me to do?”

Cat blinked. “When?”

“To pay more attention?” She adopted a hushed tone, fully leaning into her Detective Hat. But after today…. Cat sighed. Whatever mixture of signs Peter may have been throwing her way--it didn’t make a difference. Besides, he made his point earlier: she was the one that was different, not him. Vulnerable, anxious. She had a reality-shattering winter. Even though she brushed him off with his stupid Freudian analysis, there was a little merit to it...but he didn’t need to go and open all her sores like that.

She shook her head to her roommate. “Oh--yeah, just...forget about that. It doesn’t matter.”

“Huh?” Hannah grabbed her keyes from her tote to open the door, brows furrowed in confusion.

“I was just seeing things. He’s no different than before.” Cat took her offer to step in first.

Hannah shut the door behind herself and set the bag down before she returned to whispering: “Okay, but like, you didn’t tell me you guys act all different when no one else is around.”

Cat scrunched her nose. “What? No we don’t.” But her roommate jumped backward to sit on her bed, legs crossed, leaning back as if she held all the answers to the world.

“Mmm--yeah, yeah you do,” said Hannah. Was she high?

“How? We hardly even talk.”

“I don’t have the words….” She sighed and looked to the ceiling, leaving Cat even more skeptical that her roommate was of sound mind.

“M’kay, sure.” Cat was sure to layer her voice with as much sarcasm as possible, then lowered herself to her desk chair and opened her laptop to continue her English essay.

“I don’t think you were seeing things,” Hannah said after a short moment. Cat stared at her loading screen, frozen in place, watching her roomie in the reflection of the screen. Hannah still stared at the ceiling, kicking her feet back and forth as casual as could be.

Cat cleared her throat in an attempt to seem unaffected. “What do you mean?” She watched from the monitor how Hannah kicked off her shoes and let out an exaggerated sigh. What was this? What kind of weird performance…?

“Oh, I don’t know. But you’re right, I guess it doesn’t matter.” This made Cat turn around and shoot her a look. Hannah gave her a smile that looked far too sweet. “Unless it does?” What? What did that mean?

“Uh,” Cat sounded, shaking her head. “I guess...not…?” And for whatever horrifying reason, Hannah’s only reply was a simple, “Hm!”