Wicked Idol by Becker Gray

Author:Becker Gray [Gray, Becker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dangerous Press

12

Keaton

“You can’t stay angry with me forever,” I said, watching Iris stare determinedly out my car window. Outside the car, there were trees and trees and trees, heavy with leaves that were newly flushed with fall. You’d think we were still in Vermont with all this foliage, but no, we were driving through Yonkers, which meant we’d been in the car for four hours.

Four long hours.

Four hours of Iris pretending I barely existed, four hours of her answering all my questions with one-word answers. Four hours of her glaring at me when I nudged her knee or brushed against her hand.

Actually, the entire past week and a half had been strained between us, which was not great timing because it had finally come time to take the pictures that would eventually turn into our project, and we needed to cooperate now more than ever.

We’d both managed to agree that we wanted to get away from Vermont to get our images at least. Everyone else was doing trees and mountains and lakes, and I’d turned to her during our last session and said, “I want to do the city.”

Because fuck that trite bucolic crap. Any idiot with a cell phone could take a picture of some trees, dial up the contrast, and then write a douchey exhibit label for it. But Iris and I weren’t idiots. We were better than the obvious answer. And what was less obvious for a landscape than a city?

Iris had immediately seen the appeal, dropping her cold shoulder act to look at me with a thoughtful expression. “Skyscrapers instead of woods. Streets instead of rivers. I can see that.”

“We could contrast it with what a typical landscape is expected to be,” I’d said, tapping my pencil against the table we were sitting at. “I could integrate some illustrated landscape shit between buildings or on top of them. On the sides. Rooftop farms, you know, like a solarpunk feel . . .”

Iris had shaken her head. “Too futuristic.”

“It’s conceptual,” I’d defended.

“It’s season three Westworld. It’s Wakanda. It’s Zootopia. It’s been done.”

“Yeah, it has. Because it’s fucking cool.”

She’d narrowed her eyes at me. She’d been pissed since that night in the woods when I’d dry-fucked her to orgasm and then called her “bait” ten minutes after, and it seemed like she took a particular, resentful delight in saying, “It’s fan art, Keaton. Is that really what you want your semester project to be? Fan art?”

“Fan art is badass stuff. Don’t be such a fucking snob.”

Her eyebrow had arched. And then she’d continued on like I hadn’t spoken at all. “We’ll do a fake double exposure. One of the city, one of the landscape it would have been if it had never been developed.”

I’d considered it a moment. It wasn’t a terrible idea, and as much as I’d like to get her to admit that my idea was cooler, I couldn’t deny that her vision was probably more reflective.

And reflective was the kind of shit that got top marks and written up in the local papers, which I wasn’t about to say no to.

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