“Two minutes,” he yelled. I leaned up against the wall and bent one heel to it, staring out at the sunset on the water while I waited, and there in those high wooden heels I felt young again. Then, a stab of panic. With a mere seventeen days left to paint, I shouldn’t have left the studio for anything. But I was vibrating with stress—for good reason. I was making progress. The days were long. I need to take care of myself, I told the panic. I need to have some fun.

I heard the hiss of hot metal colliding with cold water, of steel clattering against concrete, and then the lock turned and Tyler poked his head out of the studio. He wore a heavy waxed apron and thick leather gloves that went up past his elbows.

“You look like summertime,” he said, raising his face shield, grinning. “Come on in.” He didn’t hug me hello, though for a moment it seemed like we should, but then he lowered his eyes to the ground and turned abruptly.

The studio was exactly as he’d described it, a gymnasium-turned-brass-foundry, the wooden floor ripped away to leave a concrete surface, mostly covered in metalworking grids, different sizes of autoclaves (small round ovens used to heat metal), and an electroforming bath. There was a walk-in refrigerator, humming away, and several chest freezers. The back wall was lined with an enormous forge; the sides were lined with machines. I could identify a CNC router, a 3-D printer, and a table saw. A row of lockers to the right were all heavily padlocked.

“Is that where you store all the body parts?” I teased.

“I’ll never tell.” He winked and pulled his faceplate up and off, the halo of it moving his sweaty hair over and back. “Yes. And in here.” He yanked open the door of the walk-in refrigerator and motioned for me to look inside.

There were shiny, blood-red torsos, lungs, hearts, kidneys, livers, stomachs, intestines; feet, hands, heads, and legs. At first—they nearly looked like bodies with the skin ripped off—until I reached out and touched one. It was smooth and solid.

“They’re extra wax positives,” he clarified. “Outside, they’d melt.”

I picked up a man’s head and held it in my hands. “Who’s this?” I asked.

“It’s me,” he said, letting his face go slack. “Can’t you see?”

“It doesn’t look like you at all,” I marveled. Only the shape of his nose was obvious. The rest looked like it belonged to a stranger.

“I know. It never does,” he said. One of the hands on the top shelf stretched toward me in a handshake, and I realized that it was the hand from the Eliot House library door.