“I don’t know.” Hope bites her lip, swiveling her sculpture around like she’s trying to figure out which part to make worse first. “What if she thought I was trying to, like, flirt with her?”

“Ugh, you guys are both ridiculous.” I take off my glasses so I can pinch the bridge of my nose. “Flirting is the whole point!” Adriana will totally kill me for going off script, but come on. “If you’re not into her, that’s okay; but if you are, I promise you don’t have anything to worry about. That’s all I’m saying.”

Hope doesn’t look over, but I watch as she bobs her head a little, absorbing the information. Finally, she says, “Well, maybe I will text her.”

Feeling smug, I slip my headphones on and start my playlist. It’s a lot of ambient stuff—background music with a heavy beat to get my blood going. When I start to feel the rhythm, I pick up a stick of charcoal and get to work.

A hand claps me on the shoulder and I jump about a mile, the headphones slipping down around my neck. Mr. Strauss hovers beside me. “Sorry—didn’t mean to scare you! It’s just that the sun is going to set pretty soon, and we need to lock up.”

I blink, my eyes dry and my head swimming. “What do you mean? We just…”

My voice trails off as I notice the advanced angle of the daylight shining through the classroom’s windows, and when I look over at Hope’s workstation, I see her poop goblin has sprouted an entire arm out of nowhere. She’s staring at me, too, and I blink a few more times as Mr. Strauss asks, “So what have you been working on for the past two hours? You’ve been so focused I hated to interrupt.”

The past two hours? Dazed—half convinced my favorite teacher is gaslighting me, but unable to deny that the actual angle of the sun has changed—I face my easel and freeze. What was a blank sheet not ten seconds ago is now filled edge to edge with a tableau I have no memory of drawing. It’s a mob scene of some kind, so dense that the people in it spill into shadowy suggestion in the background. The faces are all vague and featureless, but the attitude is undeniably angry.