All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages. Saundra Mitchell

the front of my cassock. “Sorry, I...” He starts to brush it off for me, then stops, his face going red.

      “What is it, Augustus?” I ask, and my voice sounds like van der Loos’s, pinched and tired.

      “What? Right. Yes.” He fumbles around in his satchel, then comes up with my missing gloves. “You left this. Back at the studio.”

      “Oh. Thank you.” I try to take it, but he doesn’t let go as fast as I think he will, and it clenches up between us like a taut sailing rope. Neither of us let go for a moment, but Augustus shies first, and the glove slumps into my knuckles.

      He scuffs a toe along the ground, his klompen making a horrible scraping noise against the ice. “They’re just jealous, you know. Because you draw so well.”

      “Is that what it is?”

      “Truly. You’re the best of us.” He kicks a lump of muddy snow and it bursts against the rail like a Catherine wheel. “Have you thought of your specialization yet?”

      “Landscapes. Maybe. I don’t know. Not nude women.”

      “Why not?”

      “They’re...” I scratch the back of my neck. “Not really my subject.”

      “Nor mine. I liked when we were painting the fruit.”

      “The fruit?”

      “Fewer breasts on the fruit. I mean...” He presses his hands to his cheeks. “I’m not good at breasts.”

      “Most fruit is rather breast shaped, though.”

      “But they’re not so squishable. They’re more solid. So the shadows are easier on the fruits. And I like the colors.” He’s got his hands up in front of him, flexing them, gripping these imaginary not-breast squishable fruit, but then he shakes them out, like he’s only just realized what he’s doing. “God, what a conversation. If someone were to overhear us.”

      I laugh. “The scandal of naked fruit.”

      “The church would have a whole business around making dresses for apples and pears by the week’s end.”

      “That’ll be the new commodity now that the tulips have failed.”

      “And it would be a very specialized profession, since only those with the tiniest hands could sew these tiny dresses for the fruit.”

      I laugh again, almost more from surprise than at what he’s said. Augustus is so quiet and nervous in class, I’ve never heard him speak so freely. Or realized how funny he was. When he looks up at me, the reflection of the dying light off the canal catches his eyes, the warm umber of cane sugar.

      Augustus smiles, the tips of his ears poking out from under his knit cap pink where the cold nips at them.

      “Well,” he says, after a moment of staring at each other, our breath fogging the air between us. “I’m back that way.” He points back over his shoulder, toward the square. “Don’t worry about what Braam said.”

      “I’m not.”

      “I know. But if you were. Or if you need to hear it. You’re all right.”

      He reaches out and touches my shoulder, so quick it’s almost imaginary, then walks away, leaving the cold clawing at me, each breath burning as I swallow it and coming up misty and white, warmed by my lungs.

      * * *

      By the end of February, the girls have become more ordinary—we can all draw hips and breasts in a creative array of positions now, most of us without exciting ourselves. We still draw the plasters, now interspersed with models once or twice during the week. When we’re not sketching, van der Loos has Augustus and me glazing his undercoats for a new series of domestic scenes while the rest of the boys mix his pigments and prepare the pallets, so we spend most mornings shoulder to shoulder, our hands sticky with glaze. Augustus sometimes hums under his breath while we work, his usual twitchy hands still and steady on the brushes.

      A snowstorm buries Amsterdam and we’re out of the studio for three days, all of us trapped in our homes, and when we return, we’re all buzzy and talkative, so the shout of someone entering doesn’t register with me straight away as out of the ordinary. I’m stretching parchment on my board, trying not to smudge my charcoaled fingers over the edges, but then I hear Braam say, “What are you doing here?” And I look up just as Joost Hendrickszoon steps out from the studio doorway, his wool cap crushed between his hands.

      I drop into a nonsensical crouch beside my easel, an action born purely from the panic of seeing him out of context and so unexpectedly, then fumble around for something to do so my sudden drop to the ground looks even remotely motivated. I thrust my hand into my satchel, just to look like I’m doing something, and I nick my thumb on the knife I use to sharpen pencils.

      “Constantijn!”

      I stand up, thumb in my mouth, so fast I knock my head on the edge of my easel. The whole thing teeters, parchment board tilting at a dangerous angle, but Joost catches it before it falls in earnest and tips it back into place for me. The charcoal falls off the edge and breaks against the floor. When Joost casts his gaze down to it, I can see the red-gold freckles sprinkled over his eyelids and, when he bends, the spot behind his ear where his hair doesn’t lie flat. He’s sheared it off since he started his dock work, and the short curls feather against the back of his neck.

      He tries to scoop up a few salvageable pieces, and when he hands them to me, it takes a full minute to remember how to make my fingers work to take it from him. Another to recall language and form the shape of it with my tongue.

      “Joost. Good evening. Morning. It’s morning.”

      He wipes the charcoal off his palms, leaving black smears on his cassock. “How are you faring? I saw you at the docks last week.”

      “Did you?”

      “You looked occupied or I would have come over.”

      “Oh. I was fetching the plasters.”

      “The what?”

      “We were doing a study...” Halfway through this sentence I realize I had been at the docks retrieving the plaster casts van der Loos had made of naked male torsos and I go so light-headed with embarrassment I think I might faint.

      Joost raises an eyebrow. “A study?”

      “For painting.”

      “Ah.”

      His eyes drift over my shoulder, like he’s tiring of this conversation and looking for someone else to speak to, and my mind becomes so overwhelmed by desperation to keep him here that it latches on to the word I have been so careful to skirt for this entire conversation and spits it out. “Penises.”

      Which gets his attention back on me, but at what cost!? “What?”

      “We were painting... We’ve been talking about the musculature of...” I do a mime of something oblong shaped with the unfortunate placement of right in front of my crotch. “It was just for the painting. We didn’t do anything with them. Not the penises. The casts. The plasters.”

      “Oh. Well. I suppose you have to start somewhere.”

      A wild little giggle escapes me. Joost raises his eyebrows, and I look around for some sort of pallet knife on which I could fall on and impale myself. “Are you making a delivery?”

      “No, not many ships of late—the snow’s kept them from docking. Hard to make a living.”

      “Yes, hard.”

      “What?”

      Don’t say it again, I think, but of course I do. “Hard,” I repeat, louder, and, Jesus, take me now. Scoop me from this earth; I shall never recover. I tug at the front of my smock, which I have somehow sweat through, and force myself to keep my eyes on Joost’s face and not the pale dip of skin visible between his kerchief