The Sun + Stars

2

Wheein dips her paintbrush into her tin can filled with murky water that's been tainted with too many colors. It's time for some fresh water, but the canvas begs for her undivided attention lest she lose her inspiration. It'd been begging for the past three hours, but she's determined to at least finish the lips before heading back to the dorm.

The perfect shade of pink, personally created from her red and white paints, is beginning to run out and she can't risk wasting it. She isn't certain that she can create the exact shade again.

Wheein wipes her eyebrow using the back of her hand, smearing into it the mud-brown shade she'd used for freckles earlier. She sighs through her nose. Cleaning dried paint out of her hair is the worse part of her evenings. It was one of the reasons she cut it so short.

Bobbing her head to the rhythm of her music, she resumes on the swell of her creation's bottom lip, darkening its edges. Working in the art studio on Friday nights is her own special way of relaxing while others party or relax in their dorms. The studio is always empty during this time because most of her fellow art students have lives being hipsters who talk about their imported coffee beans from the jungles of Madagascar or the twenty second showers they take using their soybean soap bars because they 'love the environment man'. And then they waltz into the art studio in the afternoons with their plastic Starbucks cups smelling like...well, soymilk and sweat so maybe the twenty second showers aren't a facade.

It didn't matter. Her fellow students can live however they want, especially if it leaves the studio free for her to loudly blast her funky jams.

She said, "I ain't even make my bed up". Wheein jerks her shoulders to the choppy rhythm as she mouths along. "Watch your step, you gon' wake my mama and dad up".

The art studio is small glass building that lies almost isolated from the rest of the campus to help students become inspired by nature without too many pedestrian distractions nearby. So, without music blasting or art students around, Wheein finds the atmosphere too quiet and a little creepy.

Through her music, a sharp beep cuts through the steady drone and she stills with her brush posed over her subject's lips. That sound is eerily close to someone using their ID to get inside down the hall but, Wheein looks over at the wall clock, it's almost nine-thirty. It's possible someone's here for some late-night work but unlikely.

That's enough painting for tonight. With her heart threatening to beat out of her chest, she shuts off her music and lets her brush sink into her can. Turning around to go wash her hands, she swallows a scream at the woman suddenly in the studio's doorway.

The woman lifts a hand. "Hi."

Wheein stands frozen in front of her canvas, small eyes somehow growing to the size of saucers. "Uh. How'd you get in here?"

Only the ID cards of art students should work on the studio door this late at night and out of her thirty-three other classmates she's never seen this woman.

"Oh right. This guy, uh-" she frowns at the card in her hand, "Jenkin Rotche- Roken-" she coughs. "Jenkin let me borrow his card."

"Borrow?" Wheein takes in the woman's hair that flows to her mid-black like an ink stain and the peculiar sharpness of her ears, like an elf's ears, just in case she needs to file a police report later. "You didn't take it?"

The woman gives her an easy smile that is nothing if not completely unconvincing. "What? You've never borrowed anything before?"

"I have a feeling our definitions of 'borrow' are very different right now."