Work Text:
The air in the classroom felt thick in that particular way April in Alabama always managed—cold from the overachieving air conditioner yet somehow still heavy, like the humidity had seeped in and decided to sit cross-legged on everyone’s shoulders.
Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The blinds were half-open, letting in a slice of sun that landed across the chipped linoleum and the front row of desks. Outside, somewhere beyond the red-brick walls and patchy lawn, Huntsville’s traffic murmured and a lawnmower droned. Inside, Mr. Keyes’s voice rolled on and on about ancient Greece.
“…and when we talk about the polis, we’re really talking about competing visions of freedom and control,” he was saying, pacing in front of the whiteboard with the slow drag of a man who’d been doing this lecture for years. “Athens represents a kind of participatory—”
He paused to underline ATHENS vs. SPARTA with a blue dry-erase marker that was starting to fade.
Jess sat in the second row, near the middle, her notebook open, pen poised. Her handwriting ran in small, neat lines across the page: polis – city-state; Athens – democracy (…ish); Sparta – militaristic; freedom vs order. She wasn’t exactly riveted, but she was listening. She always listened. The part of her that liked systems and causes and consequences found something to hold on to in the structure of it, if not in the drone of Mr. Keyes’s delivery.
In front of her and three inches to the left—close enough that Jess could see the dark coil of her ponytail and the scuff marks on the back of her sneakers—Toyah slouched in her chair, her history textbook spread open like a reluctant confession. Her pencil tapped a staccato beat against the desk, a little off the rhythm of the ticking wall clock. She could follow along if she wanted to; this wasn’t hard. Freedom versus control. Athens and Sparta. People arguing in sandals. She got the gist.
But her brain, loyal to its own interests, had drifted.
Her page was open to a full-color spread: a reproduction of The School of Athens. Mr. Keyes had called it “an idealized vision of the Athenian forum,” and Toyah hadn’t bothered to correct him. The caption underneath talked about philosophy and public discourse and the birth of Western thought, all in cramped serif font that made her eyes feel tired just looking at it.
The picture itself, though—that caught her. All those robed figures clustered under a painted arch, arguing with their hands, books, and scrolls. The sweep of blue and brick-red fabric, the tilt of shoulders, the way bodies leaned toward each other like they were being pulled by invisible strings.
Near the center, one figure bent over a marble block, face half-shadowed, pen in hand. The robe, the pose, the curl of his shoulder—it hit her with the suddenness of a punchline landing.
He looked like he’d stepped straight off a certain pair of CD covers.
Toyah’s mouth twitched.
Use Your Illusion had been a minor religion in their shared little world—two jewel cases rescued from a thrift-store bin by one of Tracey’s exes and then, after the relationship crashed and burned, donated to Glenda’s house like some kind of weird, loud inheritance. The art on the covers—a fragment of some old painting, a hunched figure in yellow and blue on one disc, red and orange on the other—had lodged in Toyah’s head long before she’d memorized the tracklists. She and Jess had spent bus rides passing the cases back and forth like sacred texts, arguing about which was better, Volume I or II, as if the world hinged on their verdict.
Now here he was again, that same pose, that same slouched, slightly dramatic curve of the spine—only this time he was surrounded by toga guys instead of track numbers.
Toyah blinked, then leaned a fraction closer to the page, the corner of her mouth quirking higher. In her peripheral vision she could see the side of Jess’s notebook, the movement of her pen as she underlined something. She didn’t need to see Jess’s face to know the expression she’d be wearing: brows slightly drawn, lips relaxed, listening and analyzing both at once.
Toyah tapped her pencil twice, a code that meant look more than anything else. Jess’s pen paused. She felt, rather than saw, Jess’s attention shift toward her.
Mr. Keyes continued, oblivious. “…so you have Socrates and his students exploring these ideas through dialogue, questioning the very nature of what it means to be free. Some might argue that true freedom requires—”
Toyah tuned him down to background chatter and let her grin spread, slow and conspiratorial. Her eyes flicked over the painting again, fixed on the bent figure in the draped robe. The shape of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. The weirdly familiar emphasis on that one little corner of the image. The resemblance was too perfect to ignore.
She angled her chair a centimeter, enough to bring Jess into her peripheral vision. The room smelled faintly of dust, dry-erase fumes, and the industrial lemon cleaner they used on the floors. Someone behind them was chewing gum too loudly; a girl at the window picked at a fraying poster about “RESPECT IN THE CLASSROOM.” Fluorescents buzzed. The clock ticked. Somewhere near the back, a boy stifled a yawn so huge it popped his jaw.
Toyah glanced over her shoulder, eyes finding Jess’s.
Jess was halfway through writing “Spartan discipline – communal, harsh” when she felt the tug of Toyah’s stare. She looked up, meeting her gaze.
They didn’t smile right away. First there was that beat—always that beat—where something unspoken passed between them. Toyah’s eyes were bright, mischief sharpened but not unleashed yet. Jess’s were steady, curious. She followed the slight drop of Toyah’s chin toward the open textbook, then back up again.
Okay, Jess’s look said. What do you see?
Toyah wet her lips, leaning back far enough that her braid brushed Jess’s desk. She kept her voice low, barely above the scratch of graphite on paper, just a disturbance under the drone of Mr. Keyes.
“Think that guy is more into Volume I or II?”
The words slipped out quick and easy, sugar-slick with humor. She tilted her chin toward the scribbling figure in the painting as she said it, as if she were asking an honest question about some distant cousin.
There it was—that tiny, perfect click of recognition.
Her gaze traced back down to the painting, really seeing the hunched-over figure this time. The bent knee. The bowed head. The draped cloth. Some corner of her memory pulled up the overlapping CD covers, the slanted shape of the anonymous man on Use Your Illusion. The colors weren’t an exact match, but the posture was. The vibe was.
Her lips parted in a silent oh.
Jess’s eyes softened. The corners crinkled. Toyah watched the moment the joke landed and warmed, like a match catching dried paper.
Jess let out the ghost of a breathy laugh, quick and controlled so it wouldn’t carry. Her shoulders gave the tiniest shake. She looked at Toyah again, this time with a shine behind the brown that said, You are ridiculous, and I love you for it.
She didn’t answer right away. She made a show of considering, pen tapping now against the margin of her notebook instead of taking notes. The lecture rolled on around them—Pericles, citizenship, the tension between private virtue and public life—but Jess’s mind had slipped sideways for the moment, following the thread Toyah had tossed into her hands.
She looked back at the painted man, imagined him in grainy CD booklet photos, drowning in 1991 guitar solos. If anyone in that picture was listening to rock albums centuries before they existed, it would be him—off in the corner, scribbling, barely paying attention to the grand gestures around him.
Toyah raised her eyebrows as if to say, Well?
Jess pressed her lips together, feigning serious contemplation, then let her hand drift into the space between their desks. Two fingers extended, palm still against the faux-wood surface, low enough that only Toyah would see.
Two.
Toyah’s grin broke wide, quick as a chord change. She bit it back just as fast, teeth catching her bottom lip. A little puff of laughter escaped through her nose anyway.
“Yeah,” she mouthed soundlessly, eyes bright. “Same.”
She turned back to her textbook, but not before letting her fingers—ink-stained, the nails half-chewed—tap twice against the edge of Jess’s desk in something like thanks. A tiny, percussion-soft acknowledgment: You got it.
Jess’s smile lingered a moment longer before she tucked it away, bending over her notebook again. The line she’d been writing, “Athens – emphasis on public debate,” trailed into a small, absentminded curve. In the wide right margin, where she usually left space for definitions, she sketched a tiny stick-figure version of the robed man, hunched over a block. Underneath him, no bigger than a thumbnail, she wrote: Vol. II.
Toyah, meanwhile, slid her thumb along the glossy edge of the textbook page and added a quiet amendment of her own. In the lower corner, where there was nothing but white space and a page number, she drew the faint outline of a CD case—just a rectangle with a scribbled figure inside, knees bent, head down. No title, no band name. Just the suggestion.
Mr. Keyes clapped his hands once, sharply, as if to wake the room.
“All right,” he said. “Eyes up. Let’s talk about Socrates and the danger of too much freedom—at least as the Athenians saw it. Turn to page one ninety-three. Question at the bottom about individual conscience. Big test material.”
Chairs scraped. Pages flipped. Someone groaned softly. The classroom settled back into its practiced shuffle of compliance.
Toyah turned the page with everyone else, the movement smooth, choreography perfected by years of following orders while her mind went elsewhere. But she could feel Jess behind her like a steady line of warmth between her shoulder blades, the invisible connection humming. They didn’t need to talk more about it. The joke had landed; the world had briefly tilted their way.
Jess straightened in her seat, pen ready again, expression sliding back into focused calm. She could recite this part later if she had to. The difference between Athenian democracy and Spartan discipline. Freedom versus control. Citizens arguing in the shade of white stone columns. It was interesting, in its way.
But more interesting, in that small, private corner of her mind where she stored the very best things, was the way Toyah’s shoulders had relaxed when she saw Jess’s fingers go up. The way their shared reference—this silly, specific, utterly them little bridge between a Renaissance painting and a hard-rock album—had turned a flat afternoon into something alive.
Toyah let her chin rest in her palm, eyes drifting one last time to the shrinking sliver of the painting as she turned the page fully. The page number disappeared under her hand, but the tiny drawn rectangle remained, its pencil lines faint but real.
Somewhere in the center of the fresco, a man in a robe bent over his work, caught forever in the act of writing. In her head, over the hum of the lights and the teacher and the rustle of thirty bored middle-schoolers, Toyah could almost hear a distant riff and a familiar gravelly voice, like somebody had turned a stereo up just outside the frame.
She smiled to herself—small, secret, satisfied.
Behind her, Jess underlined the phrase “freedom of thought” and, without quite meaning to, tapped two fingers lightly against the desk again. A quiet rhythm. A confirmation.
Volume II, obviously.