Hands-On Experience

Chapter One: Rhynn

On the first day of classes at the Northwest Institute of the Arts, Rhynn waited until all her housemates left and then cooked herself an omelet in the empty kitchen. She was still in her pajamas. She had always been fond of those pajamas, which had pictures of sheep on them, but now they seemed like dire evidence of her hopelessly mainstream taste. Would she ever be able to fit in with a bunch of artists who knew how to communicate their creativity through clothing?

Rhynn’s housemate, Mia, had already headed over to the Institute, bedecked in a striking sarong-like top that she had personally designed and dyed. Mia had also freshly beaded her dreadlocks and shown off a pair of boots that she casually mentioned were made for me by this incredible guy in Morocco. It was Mia’s outfit that had caused Rhynn to say, No, don’t wait for me. I think I’ll make breakfast here.

Okay, Mia had said. I’ll see you at orientation. And she’d headed out the door, the very picture of self-possession.

Rhynn looked at the clock. It was only eight forty-five. She had time. Orientation didn’t start until ten. She scrolled through Reddit while she ate her omelet, reading all the AITA posts about bridezillas and carefully not thinking about the day ahead of her.

The dismal scene in her closet, however, could not be avoided indefinitely. Up until the previous week, Rhynn hadn’t needed anything other than her neutral array of jeans and khakis, with more or less presentable T-shirts or plain button-down work shirts. A single linen jacket and black pencil skirt were her dressy clothes, for when she and her coworkers at the start-up All-In had to schmooze a potential investor. For the most part, however, Rhynn had relied on looking neutral. Software engineers weren’t hired for their fashion sense, and if she looked too sharp, it would only damage her credibility. And Rhynn’s workdays had been way too long to leave any time or energy for going somewhere that required dressing up. All things considered, clothing had been the least of her concerns when she finally made the break from All-In.

This morning, though, Rhynn had suddenly realized that clothing did convey information about identity, and she didn’t want to be the person that her closet was telling her she was.

The admissions officer at the Institute had said, Our students are all ages, and they come from all career paths. Everyone feels at home here. At the time, his words had made Rhynn feel warm and fuzzy, but now they just sounded like marketing language. Especially after Mia’s little explosion of ethnic glamor.

Sighing, Rhynn picked through her T-shirt drawer and extracted a bright red one. It was left over from an Ultimate Frisbee tournament and had a line drawing of a player on it. That was sort of artistic, right? She deliberated and then put it back. It might be stupid to wear a T-shirt with an actual drawing on it to an art school — unless she herself had done the drawing, maybe. Everything else in the drawer looked like she’d just walked out of the big box discount store in a suburban mall — and for good reason. Finally, she went with black jeans, a white shirt, and a black hoodie. If she couldn’t do color, at least she could hint at an interestingly ascetic style.

Chapter Two: Rhynn

As Rhynn headed on foot to the bus stop, she glanced at her little car, pulled far up into the driveway. Leaving it behind seemed to symbolize the momentous change in her life. Until this week, weekday mornings had meant a long commute from her apartment, only partially sweetened by a chocolate croissant and venti latte from the drive-through Starbucks right before the freeway on-ramp. The whole feel of mornings had been hectic, an urgency communicated from the traffic, which seemed to get worse every week. As a user-experience engineer, Rhynn had not been required to punch a time clock. Still, she usually needed to get in early: The other people at All-In, who also had no lives, often scheduled meetings for seven a.m.

Now, as she walked to the bus stop from the house she had just moved into, Rhynn felt a disorienting lightness. She had nothing in her pack for the day except a spiral-bound notebook, her new iPad, and a cheese and tomato sandwich wrapped up in a reusable eco-bag. I’m an explorer in the terrain of my own life, she thought. She was signed up for printmaking, figure drawing, and introduction to graphic design, and she was determined to see if her lifelong tendency to doodle would amount to something like a career path. At the moment, she had no idea. But that was how explorations started out, right? Someone who’d never been to a new land wouldn’t have an idea of what it looked like. This sense of experimentation was like a fresh wind blowing through her life.

Rhynn’s savings from her years in Seattle’s dot-com ecosystem were adequate, but she wasn’t wealthy. Her parents had taken a dim view of her plan to live on her savings during a year of exploration, but she had faced them down and told them that her decision was made.

I’m twenty-seven years old, she had reminded her dad the evening before she’d given notice at All-In. I’m old enough to make my own decisions. He had tried to talk her into making an appointment with his financial adviser, and Rhynn had indignantly refused. I don’t care what someone else thinks is the right thing for me to do. I’m the one doing it. And I know it’s the right thing. Her father had sighed and given in, as he had always done eventually in the face of Rhynn’s determination. Her mother had fretted at her a bit about rising to a career level where you’ll be able to take time off to raise a family, but that hadn’t gone anywhere either. No children were on Rhynn’s horizon, and at the moment, she wasn’t even dating anyone.

Her parents would have approved, however, of the thrifty impulse which led Rhynn to cook her own breakfast and pack her lunch. It was that same impulse that had led Rhynn to move out of her generic one-bedroom apartment and into the rambling shared house on an older street in South Seattle. Sharing a house was something Rhynn hadn’t done since she was an undergraduate, but there was no way she could justify renting her own place when she wasn’t bringing in any income. Besides, she thought that sharing a place with a handful of artists and dancers might be helpful in getting her into the artistic mindset. She needed to fight her way out of the digital bubble where she’d been living.

Chapter Three: Kostya

That same Monday morning, Kostya pushed open the doors of the Northwest Institute for the Arts and picked up the packet in the entrance hall with his name on it. One of the last arrivals, he felt like a tightly compressed spring as he settled into one of the few remaining chairs in the orientation session.

He told himself to breathe, to listen, to be present. He couldn’t let his impossible family distract him from this opportunity. Kostya’s father had just discovered that his brother, Pavel, — Kostya’s uncle — had paid Kostya’s tuition at the Institute, and there had been a four-way argument that morning over Facebook Messenger. Kostya’s parents had had some confidence that their son would soon get tired of living in the rundown studio apartment he’d rented above a busy fish market, but they hadn’t counted on his uncle paying his tuition at — of all things! — an art school!

Uncle Pavel had always been the one person in his family Kostya could count on, and now that Kostya was nearing thirty, he and Pavel were closer than ever. Konstantin, is it what you really want? To be an artist? Pavel had asked him. Kostya had looked lovingly at his uncle.

I got admitted to the glass art group, Kostya explained. It’s an amazing opportunity. The glass artists in this region are some of the most important in the world, and they don’t take on many apprentices. It was competitive, and also I got very, very lucky. Now I have to work to deserve that luck.

His uncle had nodded. That sounds good to me. As Pavel looked at Kostya, his brother’s son, he could see the eagerness in Kostya’s lake-blue eyes. Now that they had all moved from the former Soviet Union and taken up a new life in the United States, family had to stick together. But sticking together did not mean forcing the younger generation to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Not if they were talented dreamers, like Kostya.

But when Pavel told Kostya’s parents about having helped with the art school plan, Kostya’s father had erupted in fury. In rapid Russian, he had shouted, Now what? You’re telling me that my son is going to be some penniless artist? We put ourselves in so much danger, leaving the Soviet Union and bringing enough resources to the United States to make sure that our children would never want for anything. I’ve built our investment firm up again from the ground in this country!

Kostya had just been leaving his apartment when the phone chimed, and his father and mother were both on video, shouting at him. He went back inside and sat down, hoping that perhaps his uncle would be able to change his parents’ mind. However, neither Pavel nor Kostya were able to break into the furious stream of words. Finally, with a quick glance at the clock, Kostya closed the app and silenced the phone. He ran the sixteen blocks to the Institute, trying to burn off the anger that rushed through his veins, but it didn’t work. He arrived out of breath and almost late, still enraged over his parents’ injustice.

Chapter Four: Rhynn

Rhynn was just pulling her notebook out of her backpack in the small auditorium when a man abruptly dropped into the chair next to her. He was out of breath, as if he’d been running, and she could see his shoulders rising and falling hard with each inhale. They were nice shoulders. Broad. He was tall and looked strong. More than that, he looked iconically … what? Slavic? Teutonic? That high-cheekboned Eastern European face and icy blue eyes. And his hair was so fair, almost a white-blond. Realizing she was staring, Rhynn deliberately turned her eyes away and tried to focus on the woman who was at the podium, welcoming