Art class, third year, that strange liminal stretch of time where the bright, delusional hope of first year has fully decomposed into caffeine dependency, imposter syndrome, and a slow-burning resentment toward anyone who uses the term “gesture study” unironically, because “gesture study” is just a polite academic way of saying I panicked, drew a potato with limbs, and then insisted it was about movement and feeling, and by year three you’re no longer pretending you’re going to be famous, you’re mostly just trying not to make eye contact with your own work when it’s pinned up on the wall, because that’s when you notice the things you can’t unsee, and everyone in the room has sorted themselves neatly into categories without ever agreeing to it, the ones who are spiraling quietly, the ones who are spiraling loudly, and the smug ones, who usually come from money or therapy or both and say things like “trust the process” with a straight face, and the room itself always smells exactly the same, no matter which building they shove you into, sweat and turpentine and, inexplicably, bananas, like the official scent of higher artistic education is body odor and solvent with a fruit note, and to this day I still don’t know who kept bringing bananas, though in my head it was probably Heather, because she had that very specific energy of someone who knows what potassium does for the body, and there’s always this moment in every nude class, this collective pause that you can almost hear, where everyone suddenly realizes, oh, he’s really going to take off his clothes, and everything gets very quiet in that way that isn’t respectful so much as hyper-aware, and suddenly you’re all trying to act like you didn’t just drop your charcoal pencil down your own cleavage and like that didn’t just become the most vivid sensory memory of your afternoon, and what’s fragile about it isn’t the nudity at all, it’s the silence, the way the entire room gets weirdly reverent about shadows and negative space and form, because everyone is desperately trying to avoid drawing a penis with too much enthusiasm or, arguably worse, too little, because both somehow feel like crimes, and you’re standing there shifting your weight, pretending to be deeply invested in the angle of a hip while your brain is loudly narrating every second, and on that particular day they told us we had a new model, male, confident, and—this part said out loud—“very still,” which I interpreted as code for he’s been doing this forever and knows how to shut up, which felt comforting at the time, like at least one person in the room would know what they were doing, and god, was I wrong, because as soon as that door opened and the atmosphere shifted, that anticipatory hush rolling through the space like the moment before a curtain goes up, I realized that “very still” did not mean what I thought it meant at all, and whatever was about to happen was not going to be as simple as standing, drawing, and pretending this was all completely normal.

And then—this is the part where the room itself seemed to take a breath with me—I stepped back without really deciding to, like my body knew something was about to happen before my brain caught up, clearing space at the center as if I were parting invisible curtains, and I remember thinking, oh, this is a moment now, this is going to lodge itself somewhere inconvenient in my memory, because he walked in, Frank, just walked in like the world had arranged itself five seconds earlier specifically to receive him, wrapped in this pale blue bathrobe that absolutely screamed borrowed from someone wealthier, the kind of fabric that doesn’t just touch your skin but judges it, like it was born in a spa, raised by eucalyptus steam and soft instrumental music, and would like you to know you are not its first choice, and he had this aura about him, honestly, like he’d just descended from Mount Olympus after blessing a line of artisanal skincare and was now slumming it with us mortals, and yes, I know how that sounds, I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds, but I’m telling you what it felt like, because there was this second—this exact, crystalline second—when everyone went quiet, not out of politeness, not out of shyness, but because we were all bracing ourselves, like you do right before a wave hits or a glass drops, that shared intake of breath, and then he reached for the belt and—whoosh—off it came, the bathrobe dropping to the floor like it owed him money, no hesitation, no flourish, just this clean, unapologetic release, and there he was, standing tall, stark naked, Rodin’s The Thinker if The Thinker had a gym membership and a subscription to tantric yoga, one leg up, one hand resting on his thigh, staring off into the middle distance like he’d either just remembered the existence of death or completely forgotten his Netflix password, and I won’t lie, I was impressed—not by the… you know, although that was fine, confident, perfectly serviceable, nothing to write home about unless you’re my Aunt Denise, in which case she absolutely would have framed it—but that wasn’t the thing, it was the stillness, the ease of him, like his skin didn’t so much belong to him as drape around him politely, cooperating, and suddenly, just like that, we were all artists again, brushes lifting, charcoal scratching, no one saying a word, everyone just studying, and when I say everyone I mostly mean them, because me—I was observing, not in a creepy way, in a scientific way, obviously, purely research, and it is not my fault that he had the audacity to pose like a Renaissance saint and smell faintly of bergamot, honestly, some people enter a room, and some people arrive, and Frank very clearly did the latter.

There’s a very specific choreography to moments like that, I’ve learned, a kind of silent group dance where nobody makes eye contact and everybody pretends it’s business as usual, like if we all commit hard enough to the fiction of professionalism it might become real, so I’m sitting there absurdly upright with my pencil poised like I’m about to draft blueprints instead of a human being, thinking ah yes, the human form, fascinating, purely academic, I’m here for the angles, the light, the bone structure, while at the exact same time flicking my eyes sideways in these tiny, guilty increments, because meanwhile every single person in that room is panicking about where to look and how long they’re allowed to look there before it becomes a felony, and you can almost hear the internal monologues ricocheting around the space—should I draw the penis first and get it out of the way or save it for the end like a treat, am I allowed to shade it or is shading erotic, what if I make it look weird, what if I make it look too good—and the panic is just radiating off people in waves, thick enough to taste, like the Titanic but instead of icebergs we’re all terrified of drawing a testicle incorrectly, and I start pacing behind my easel, miming these very deliberate charcoal strokes, because me, I am cool, I am composed, I even hum, because humming is the universal sign of I am not at all flustered by your excellent thighs, and honestly the whole thing was excellent, the pose, the way he held it like he’d been doing this his whole life, like this was just Tuesday, like he knew he was being watched and genuinely did not care, which of course made all of us care even more, because when someone is completely unbothered by their own nakedness you either want to punch them in the throat or sleep with them, sometimes—unfairly—both, and that’s about the moment when Eva sort of… slumped, not fainted-fainted, just this slow, dramatic collapse like a building being decommissioned, later claiming it was low blood sugar, which we all politely accepted even though we knew, every single one of us, that it was Frank’s left shoulder blade, because he flexed once—once—and it was like someone fired a starter pistol inside her ovaries, and I just shrugged at the time, feigning innocence, because honestly, it happens to the best of us, and pretending otherwise would have been the least believable pose in the room.

But here’s the thing—and this is where it caught me, where it really lodged itself somewhere under my ribs and refused to be dismissed with a joke—it wasn’t the body, not the cheekbones, not the butt, although, frankly, very respectable, very competently assembled, no, what got me was the nerve of him, the sheer audacity of just… being there, completely exposed and yet completely at ease, like the exposure wasn’t a condition or a risk or some brave little act of defiance but simply the most neutral fact in the room, and I remember standing there, arms folded loosely like I was trying not to make a mess of myself, weight shifted onto one hip in that way I do when I’m pretending I’m casual, and realizing that it didn’t seem to matter to him that we were staring, that the room was full of eyes and judgments and half-formed thoughts, because he wasn’t performing for us, not even a little, he wasn’t shaping himself around our attention or feeding off it or resisting it, he was just being—unapologetically, nakedly, there, still—and something about that landed harder than I expected, because that did something to me, and I tried to brush it off, tell myself it was nothing, maybe post-Kevin thirst and a lack of electrolytes, maybe my brain misfiring because I hadn’t slept enough or eaten anything with actual nutrients, but there was another part of me that recognized something truer, something quieter, which was that he looked like someone who had never once apologized for taking up space, and I realized, almost painfully, how much I do that, all the time, how I apologize with my shoulders by making them smaller, with my voice by softening it before anyone asks, with my goddamn eyebrows by constantly checking whether I’m allowed to be where I am, like I’m terrified someone is going to audit my existence and find me unworthy, and he stood there like being looked at was a birthright, not a favor, not something contingent on charm or usefulness or likability, just a given, and in that moment I wanted to—I don’t know—steal some of that, absorb it through osmosis, siphon it off quietly, or maybe just draw it well enough to pretend it was mine, so I painted, carefully, quietly, like if I got it right, if I could capture that calm, that confidence, that unbothered presence, maybe some small part of me would stop apologizing too, maybe my body would learn something my mouth never could, and I set the brush down knowing, of course, that it’s never that simple, because Frank—well, Frank was just getting started.