Citrus, Clara Spars

Citrus | Clara Spars

levitating in his torso, like if he stared too long, he might burst with affection. He calmed himself and went back to sketching. The art teacher was tall and slender, and wore tight black skinny jeans. Everything about her seemed to climb upward toward the sky. Her eyelashes reached so far up her face that they seemed to prop up her perfectly penciled eyebrows like the legs of a table. The cuffs of her leather boots clung to her knees, a short distance away from where her hips swung like a pendulum whenever she walked. Even the way she spoke seemed to be reaching for something; her voice lilted upward at the end of each word, as if everything that came out of her mouth were a question. “Everything exists in relation to its surroundings,” she whispered, “The pencil’s length is only a small fraction of the desk’s, just as we are smaller parts of the universe.” Bethany had set a cardboard box atop a table at the center of the room. Above the box was an arrangement of random objects: a selection of knobby orange squash, soda cans, crinkled paper bags. The desks wreathed the centerpiece, facing inward. “Let’s start with some gesture drawings,” she announced, clapping her hands softly. Her dozens of thick metal rings clicked against one another. She circled the room like a vulture, explaining the importance of acting on instinct. An artist needed to trust intuition and let his eyes guide his hands. She glanced at Miro as she said this, and Darcy stifled a snort. Fifteen minutes into class, the door opened and a bearded man entered. He was large, hirsute, with porous, splotchy skin that resembled an old, discarded lemon peel. Bethany stared at him with pursed lips and spread her nimble fingers over the center of her chest. “Can we help you?” “I’m the model. You must be Bethany.” There was a pause. A look that resembled panic crept into Bethany’s face, starting with her twitching brow and crawling down into the curves of her frown. Eventually, it melted into a tired recognition. She let a puff of air out of her nose while stretching and snapping an elastic smile. “The model. Yes, of course. Let me get you set up.” Bethany led the man to the storage closet at the back of the classroom. The class remained silent, and some kids exchanged

Leland Quarterly | Winter 2021

confused looks and shrugs. Darcy texted Miro wtf. He responded idk. Bethany returned a few moments later with her usual silky calm demeanor. “Jerry will be set up here for those of you who’d like to… Incorporate his form... Into the still-life.” She pushed the cardboard box setup over to the side and wheeled a wooden stage into the center of the room. Jerry emerged from the storage closet sporting a bright orange kimono. There were swirls of gaudy cherry blossoms detailed on its hem. The man’s red beard had been sectioned off into tiny braids with neon beads woven in here and there. He mounted the stage, swinging his leg up and revealing his lack of underpants. He shed the robe and positioned himself.

Darcy stared at Miro, her eyes wide with horror. Miro shook his head in disbelief. Though the students tried their hardest to focus on the assortment of inanimate objects that were originally meant to be the subjects of their drawings, Jerry seemed to be doing the most he possibly could to retain the full attention of his audience. He struck poses with such violence that his muscles shook, his flabs of skin quivering like the ears of a hound facing the breeze of an open car window. Bethany would interrupt now and then to give students individual advice. “Mind if I…” she would say, already reaching for a stub of charcoal and leaning over the student to get a better angle at their drawing. When she leaned over Miro, the tips of her wavy blond hair grazed his forearm, her breath warmed his shoulder, and the smell of lavender essential oil and patchouli wafted into his nostrils. Her opal pendant bumped his earlobe twice. “There, see? Like this.” Miro nodded uncertainly. He saw Darcy raise her eyebrows.

Citrus | Clara Spars

“The art teacher wants you,” Darcy snickered as the two of them made their way down the steps after class ended. Miro shook his head. “She wants everyone. She exudes sex.” “More often than not, it’s channeled at you.” “What, are you jealous?” Darcy punched him lightly with an arm that jangled a dozen thin gold hoops. “Of you, not her. I want someone to look at me like that.”

Miro’s skin tingled. He’d been in love with Darcy for three years now. They had slept together once, when she stayed the night in his dorm room after a party a few months before. A week later, he had asked Darcy on a date — a date date, as he shyly explained to her — and she laughed and shook her head. “You kill me, Miro,” was all she had responded with. Then he let her walk away, her black ponytail swishing like a wagging finger. After class, they sat on a patch of grass at the corner of the campus’ main plaza with cups of iced coffee that Miro had insisted on buying. Other students biked by trying to make it on time for their next classes. A tour group was being herded by the corner of the lawn where Darcy and Miro were spread out peacefully. “What was your SAT score?” a parent was in the middle of asking. She was a mother with a platinum bob, her arms folded across her chest with a brochure clenched in one of her well-manicured claws. The tour guide tried to avoid the question unsuccessfully. “Seems like a miserable job,” Darcy mumbled. “Being a tour guide, I mean.” Miro nodded slowly, “You know what seems like a miserable job? Nude modeling for college art classes.” Darcy laughed, sucking up the last bit of coffee at the bottom of her cup and rattling the leftover ice. “That Jerry guy must be pretty sure of himself to be able to flash his junk at a group of twenty-somethings.” Miro hummed his agreement. “Good for him, I guess.”

During their first-year orientation, Miro saw Darcy for the first time sitting at a picnic table with a sack of mandarin oranges. Clusters of eager freshmen darted around like dragonflies, trying to make as

Leland Quarterly | Winter 2021

many friends as possible within the first hours of college. They wore lanyards with flimsy name tags screaming their names and hometowns in bubble letters, and chased after anyone else they saw doing the same. Amid the chaos, Darcy sat alone. Her lanyard was tossed aside. Having things around her neck, she later explained, made her throat itchy.

Darcy was tan with long dark hair and lots of piercings. Two silver hoops hugged her left nostril in parallel, and her ears were stickered with glinting earrings shaped like stars and moons. She wore eyeliner that framed her coppery pupils in thick black. Her navy blue nail polish was chipping so that the leftover paint on each nail looked like the shape of a country. At the table, she wrestled a mandarin from its netty sack and stuck her thumb into its navel. The scent erupted in the air, pooling out with the light breeze. Miro tried to think of charming ways to start a conversation. He wanted to come up with a joke about the mandarins. All that came to mind, however, was that somewhere fifteen or so miles away in suburban California, the placenta that he had been birthed with was buried under a mandarin tree for good luck, because his mother was a strong believer in harbingers and superstitions. He couldn’t start off with that. “Want one?” Darcy asked as she popped a section of her orange into her mouth. Miro hadn’t realized she’d noticed him. “I took them from one of the activity tables.” She explained, swinging one of the mandarins in front of her twice, mimicking the toss that she was offering. He caught it in one hand. “Thanks.” Sitting across from her, he quietly peeled his fruit. He asked if she was a freshman, too. She nodded at the lanyard that sat next to her. He read the nametag aloud, “Darcy. Like in—” “Pride and Prejudice. No, not like that one.” “Like what then?” She shrugged, peeling another orange. “Where are you from?” he tried. “I grew up in Florida.” “I guess that explains why you like oranges so much.”

Citrus | Clara Spars

“I like mandarins,” she corrected him. “Oranges are too aggressive.” Miro sat in awkward silence. He thought about leaving her be, but was exhausted from having the same three conversations over and over that day and had nowhere else to go. Plus, Darcy was pretty. “My placenta is buried under a mandarin tree,” he blurted. He looked up at Darcy hesitantly, and his gaze met with the white flash of her teeth. Her smile dimpled her cheeks and tucked her makeup into the thin creases by her eyes. “So is this some twisted form of cannibalism?” she laughed. “Yeah, I mean… Circle of life,” he said, loosening up. “Are you quoting a Disney movie?” “It was actually Jane Austen,” Miro joked. He relaxed, and let it show. Resting his elbows on the table, he leaned in and looked up at her from under his hair in a way that he thought was flirty. She grinned, offering him another mandarin. He made a silent wish on it, hoping he could make her smile like that at least once a day.

During the next two years, Miro and Darcy remained close. They ate meals together in the dining halls regularly, crammed essays and projects in the library late at night, and ran errands at the local shopping mall in the janky, rusting car that Miro bought too enthusiastically off Craigslist. For Miro’s birthday, Darcy gave him a necklace that she had wrapped with a scrap of newspaper. The pendant was a small metal disk with spirals engraved on its face. Miro never took it off. Over the course of many months, the cheap metal began to turn bronze and stain his skin gray in a blurry line around the back of his neck. He developed a habit of reaching for the little disk, flipping and pressing it with his fingers absentmindedly throughout the day. Sometimes he’d put it between his lips and let it sit there until he moved enough to make it fall out. Halfway through their junior year, Miro declared his major in biochemistry, and Darcy chose graphic design. She spent her afternoons outside, sketching in her notebook in the sun, carrying around her tablet so she could work on her digital compositions at