Free Accelerated by Bronwen Hruska Page B

her to a shrink. The Prozac helped her get out of bed. Three months later, she left him.
    “So if it’s not Ellie, what is it?” Nicole had tossed the Law Journal on the table and was gearing up to hound him. “Is it work? Wait, don’t tell me. You have to do a layout of Brad Pitt’s colonoscopy.”
    “Funny.” Sean went into the kitchen and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge.
    “So it’s school. Let me guess …”
    This was not a fun game. “Just drop it, okay?”
    But Nicole didn’t drop things unless she wanted to. “Let’s see, they want Toby to start training now for the SATs.”
    He handed her a beer.
    “They’re worried because he’s not in AP physics yet and he’s falling behind the eleventh graders.”
    “Okay. I get it.”
    “He’s in too many after school activities.” She was on a roll now. “He’s not in enough after school activities.”
    He took a drink, and tried to ignore her.
    Nicole plowed ahead. “His advanced artwork is taking time from his advanced math so they’d like to give him extra help and maybe throw in some study drugs to get him up to speed.”
    He stared at her, annoyed but slightly impressed. She took a sip of beer and raised her eyebrows as if to say, Am I close ?

CHAPTER SEVEN
    B ACK WHEN HE ’ D BEEN AT THE S CHOOL OF V ISUAL A RTS , GAS stations, warehouses, and questionable middle-eastern fast food joints littered the far-west section of Chelsea. Now, art collectors and dealers came from everywhere to see Manhattan’s newest gallery mecca. It was impossible to believe the Burdot space had once been a condemned factory where underpaid Chinese workers sewed potholders or underwear or something equally wretched.
    A wash of southern exposure streamed through oversized windows, bathing white walls and blond wood floors. Edgy photographs of dark and light that looked more like angry drawings, lined the walls. He spotted a woman at an immaculate desk at the back of the huge space. She wore a black skirt that hit just above the knee, a cropped jacket, pearls, and an aloof smirk.
    She walked slowly across the room to him, sizing him up. “Camille Burdot,” she said, shaking his hand.
    “Nice to meet you.” No question, he’d been right about the black underwear. He stood about a linebacker-and-a-half from her as she studied his work, arms crossed, eyes squinted. Camille Burdot was gorgeous. Her bedside manner, however, left something to be desired.
    “Your drawings are … eh,” she said, tepidly. Sean shifted and bit the inside of his cheek. Obviously she knew nothing about art.
    “But these,” she said, gesturing to the collages. Zees . “These are … good. Very good. You have captured something absolutely unique.”
    Of course the work she liked had been a fluke, inspired by Toby’s food pyramid project. The assignment had entailed cutting pictures of food from magazines. Slicing up back issues of Buzz with Toby had not only been therapeutic, it had been a blast. So much so that he continued to mutilate the magazine and explore the form long after Toby had gone to bed that night. When he ran out of magazines, he’d found a box of awful family photos buried in the coat closet and sliced up the ones of him and Ellie. In one, his eyes were half-closed, making him look like a heroin addict. In another, Ellie’s stomach hung over her bathing suit, even though he’d never seen it do that in real life. Each one was worse than the next. It was cathartic, satisfying. He couldn’t remember how he got the idea to paste the sliced-up photos, mosaic-style, into old charcoal sketches he’d done of Ellie. The pieces Camille liked so much were kind of weird—Ellie’s breasts, thighs, and stomach were crammed with deconstructed photos of their old life together. He’d liked them, but he wasn’t sure if it was because it was a way to vandalize his memories.
    “It took me a while to figure it out,” Camille was saying. “At first, I thought it was too