I nodded. “Yes. I carved it when I was a child—A for Amy.”
The twilight pressed into the studio like soaked cotton, the fluorescent light above flickering, sharpening the doubt on the judges’ faces.
The elder judge’s finger lingered on my carving, when Olivia suddenly pulled out a stack of yellowed papers from her bag, tossing them onto the easel with a flourish.
On top lay a copy of Attic in Evening Breeze, clumsily signed with my name in the corner, dated three years ago.
“Judges, look!” she said, voice laced with feigned innocence and hidden triumph. The silver bracelet at her wrist clinked against the frame.
“I told you Emily knew Professor Larson’s work too well. I found this while helping Sophia clean her dorm room last week. She even copied the window lattices exactly the way he painted them thirty years ago!”
Blood surged to my head then dropped cold to my feet. The strokes on the page were laughably crude. My signature was always angled upward; here it leaned crooked, like grass bent in the wind.
And three years ago, I hadn’t even lived in a dorm. I had only been to Sophia’s dorm once, last year, to help her move her things.
“This is fake!” I lunged to snatch it, but Olivia darted behind Larson, tilting her face up at him with a look of dependence.
“Professor, isn’t this sketch similar to your Attic in Evening Breeze? I’m not trying to target Emily, but plagiarism is unfair to all the contestants.”
All eyes turned to Larson.
I stared too, my heart squeezed so tight I could hardly breathe.
In my pocket, the torn scrap of paper pressed painfully against my skin: “Her art carries fire…”
In another life, the girl in the denim dress from the photo had borne my face. Surely he would say it now—surely he would reveal this forgery.
At last, his fingers touched the stack of papers, stroking the rough surface.
The light overhead steadied.
“Professor, please say something!” Olivia whimpered from behind him, feigning grievance. “I only want fairness…”
But Larson ignored her. His gaze lifted past the forged sketch to my freshly completed Grandmother’s Courtyard.
The oak’s leaves still shimmered with wet paint, the carved A softened by dusk.
His throat moved. When he finally spoke, his voice was deeper than before.
“In your grandmother’s yard, on the west side of the oak—there’s a crescent-shaped scar in the trunk, isn’t there?”
I froze. The corner of the scrap in my pocket cut into my palm.
That scar had been left when lightning struck the tree one summer when I was ten. I had sat on the stone bench beside it often, sketching. Even Sophia might not have remembered such a detail.
“Yes…” My voice shook. “It looks like a crooked crescent. When it rains, water gathers in the hollow.”
Larson nodded. Then he raised the forged sketch to the judges, pointing at the clean, unmarked trunk drawn there.
“In this copy, the oak’s bark is smooth. No scar at all.”
