Portraiture.

Tab stared at the assignment title, and mentally swore off praying to the God of Comic Art. He obviously wasn’t pulling his weight. Tab had been praying diligently for months for the thirty-percent assignment

with five percent exhibition, because the God of Public Appearances hated him and wanted to make sure he suffered

to be comic art. Or even any stylised form at all. There was so much flexibility in those modules, but…

But portraiture?Tab hated portraits. They had to look halfway realistic, and Tab didn’t do realism. Halfway or otherwise.

“That,” Maxi said, plonking their cardboard coffee cups on the table, and barely missing covering the stupid assignment sheet in lukewarm mocha, “is so much better than I’d expected.”

Tab rolled his eyes. Of course Maxi would say that. Maxi was all about the drawing of the people. Any people. Preferably people who weren’t really aware of it at the time, because Maxi was kind of a stalker if you thought about it. Of hot boys, mostly, but occasionally girls with hairstyles she wanted to copy, or The Dancing Redhead, a girl from the dance department of the college that Maxi had her one and only lesbian crush on.

Tab fished the assignment sheet out from the mess Maxi always made of any table she sat at, and stashed it away.

“Who are you going to draw?” he asked.

“Alice,” Maxi said promptly. “Obviously. I’m going to bring some disability awareness to this exhibition. Are you aware in the last eight exhibitions, there’s not been a single disabled person?”

“…And?”

“Tab! There’s only been eight!”

“Well, maybe nobody else knows any disabled people.”

Maxi snorted.

“Or maybe the disabled people don’t want to be drawn.”

“Alice will, she loves the attention,” Maxi beamed. Alice was her fourteen-year-old sister, whose expression of any emotion whatsoever was a garbled sort of grunting. Maxi swore she could talk; Tab wasn’t convinced. But then, he’d only met

seen

Alice twice. She didn’t like strangers, apparently, and Tab was totally fine with that. “So?”

“Huh?”

“Stop going off in your own little world,” Maxi scoffed. “Who are you going to draw, eh?”

Tab shrugged. “I dunno.”

“You must know.”

“I don’t. I hate doing portraits. Or real people. They get offended and shit.”

“So draw someone who doesn’t know,” Maxi winked, and tracked her eyes around the café. She had sharp, purposeful eyes; they always watched, and never simply were. The reason? Slaaag. Maxi was a flirt. End of, really. Maxi was the high priestess at the Temple of the Flirt, and Tab had every intention of drawing her one day as an acolyte of Lust or something when he was a famous comic book artist.

Or a cartoonist, he hadn’t quite decided yet.

Maxi was the kind of girl who was easy to draw in a comic style. She was all curves and long curly hair

technically dark brown, but she religiously dyed it black

and oversized hipster glasses even though she didn’t actually need glasses. She wore off-the-shoulder tops a lot, too, because

she said

it showed off her nice shoulders and long neck and

everyone else said

it showed the cleavage that you could smother a man in. She’d make an awesomevillainess. Tab just had no intention of ever telling her that. The ego was big enough already.

“Tab!”

He jumped; Maxi huffed and adjusted her huge glasses. “We seriously need to find you a boyfriend,” she despaired. “Don’t you have a crush on anyone? Like anyone? Even seen someone wearing really nice jeans that were ironed at some point in their lives?”

“No,” Tab lied.

She huffed. “Do you even know any other gay guys around here?”

“Uncle Eddie,” he said, quick as a flash.

“Gay guys that aren’t members of your own family, Tab,” Maxi said, and flicked his forehead. “Nerd. Come on, don’t you? You must. You do, right?”

“Not anyone I’d ever date,” he said more truthfully. He’d gone to, like, one LGBT meeting at the college. It had been full of potato-shaped lesbians with brutal haircuts and weirdly deep voices, and lanky gay guys who talked with a lisp and carried fashion magazines under one arm.

And okay, it was an arts college, but still…

Nobody Tab had really felt comfortable talking to—it had been excruciating, actually—and then they’d all voted to go get trollied, and Tab felt awkward enough in public without being drunk.

“Well,” Maxi prodded him in the arm, hunching forward like they were sharing secrets. They kind of were. Tab never talked about his crushes with anyone, really. It was just kind of awkward with Uncle Eddie, and he never knew what to say to Aunt JuliKate anyway, and everyone who knew he was gay had guessed. He’d never even technically come out of the closet. Maybe there was no closet. He was just kind of…auto-out. “What’s your type?”

Dangerous, gorgeous, and preferably half-naked. “I dunno.”

“Oh come on, Tab! Look,” Maxi leaned across, her curly hair flopping forward over the table in a waterfall. A bubbly one. With dandruff. Tab moved his coffee. “I could set you up, you know.”

“Oh no. No, no, no, no.”

“Taaaaab.”

“Maxi, I’m not going on a blind date.”

“What if I promise it’s with a nice guy and…”

“No!” Tab insisted.