Sketchy

This was the kind of thing someone did in middle school. 

Not during her eighteen hundred dollar college literature course that resembled something closer to a stereotypical high school freshman English class. 

“I’m pathetic,” Ella mumbled voicelessly, shaking her head as she looked up toward the front of the lecture hall. Her professor moved through the rows of desks, a ragged worn copy of Romeo and Juliet clutched tightly between her fingers as she recited the section they were supposed to be analyzing. 

Ella wasn’t sure how many times she’d taught this class. Judging from her freshly pressed dress paints, sparkling white blouse, fashionable heels quietly stumbling over the lecture hall stairs, and awful schedule, Ella was comfortable assuming this was her first attempt at getting college students to fall in love with starcrossed teenagers at eight o’clock in the morning. 

At this point, Ella wasn’t sure what her professor was even saying. It was far too early to try to focus on the iambic pentameter. She’d given up sometime during the third lecture. Once a student decided to inspire a debate about ‘love at first sight’, Ella decided if she was going to stay awake during class then she was going to have to draw. 

Scratchy shapes in the margins of her syllabus outline quickly turned into masterful doodles spanning full sheets of loose-leaf paper. There were only so many abstract shapes and patterns she could draw. Swirls turned into drawings of apples, sunflowers, strawberries, and eyeballs. 

The balcony scene made her desperate enough to practice drawing hands and feet. She needed to redo her hand and foot study for her class because her project had been less than stellar. Her own hand had been easy to draw, but she couldn’t hold her left hand in a complex position while pretending to focus on the lecture and drawing with her right. Luckily, there was a sea of hands in front of her. 

Her professor’s chipped neutral manicure had been a fun detail, but the pinched position of her hand was a struggle to capture. The open book she’d drawn looked beautiful. 

The girl in front seemed to have impossibly tiny hands.

Or impossibly large pencils. 

It wasn’t perspective. Ella wasn’t sure how, but the pencil always seemed to look too big in her hands whenever she wrote.

There was a guy that sat rows down and to the left who had long fingers. He liked to twirl his pen like a drum stick. She definitely liked his hands. They were long and dexterous, and Ella was sure he would make the most interesting gestures for her to draw. She’d managed to catch a few of them in messy sketches, but they didn’t look much like anything. 

Then there was the girl a few rows behind her. Four inch long nails that seemed to have a different design every time she turned to listen to someone speak behind her. She couldn’t draw her hands without blatantly ignoring the lecture. Her assigned seat kept her nails from view, so during discussions Ella would anxiously wait for a chance to see what color and design she was sporting. With luck, she’d get a sketch of the latest design.

Finally, her latest obsession, her neighbor.

It started with his hands. They weren’t as interesting as the dextrous hands toward the front of the room or the manicured ones behind her, but they were close enough to get detailed drawings. He typed, took notes, and had a little habit of pinching the corners of his book pages with his index and thumb. His hands gave plenty of chances for practice. 

Until he became more than that. 

Someone behind her had made a comment about fate during some discussion Ella had been half-listening to. A snort from the man next to her caught her attention as her ears tuned in long enough to hear the words “divine intervention”.

Her eyes went wide with shock as her lips turned down into a disapproving frown. “Huh?” she whispered, drawing a husky chuckle from her neighbor. 

She’d spent at least two solid weeks drawing his hands before noticing he had very nice eyes. Once the discussion died down, she’d tried drawing them. Ella snuck glances at him. She’d wait for the perfect moment when his eyes would focus on his notes, so she could study his features. 

It took a few tries to get the shape of his eyes, but eventually, it was a natural motion of her wrist. His eyes were somehow both dark and bright. No matter how much she shaded, Ella couldn’t capture him. Charcoal would be perfect. 

Drawings of his eyes expanded to shading his brow, nose, and the planes of his cheeks. She discovered a scar on the bridge of his nose and scattered freckles on his face. His mousy brown hair was messy and took forever to draw. Hundreds of individual little lines clustered together. His hair always took most of the class to draw. 

Ella knew the angles of his face before she’d learned his name. 

According to his student ID dangling from the lanyard around his neck, his name was Charles Evan Pritchard. 

From weeks of careful observation, Ella learned a lot about him without exchanging so much as a word. 

According to his student ID, his name was Charles Evan Pritchard. She wasn’t sure if Evan was his middle name, or he was one of those fancy people with two first names. She didn’t even know his major. They’d exchanged glances and a smirk, but she was sure she knew the number of freckles on his face. 

Somewhere between the death scene of the star crossed lovers and the examination of imagery, Ella found herself lost in all the details she’d learn about Charles. 

There were stories. 

The shiny pink scar below his wrist could have been a surgery scar. She couldn’t imagine him with carpal tunnel and her limited biology knowledge couldn’t imagine another medical explanation. It was likely a cut. Something small and accidental. 

He had plenty of those. 

One barely the size of a crumb on the knuckle of his right thumb. 

A thin line along one of his eyebrows where the hair no longer grew. 

Neat little scrapes at the bottom of his chin. 

Her favorite was still the one that sat between his eyes. That would be her favorite story. 

Her fingers traced along the overworked lines of his nose as her chest ached. The sound of her professor rereading Juliet’s last words echoed in and out as she added the finishing touches to today’s portrait. 

Was this how Monet felt about water lilies? 

“Well-” 

A raspy whisper made pinpricks trickle down her spine. Ella turned next to her, meeting Charles’s amused glare. 

His fingers crawled over the tabletop, sliding her notebook a little closer to him as he leaned over. 

Air caught at the back of Ella’s throat as the fine details of his face came into focus. The fields of mousy brown hair had hidden notes of blonde and what looked to be a piece of gray. The quantitative number of freckles along his cheeks now looked endless up close. The scar she’d grown to love looked even more interesting. She hadn’t really noticed how wide it was before. 

“I think that’s my favorite one,” Charles grinned, nodding with approval as he looked over her drawing of him. 

Her’s too.