The train rolled into the station just as Nina went up the stairs to the platform. Years of experience had taught the entire Letov family the exact time to leave the house before a train arrived. Or was supposed to arrive, anyway. Delays were common. 

This time, the train slowed down almost at the end of their journey, pulling out of the last station before New York. Nina leaned her head against the window and tried to nap in the uncomfortable position. She could draw something, but she didn't really feel like it. She rarely did anymore. In high school she'd doodle all over her papers, filling sketchbook after sketchbook, but it's been years since she'd had the urge to do so again.

She stared out the window instead, as central Jersey exurbia gave way to North Jersey industrialization. Smokestacks of factories and refineries, filling the air with the smell of sewage and chemicals. Dingy car repair shops along overpasses. Swampy marshland outside Newark, determined birds still nesting in it.

And finally, the Manhattan skyline climbing out from around a corner, somehow more impressive than the similar cityscapes of Newark and Jersey City for the simple fact of being across the water.

Nina took the subway uptown, though she might've been able to walk it if the weather was better. She took a seat and looked around at her fellow subway patrons, the ever-changing advertisements, and wondered if any of them could tell she didn't live in the city. Did New York girls dress differently? Did New York artists? Was she looking around too obviously? 

She tried to put all of these thoughts out of her mind as she walked to the gallery, checking the directions on her phone as she did so.

On her way in she spotted a group of girls who looked like local art students, carrying portfolios and poster tubes. They were probably going to the same place, Nina decided, but she wasn't in the mood for befriending random undergrads right then. Didn't want to disappoint them with the realities of post-art school life.

The receptionist directed her up a narrow staircase to a large, glass-walled space, the entryway of which was adorned in a giant poster advertising the exhibition. The text overlaid one of O'Neill's monster drawings, her thick pencil hatch marks enlarged to dizzying scale. Nina stopped in front of the doors to stare.

Something hot hit the side of her dress. "Oh! Oh my god, I'm so sorry! Are you okay?!"

Nina turned. There was burnt coffee dripping down her right side, soaking through her dress and cardigan. And a girl, standing with a horrified expression on her face and an empty paper cup.

She was wearing a vintage-looking green sweater with enamel pins studded across the chest, over a black shift dress, black turtleneck, and black tights. Her hair, brown with gold highlights, flowed out in waves from under a forest green beret. Her eyes were that indeterminate light color that changed depending on their surroundings, greenish blueish gray. Matte red lipstick.

She looked, Nina thought, like she'd stepped off a film set into the dimly lit vestibule of the gallery.

"I'm so sorry," the girl said again. "Um. Do you know where the bathroom is?"

Nina shook her head.

"I'll take you there," the girl insisted, grabbing Nina's free hand in both of hers— warm, soft, manicured, Nina couldn't help but notice— and leading her around corners and down narrow hallways to a single stall industrial bathroom in what was possibly another dimension of the building.

As they went, the girl talked. 

"I'm Goldie, by the way. Well, Golding, but everyone calls me Goldie. Yeah, after the Lord of the Flies guy, my mom was a big fan. I actually work here, that's why I know where to go, but I haven't been here that long, which is probably why I bumped into you. And I'm—"

"Sorry," Nina finished. "You've mentioned."

Goldie giggled, slightly hysterically, then sighed. "This is the first show I've been assistant curator on so I've been freaking out about it for weeks, and then I had to go and spill coffee all over a cute girl right before it opened..."

"Cute?"

They'd reached the bathroom, and Goldie pushed the door open and held it for Nina to go through. "Yup. Not that this wouldn't have been a tragedy if you weren't cute, but the cuteness does make it somewhat worse."

Nina was impressed she didn't backtrack or try to wave off the compliment somehow, the way Nina probably would have. She grabbed a handful of paper towels and tried her best to salvage her outfit.

"It didn't like, burn you or anything, did it?" Goldie asked, dabbing at the stained sweater. "I don't think it was that hot, but I dunno, maybe it's different when it's on you."

"I'm fine," Nina said. "Just wet. And not in the good way." 

The comment surprised both of them, Goldie freezing for a moment before bursting into loud, cackling laughter. "Wow," she said, and made eye contact with Nina for the first time. Like she finally realized the stained sweater and dress were both being worn by a person.

"What's your name, by the way? I think I forgot to ask."

"Nina. I don't think I was named after anything, except that my dad wanted something that was easy to pronounce in English and Russian." Nina shrugged the cardigan off of herself and stuffed half of it into the sink to try and soak it.

"Oh, are you Russian?"

"Kind of. Mostly Ukrainian Jewish, but we speak Russian at home... It's complicated." Just a few years ago Nina would tell strangers who asked that yes, she was Russian, because the odds of any random American off the street being able to find Ukraine on a map were too low to bother specifying. She still didn't want to go into it all, though.

"Oh..." Goldie didn't seem to know what to say to those implications either. She changed the subject instead, pulling the sweater back out of the sink. The coffee stain was mostly gone, but the entire thin pale pink cardigan was sopping wet. "I think this is probably the best we can get with what we've got here." She gave the wet sweater one last squeeze. "You could hang it up in our closet? Although I don't know how okay everyone will be with dripping water all over the floor..."

 Nina examined her new look in the mirror, noticing how bright her pink jewelry suddenly seemed without the sweater to balance it. "Hanging it up in a closet would be great. Don't wanna get pneumonia or something."

"Right? Yeah, I'll see what I can do!" Goldie's voice changed in that sentence, snapping into a customer service script delivery tone Nina recognized from her own job. The shift seemed to remind Goldie of something, and she scrambled to dig her phone out of her pocket. "Crap, we're so late!"

“Sorry,” Nina said, and then blinked. Why was she apologizing when Goldie was the one who’d spilled coffee on her? And then went out of her way to help her clean up? “I mean—”

Goldie just giggled again. “I’m sure it’s fine.” She grabbed Nina’s hand again to lead her back the way they’d come, letting go once they’d returned to the vestibule.

“So uh, welcome to the show,” Goldie told her, waving towards the gallery entrance. “Sorry again. There’s red wine inside if you want to return the favor.”

“But then I’d have to help you clean that up too, and I won’t have any time to see the drawings.” Nina raised her eyebrows and smiled.

Goldie laughed outright at that, tilting her head back in a cackle. She looked like a stock photograph: Artistic Woman Laughing. Her beret stayed put, probably pinned in place. “You’re sweet. Find me after the show, okay? There’s an afterparty. You should come.” She was already turning away as she offered the invitation, tossing it carelessly over one shoulder with her long curling hair. She ran off to talk to someone else, and Nina was alone.

At least she was right and there were canapes. She filled a paper plate with cheese cubes and prosciutto and picked an end of the gallery to start from. It wasn’t as big of a space as it’d seemed from the outside, smaller even than the art store where Nina worked. She wandered over to the nearest drawing and stared at it, eating her cheese cubes.

The Society was presenting Rose O’Neill’s work in chronological order, from her first published illustrations to her later career Kewpies and the Sweet Monsters private drawings, which had been lauded in Paris in 1921 but confused American audiences the following year. Those were the drawings that Nina was most excited about, after seeing them on social media a few years ago. Hulking, fleshy, grotesque creatures rendered in delicate, sensuous charcoal lines, in tender and vulnerable poses. Nina felt as though she could reach into the paper and— not grab them, but stroke them, gently, and feel clay and earth under her fingertips as she did so.

Her fingers twitched. She put her plate on the floor and reached for her sketchbook and pencil, in the pocket of her dress. She tried to reproduce the contours of Plate 7: The Eternal Creature, the longing felt in the curve of the creature’s neck and arched back as the other creature placed a huge hand on its chest.

“That looks good!”