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room. Someone two apartment buildings down got a new refrigerator last week, and its box is here now—tall, clean, fresh cardboard, flattened out and waiting for me to cut into it and bend it into something else, something better.
    The last of my mother’s warmth is gone from her chair, and just thinking about my studio makes me itchy to get down there. I untangle my jeans and shove my legs into them, yank my hair up in a knot, pour myself more coffee with a dollop of milk, and grab a banana before heading out the door, down one flight of stairs, and around a corner.
    A humming strip of fluorescence makes it bright enough; still, even with the door open, no real natural light comes in.
    But hell, it’s mine.
    Everything costs something. This small space, one of three storage rooms off the back alley, cost me weeks of worrying how to approach Johnny, our apartment manager, plus the promise to clean it out—it had been packed to the gills with things former tenants had left behind. Plus, it cost me the two hundred bucks I’d gotten for the one thing in the room that hadn’t been a complete piece of shit—a vintage fiberglass Eames chair, sold to the hipster shopkeeper on Electric Avenue. And maybe most of all, it’d cost me pretending not to notice when, as he slipped the storage room key into my palm, Johnny’s hand cupped my left breast and squeezed once, hard.
    I unlock the door and switch on the light. It stutters into existence in that way fluorescents do, and I step inside. I sip my coffee and look around, then trace my toe along the scratches I’ve made in the concrete. They form a permanent web, layers and layers of them, sort of beautiful actually, from all the shit I’ve cut. I set my mug on the table and perch on the room’s one chair, a beat-up metal stool. There is no need for a second chair; no one ever comes here.
    Then I do that thing I’m pretty good at, from all the practice. I turn my mind away from every distraction—the echo of last winter against my heart; my vague curiosity about how Marissa’s night might have gone; my growing irritation over Mom’s job nagging, mingled with the impending cloud of doom that hovers just overhead, as summer school ticks closer and closer each second; away from Aunt Naomi’s offer, the offer I haven’t shared yet with Marissa or my mother. I turn away from all that as I start a playlist and music booms through the small, narrow space. My studio. I turn away from all that as I flip through my sketchbook, as I run my finger along a sketch. I’ve already sculpted this image once; it’s displayed in the window of the café where Carson works, though I didn’t let them post my name. Now I want to see if I can figure out a way to take this same shape and make it something more, cause it to cast a different shadow.

Three
    It’s only because this is Venice Beach that Carson’s café agreed to put my baby pie in the display case. The sculpture has fluted edges and a latticework crust, just like a real pie, but pierced here and there by the fat arms and legs of well-fed babies, harvested from secondhand baby dolls. People in Venice like the freakish and the odd. They identify with it. A couple of miles up or down the coast, and my pie wouldn’t have a place to call home.
    The baby pie image has stuck with me. When is a pie not a pie? That’s the question I’m playing with, and the answers are pretty funny, right? Like, of course, a flower isn’t a flower all the time … and then there’s pi, the mathematical term, 3.14 … et cetera et cetera, and then I’m back to geometry, which, let’s face it, isn’t all that far away from any sculpture.
    I’ve rotated the table lamp so it throws a shadow on the far wall, and I’ve been experimenting with different shapes, piling up little empty wooden spools and twisted bits of pipe cleaners stuck together with molding wax. The single bulb pumps out some pretty good heat, and when the morning’s fog has burned