Bare Art by Maite Gannon

 
    The brothers found an apartment a month before the start of the semester . It was a three-bedroom unit with one bathroom, a decent kitchen, and a living room.
    “You want the room at the end of the hall?” Matt offered. Pete was the musical twin. The room at the end of the hall was farthest away from the common areas, which would be the site of a lot of ambient noise.
    “Please.”
    Matt didn’t have much to unpack. He was an engineering student and inherently minimalist when it came to possessions. If an object didn’t have a specific and immediately purpose, he got rid of it. There wasn’t a sentimental bone in his body. Pete, on the other hand, and been working toward getting a degree in music long before the university accepted him. He filled whole shelves with scores of sheet music that he ordered online from companies who transcribed them into braille. His cello and music stand took up a big chunk of space. Between the desk and the bed, he had just enough room to set up his instrument and practice.
    “Good thing these rooms are tight,” Matt said. “If you misplace something, you’ll know it can’t have gone very far.”
    The problem was what to do with the third bedroom. The budget would be tight if the twins continued to live there without another roommate.
    “I’ll put an ad up ,” Matt said over dinner. They hadn’t unpacked the kitchen yet, so dinner was takeout eaten on the floor. 
    “Make sure the ad says we want a female roommate,” Pete said. “Girls are cleaner.”
    “Sure,” Matt agreed. They’d need a roommate who wasn’t a slob, because leaving things lying around wasn’t an option when sharing space with a blind person.
    Matt put the ads up online and around campus. They got one call from a woman who, when she came to view the place, turned out to be in her forties. The next caller was actually a man, and was a Born Again Christian who tried to convince them that unmarried men and women shouldn’t share space.
    “Where do these people come from ?” Matt wondered, and crossed the religious nut off his list.
    The caller after that knew Pete from the music department. “No way,” Pete said before Matt could even schedule her to view the apartment. “She plays trombone.”
    “And that’s bad?”
    “Do you want to listen to trombone practice seven days a week, five hours a day?”
    “Point taken.” Matt crossed her off the list. It was bad enough listening to his brother play the same songs over and over again, and cellos sounded nice.
    They found their third roommate a week before the semester began. She was a visual art major with a focus on painting, which satisfied Pete’s criteria. How loud could painting be? It wasn’t like she was going to run a pottery wheel in her bedroom. She was also good looking, which satisfied Matt’s criteria.
    “Any problems with being tidy?” he asked her.
    “Nope.”
    Claire had a very whimsical wardrobe. She looked like a little china doll trying to be a clown, and it prompted Matt to ask if she was going to burn incense and put up bead curtains over the door.
    “I’m allergic to incense and I’m an artist, not a hippie.”
    “Do you have a problem with hours of repetitive music every day of the week?” Pete asked, and explained that he was a music major.
    “I have earplugs.”
    She looked the twins up and down, trying to judge if they were creeps. They were either identical or very similar fraternal twins, and if the one on the left weren’t looking at the fridge for no reason she wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. They were both tall and lean, with dark curls cut the same way. Even their teeth were crooked in the same places.
    “So which of you is which again?” Introductions had been hasty and Claire had no memory for names and faces.
    They pointed to each other and said, “He’s the evil one,” in unison.
    “Cute. But seriously.”
    Matt put a hand to his chest. “I’m Matt, the good looking one. This