The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom by Jenny Holiday

a couple weeks ago, so—”
    â€œTorture yourself over a woman,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “That’s understandable. You can use that. But the rest of it? You’ve been torturing yourself about everything all semester. Form. Technique. God knows what else.” He turned to me. It was still so strange to see him without his trademark cigarette. “And how has that been working out for you?”
    â€œSuffering has nothing to do with art?” I shot back. “What about Van Gogh? Bacon? Arbus?” My voice rose, indignant, because he was wrong.
    â€œSome artists manage to leverage their suffering into greatness. But suffering isn’t a precondition to great art, Matthew. Caring is, though. You can’t just be a robot the rest of your life. You have to let yourself care about something.”
    It was the most he had ever said to me in one go. We stared at each other for a long time. How could this asshole presume to know anything about me? About whether I’d suffered. About whether my suffering was worthy . About what I’d had to do to get through the past four years. About what I’d had to do to get through the last twenty-two.
    â€œWhat I care about,” I finally whispered, shaking so hard with suppressed rage that I couldn’t make my voice any louder, “is not flunking out of college. What I care about is my goddamned senior portfolio.”
    Curry smiled as he stared at me. Seeing him smile was even weirder than seeing him without a cigarette. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your senior portfolio, Townsend. You do what you like, and I’ll sign off on it.”
    Then he turned and lit a cigarette, dismissing me.
----
    I t wasn’t late enough when I got back to campus. It wasn’t dark enough, the spring days having grown longer without me noticing. That I was planning to go out without sufficient darkness was a sign of how out of control I was. But I was beyond caring. I banged into my room and yanked the portraits of Jenny out of my portfolio. When I ripped the corner of one of them, it only fanned the flames of my rage. I didn’t even have a new stencil, for fuck’s sake. It showed how utterly distracted I’d let myself become in recent weeks. I slammed my backpack on my bed, intending to empty it so I could refill it with my supplies, but the already-wobbly zipper finally gave way, and all my shit went flying.
    Fuck it. I didn’t need the backpack. I just had to go, had to obey the fire in my limbs commanding that I keep moving . I grabbed a garbage bag, jerked my closet door open, threw all my paint cans into the bag, and headed out into the twilight.
    I could feel the fury starting to dissipate as I walked. It was like my junkie body knew it was going to get its fix soon, and it opened a tiny pinhole in my chest, allowing the rage that had accumulated there to begin to hiss out. By the time I was done, a couple hours from now, I would be okay, back to myself. I glanced at the art building up ahead. I’d be that goddamned wooden door, unchanging and impermeable.
    The art building sat at one end of a circular commons that formed the center of campus. It was lined with the university’s oldest, most stately buildings, anchored by Salter Tower, the campus’s iconic clock tower, and ringed by a roundabout used by buses coming into campus. As I approached, a regional commuter bus of the same variety from which I had recently disembarked pulled up in front of the student center, which was on the opposite side of the circle from the art building. I slowed my pace and averted my face. Some of the profs commuted to campus from Boston, and though it was unlikely that any of them would be arriving on a Sunday evening, I had to make sure no one with any authority saw me leaving campus with my sketchy garbage bag. As the bus pulled away, I allowed myself to glance over to see if I needed to