My worry turns out to be rather correct. An easy start, Ms Berks has me gather a handful of things from the room: spare threads and fabrics, in case the dresses need to be repaired. She then piles the dresses on top.

“This way,” she says, striding to the door.

I follow her outside the room. She takes a moment to lock the door behind us, and then continues her striding, my long legs struggling to keep up; I didn’t much notice before, but she is even a bit taller than me, and she seems partial to brisk walks….

Between the quick pace and hot weather, I’m in a light sweat when we come to the art room. Although the chairs and tables are cleared away, the teacher’s desk is still there and she loosely gestures at it on her way to the sliding door at the back. “Put them there.”

She doesn’t have to tell me twice, a sigh slipping out as I place everything down. Full-length dresses, even in a thin fabric, aren’t exactly light.

“Let us examine the year’s paintings,” she says from the backroom, muffled.

She said us, so I walk over to the “doorway” and look in. It’s nearly as big as a classroom, desks and chairs (neatly stacked) and easels on one side, and on the other (where she is) are rows and rows of canvasses on shelves. I noticed them during the term, thinking them spare, but I was wrong; she takes one down, revealing an abundance of colour on it.

“Come now, I have better things to do than indulge you all afternoon,” she says. Despite the sharp tone, she looks at me with a crooked smile.

I pull myself forwards, joining her there, and I look at the painting she took out. “What are we doing, miss?”

“Putting four dresses in a room is hardly something worth seeing, so I have folded it into the art classes’ exhibition,” she says.

“Ah.”

She lightly chuckles, not bothering to hide her mouth (probably because of the canvas she’s holding). “What do you think of this painting?” she asks.

I look and it’s obviously from her still life assignment. Although I don’t recognise it, it’s similar to Violet’s: an apple, orange, and a pear arranged on a plate. “I, um, don’t know what to say, miss.”

While I’ve been “taught” to critique classical paintings, it’s hardly relevant to an amateur’s work. Besides, that critiquing is all empty words, more codewords that prove I’ve been taught than actually conveying my thoughts.

“I am sure that, if you open your mouth, some words will inevitably fall out,” she says, her tone light and teasing.

Though I feel a touch of embarrassment warm my cheeks, I sort of do that. “Well, I think the arrangement is okay. The yellow of the pear is emphasised, so it has a nice gradient of red to yellow. But, um, the brush strokes don’t… make the fruits feel round? They’re straight, not curved. And, uh, the lighting… oh, the shadows don’t…. I’m not really sure. The, the textures… you don’t really feel like the apple is smooth and orange a little, um, rubbery, and the pear isn’t mottled.”

My rambling comes to an end because she starts chuckling. Another spike of embarrassment hits me, but I was only doing what she asked….

“You really do take everything I say to heart,” she softly says, putting back the canvas.

I don’t know what to say to that either, but I don’t just open my mouth and see what comes out this time.

She flips through more of the canvasses and takes the odd one out, asking me to line them up against the wall. I notice they’re all still lifes and I’m surprised by the variety. First, she takes down three that use fruits. Of the other still lifes she then adds, there’s books and flowers and pens and pendants and shoes and cutlery (some overlap between the different ones).

Not one of mine, though, and I’m a little disappointed by that. I know mine aren’t good, but I think they’re comparable to the ones she picked out.

“Let me see now,” she mumbles, standing back and looking over the ones she did choose. “Two, five, six,” she says, pointing at them. “Take those through.”

“Yes, miss,” I say. Careful, I pick them up and go through, leaning them against the wall.

When I come back to the backroom, she already has the others put away and is going through another shelf. “Here,” she says, holding one out to me.

I line it up like last time. This one is a landscape, and it’s soon joined by other landscapes. Most of them are familiar sights from around the school grounds and noticeably include two “copies” of her painting she showed us for our first and second lessons. However, these paintings were probably done near the end of term, not looking like someone’s first painting, and also the colours better match what the grounds currently look like.

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Again, neither of my landscapes make the cut. Oh well. She then chooses four to go through to the main room.

We repeat this a few more times and, even if a single canvas isn’t that heavy, the heat piles up, little wind slipping through the windows. (At the least, these windows can open wide because of paint fumes.) There’s a noticeable jump in quality going from the juniors to the seniors. However, she tells me that some of her students took up oil painting over the summer holiday and, pointing them out, most of the senior paintings are done by such students.

That helps me feel better about my skills.

In the end, it’s roughly a third junior artwork to two-thirds senior artwork. I guess that is a conscious decision on her part, matching the one term we’ve had and the two terms the seniors had of art this last school year.

Leaning against the desk, I start controlling my breathing, recovering my breath. Not much I can do about the sweat right now.

“That is enough for today,” she says, wiping her hands on a cloth.

I look at my own hands to see a general grime there, I guess from dust.

She closes the sliding door and walks towards me, but stops a couple of steps away, her gaze falling on the paintings. “If you are willing to assist for the rest of the week, come see me here an hour or so after lunch.”

“Yes, miss,” I say.

With that, I go back to the dormitory, heading to my room for a shower before I meet my friends in the lounge.

Violet greets me by saying, “I take it she wasn’t there?”

I giggle at her jab, sitting down in the seat I vacated earlier—gosh, it almost feels like that was yesterday. “What are we looking at now?” I ask.

So the rest of the afternoon crawls along. I’m mentally drained when evening comes, but pull myself together to work on Iris’s dress. Then I go to sleep at my normal time, only to be disturbed by thunder, yanked out of a dream and thrown into a moment of panic.

As my heart calms down, I wrap myself in the duvet-less covers I sleep under and slip behind the curtains. Looking outside, rain spatters against my window, drumming a lulling tune, the ground already flooded. While the flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder give me a small fright, it’s overall rather relaxing. I admire the view for maybe ten minutes (time elusive) before my sleepiness returns and so I return to bed.

Not much different from yesterday, I wake up on Tuesday, study through the morning, and then go help Ms Berks. (My friends have decided to take this hour or so I’m gone as a break, so I’m not even skipping out on studying.) She has me set up the easels around the edge of the room, then I put the paintings where she tells me to. There’s a good balance of colour, I think. When I look around, nothing is jarring, each painting matching its neighbours (even if the subjects are rather different).

That’s followed by another afternoon of studying and another evening of sewing. The rain continued through the day, but it didn’t get in the way of anything and brought with it cooler weather. If anything, I quite liked having it as background noise.

Wednesday, the rain has finished but the puddles are lasting, which means we are stuck in the lounge for our studying. I would like a change of scenery, but never mind. After lunch, I again go help Ms Berks, today a simple case of writing out simple info cards for the paintings: topic and name. Of course, she tells me what to write and I just focus on my calligraphy. There’s no rush, though, so the long time it takes is purely down to me putting in my best effort to write in an elegant script.

And the afternoon and evening are more of the same. By now, I’m rather confident I can complete the dress for Sunday. Finish the embroidery on Friday, sew it all together Saturday, present it on Sunday—that’s my plan.

Come Thursday, yesterday’s bright sunshine has helped to dry the grounds from swamp-like to merely muddy. Still, my friends and I have been so cooped up that we walk along the various paths for a good half an hour after breakfast, a nice way to start the day. Then we study through the morning, have lunch, and I go back to the art room.

However, on the walk over, I can’t think what I’ll do today. It looked very much done when I left yesterday. Well, Ms Berks told me to come back, so she must have something.

“Hullo, miss,” I say as I step inside, and I close the door behind me.

She’s at the desk, a book in her hand much like at embroidery club. And much like at embroidery club, she ignores me until she finds a place she wants to stop, at which point she casually slips in a bookmark and shuts the book with a dull clap.

“I won’t be keeping you long today,” she says.

“Thank you?” I reply, not entirely sure what that means. Is it just a small job?

Rather than ask her, I dutifully follow her as she opens the backroom and goes through. She leads me to a mostly empty shelf of paintings, one which she didn’t look through on Monday, and she takes down three paintings.

“I was going to wait until after the exams like usual, but I thought I might as well have you take them now and save me the hassle,” she says.

My confusion continues on for the second it takes me to recognise the first of the paintings she took down: the last of my still lifes. “Miss?” I ask, hesitant.

She lightly laughs. “It is easy to tell which students care and actually try, and if I think they have painted something of merit, I ask them if they wish to take it with them.”

That’s quite a lot to suddenly take in, a subtle acknowledgement of my… effort. She thinks I care, that I’m trying my best, and that my paintings have merit.

“Regardless, I thought you would want both of these. They really speak to how far you have come since handing me that piece of embroidery at the start of the year,” she says, and then she falls into a light chuckle. “Honestly, I rather took pity on you. To be frank, I still do pity you. You do not belong in this world. The way you see things clearly and yet find beauty in them, I can only worry that you too will be broken.”

As shocked as I am by her words, all I can do is take the still life and group portrait paintings she gives me, while she keeps the painting of the school I did.

“This one will be going up in the hall. I would have liked to include more of your work, but I am sure you understand I must maintain an air of impartiality.” She sighs. “Well, you should be on your way. Rest up.”

“Yes, miss. Thank you, miss,” I say, falling back on good manners practised into habit.