He could not have felt self-conscious for long; he loved drawing too much for that. So he barely even thought to look at her, even in the corner of his eye, because he was looking at the arrangement.
He was following the ribbon on its winding path down the swell of the lamp. He was trying (and this was always the trickiest part, no matter what anyone said) to figure out exactly where along the ribbon each dragonfly was, because it was very, very important to record exactly what was in front of your eyes, otherwise you were making things up, and making things up was what children did, and Desiderio was not a child anymore, he was eleven and a very good drawer no matter what anyone said.
He had started drawing the first lines when he heard the noise, like the honking of some malevolent goose. Aurelie was scooting her chair closer. Much closer than he had expected. Their chairs were practically brushing arms.
He realized belatedly that he was hunched over his book – in fact, he was shielding it from her eyes with his arm. He cleared his throat and shifted, flushing a little. He was unaccustomed to having an audience, that was all. He shifted a little more, and it was like trying to budge a very heavy rock. He swallowed a heavy lump, then finally turned the book so that she could see it while he drew.
Her cheeks were very red. Why on Vita should they be? She was rather the one who had a front-row seat to his embarrassment, and it had always seemed to Desiderio that children, no matter the age, liked nothing more than to laugh at him. In particular.
She sat down again, and he heard her little voice. She was such a very shy little girl, but when she talked, she talked a great deal; there was something very sweet about it.
The effort of following her soon took his mind away from those things; it was strange, how quickly it went, and how quickly he found that he could start drawing again. He found himself furrowing his brow, listening and at the same time finding the edge of the ribbon, the shape of the lamp behind it. Marking the places where the dragonflies were very lightly, then frustratedly marking them again, because he had gotten it all wrong somehow.
Defective, Aurelie said, stumbling a little over the D. His mouth was pressed very thin. His flush deepened, and he looked down at the page, letting a sheaf of black hair fall in the way of his face.
“A confisalto dancer? Hmm.” He smudged a line with the side of his finger. “One of my aunts is a confisalto dancer,” he added absently. “Aunt Albertina.”
The worst of my aunts, he might have said, but he didn’t want to upset Aurelie. He supposed little girls like confisalto. The problem was when grown people liked confisalto, and suddenly they were very important because of it. She had elaborate hairpieces; once, when he was a baby, he had reached up and tugged her wig off to reveal the shiny scalp underneath, and she had never forgiven him.
He looked over when she trailed off, his dark eyebrows still furrowed together. “No,” he said softly, and shook his head. “It is no distraction. It helps. To listen.”
He tried what he thought might have been an encouraging smile; he had never been very good at those, but he tried anyway. She seemed terribly hopeful. It wasn’t that he was curious, because he wasn’t, because stories like this were for much younger children.
“Does the paper confisalto dancer love the one-legged soldier as well?” She had said one way, but not the other. He knew enough about girls – proper girls, Brunnhold girls – to know that one did not guarantee, and often negated, the other. “And what about the jack-in-the-box? I do not like those; they are horribly startling,” he pronounced, then turned his nose back to his book, even if he was facing her a little more now as he drew.