I tried again. The clay wobbled, then settled. I breathed like the chalkboard told me to. Cone, collar, calm. The bowl rose a little. It looked like something you could eat soup out of if you were charitable and blind.
“This is… not terrible,” I said.
“It’s stubborn,” he said, watching my hands. “But it knows what it wants to be.”
“Is this a pep talk for clay or me?”
“Yes,” he said again, and I bumped his shoulder with mine.
We made two bowls that might pass for objects and one collapsed that looked like modern despair. We got clay on our faces, which felt like flirting. We learned that I am very bad at a sponge, and he is weirdly good at trimming. At one point, the instructor turned on a fan and the sleeve of his sweater fluttered, and I lost my train of thought entirely.
“Eyes on y
