I hunched over and tried to bring Ellie Hogue to life in charcoals. My hand, stained with streaks of phthalo blue from this morning’s oil workshop, barely grasped the greasy black block as it flew over paper, charting the hollow of her neck and her smooth stomach.

    Other night classes had dismissed, sending the sounds of freed students filtering in through the windows. A few interested pairs of eyes peered through the panes at our required curriculum.

    The professor waded through desks and easels, correcting flaws and murmuring encouragement. He paused at my elbow. "Layer your shadow around the knee. She must live on the paper." I smudged darkness on down the length of her calf. "Excellent work, Mr. Grant."

    A bell warbled through the ancient building. Students began flipping their sketchpads shut, sending puffs of black charcoal into the stale air.

    "Let’s thank Ellie for posing," said Professor Thompson over the commotion, a flimsy robe resting over one arm.

    Some of the rowdier underclassmen climbed onto their desks, whistling and exchanging high-fives while Ellie slid from an overstuffed chair in the center of the room.

    The professor offered her the thin cover-up. "Congratulations on med school, Ellie. It won’t be the same around campus without you next year."

    I ripped the sketch out, shoving the pad into my knapsack between a John Edward Costigan biography and a turpentine-splattered senior thesis as Ellie raised her arms and slipped the robe over her body. Her uplifted breasts revealed a dark blot of pigment against white skin - a birthmark I recognized from the nights when I’d held Denise Hogue in my arms in the freshman dorm.

    Could the twins possibly have a birthmark in the same place? The thought electrified me. She caught me looking and whipped the robe around her body.

    I looked at my sketch again, recalling Denise’s bitter complaints about the twin who had it all. "I could kill her!" she told me once, mascaraed tears smudged down her cheeks after Ellie had been elected Carolina Campus Sweetheart and flaunted it in her sister’s face. A string of bad luck, mediocre grades, and pure jealousy turned Denise on to a daily diet of cocaine. That’s when she lost me and her dreams of a medical career.

    In late March, students and faculty mourned the death of Denise Hogue. The senior communications major had plunged from the top of the college library’s staircase. Campus police labeled the incident an unfortunate late night accident.

    The clock in the center of the quad stirred and began chiming. The soft sounds and smells of a southern summer on the verge of birthing begged me to come outside, forget the Hogue girls, forget what I saw. I shouldered my pack. Professor Thompson shook each student’s hand as the room emptied, offering best wishes for the break and reminding freshmen and sophomores to sign up for his Perspectives in Realism lecture next fall.

    I came to a decision and loped across the floor toward Ellie, the sketch heavy in my hand.

    "Mr. Grant, you’re truly gifted." Professor Thompson blocked me and grabbed my sooty hand. "You’re going where?"

    "Um, working toward my masters at NYU, then teaching somewhere." I watched the model over his shoulder as she gathered her purse and a dress and disappeared out the door.

    In the hallway the last grinning art student brushed by me. I caught a hint of the light-colored robe flash around the corner past the photo lab and I turned away from the exit, following the spirit.

    The George Pippin Art Center was closing for the spring semester. In another month, the halls would stink again with the sharpness of oil paints and turpentine, wet clay and glues. For now, though, the floor gleamed with an unaccustomed polish and the black lockers lining the walls gaped open. An odor of abandonment already ghosted the old building.

    No lights shone in the halls, only an orange glow coming from the old-fashioned campus streetlights outside classroom windows. Around another corner, a fluorescent yellow mop bucket propped open the door to the women’s bathroom. Cigarette smoke coiled from the interior. I poked my head halfway in. "Ellie? That you?"

    The tip of the cigarette flared from across the bathroom. "What do you want?" She came closer. I could see part of her face and a smooth pink sundress.

    "Why’d you run off? I wanted to show you my sketch." My hand trembled as I stepped forward, offering the drawing. "It looks just like you."

    She locked her eyes on mine and reached for the dense paper. Smoke streamed from her nostrils. "You’re going to NYU," she said.

    "Leaving for New York next month."

    "And I’m off to medical school in Miami. What do you think of that?" She sucked on the cigarette. The sketch hung lifeless in her hand.

    "I guess that’s great. It’s great."

    "So we should just say our good-byes right here. I’ll keep your drawing, if you don’t mind."

    "Do you like it?"

    She held it up and squinted. "It looks exactly like me. Exactly." Ash snowed down to the clean floor. "I had no idea you’d be in that class."

    My sandaled feet began to sweat. I ran a hand through my hair and hiked the backpack a little higher on my shoulder. "Look, I noticed the birthmark-"

    "You noticed nothing."

    "-and I just wanted to ask -"

    "You saw nothing!" She pinched the cigarette between her fingers. The weak glow in the building marked her face with deep furrows and charcoal-colored shadows. She dropped her voice low and moved close to me, breathing in my face. "Nothing."

    "Whose name should be on that tombstone?" I whispered.

    The sketch shuddered in her hand. "I’m Ellie Hogue."

    "I can help you."

    "I don’t need your help." Her thumb hooked around one sundress strap and pulled it down, revealing her breast. She took my hand and pressed it against the discoloration I’d seen earlier. "It’s a burn," she said.

    The skin was still hot, beginning to boil and blister and seethe under my fingers from the recent sting of a cigarette butt. I jerked my arm away.

    She smiled and blew smoke in my face. "Told you I don’t need your help."

    The smoke roiled and curled through the bathroom, blinding me. Her laughter bounced down the mopped floors. I turned and ran down the hallway, bursting out the glass doors into the clean night air outside the art center. No oil paint fumes out here to gag me, no turpentine molecules suctioning to my lungs, no murderer’s secondhand smoke poisoning me in a women’s bathroom. The sky was stained violet, freckled with stars. My backpack suddenly felt like it carried the weight of the world in its nylon interior.

    I’d done it, then. What Professor Thompson demanded of us the last semester of Living Art Workshop. I’d brought her to life on paper.