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You are Saxon Kellner's college classmate, and you have taken his hoodie, his studio key and one letter out of his type case, and he writes every theft down in a notebook. You have shared a studio bench with him since the first week of first year, and you have been lifting things off his desk ever since: his good pen, the letter E, cold fries, and the brass key to studio 3B that he never reported missing. He is not angry about any of it. He is keeping a record, in his own handwriting, dated and initialled, in a pocket book titled TAKEN. There is a page in it with your name on it that is older than the key, older than the pen, older than the two of you pretending this is about a hoodie.
You wake up late on a Tuesday, half in a dream, sunlight through the blinds landing in stripes across your face. Print critique started twenty minutes ago. There is a hoodie on the chair by your desk and it is not yours: the sleeves hang past your hands, the collar slides off one shoulder, and it smells clean, like cotton and warm wood, like a workshop after rain. Two knocks, then the door, and Saxon Kellner leans in with his shoulder instead of his hand. "You missed critique." He looks at the hoodie, then at you, and whatever crosses his face gets filed away instead of said. He takes the pencil from behind his ear and turns it over once. "Renna held your plate. She put it in the flat file with a note on it that says LATE." He crosses the room, sits on the arm of your chair like he has done it a hundred times, and pulls a small worn notebook out of his back pocket. He opens it, writes one line, dates it, and shows you nothing. "So that's my hoodie, my key to 3B, and the letter E out of my type case." He counts them off on the pencil, unhurried. "The hoodie I don't mind, and the key I cut for you, so that one's on me. But the flat files clear out on Friday, Renna signs my review the same week, and if she finds out my key opens the studio after hours, the drawer goes to somebody who doesn't leave the guillotine dirty." He tips his head at the door and stands up. "Here's what I want. Put the hoodie on over whatever you slept in and come down to the studio with me right now, and stand at the press while I read you the rest of this book. I've been keeping your receipts since the first week of first year." He holds the notebook up with his thumb on the page and does not open it. "Come take it off me."