Chapter Text
Victoria Chase double-checked her notes from her interview with Max Caulfield, which would be condensed into an illustrated five-page article in a programme for a showing of her former schoolmate's most recent anthology in the Chase family's Seattle gallery. She was still smiling slightly at the complete irony that Max Caulfield, of all people, was now a celebrated visual artist whose work commanded a high price and about whom professional art critics would pontificate for many thousand words. Who would have imagined mousy Max, the social outcast who only ever seemed to connect with other outsiders, would one day be a huge thing in photography?
Well...
Looking back, Victoria decided that, if she hadn't been so blinded by her schoolyard jealousy and desire for social climbing, maybe she would have. She'd just been so mad at Max being the apparent vector for the fall of her idol (and, embarrassingly enough, crush), the now-jailed kidnapper and serial rapist Mark Jefferson. She'd been so furious that Max had dared make a point of becoming best friends with Kate Marsh and for all the good things she did for no other reason than they were the right thing to do, without the slightest hope of reward. All those stupid, immature complexes left her so unable to see what was in front of her when Max received a special prize at the end of that semester for the quality of her work despite having dropped out.
Switching windows on her laptop, Victoria began to browse through the digital version of Max's first anthology: Expressions. Max's simple notes, provided as part of her submission to Blackwell Academy's art faculty at just the cusp of 18 years old, had stated that she had wished to create portraits that communicated certain abstract concepts or emotions without any other context. Things like Light, Alive, Commitment and the like. It was in many ways a fine work; still rough around the edges but in which one could already see what would be Max's signature style.
Mark Jefferson had noticed Max's interest in photographic portraiture but who knew if he was aware of where it had gone after his arrest and imprisonment?
Max's photos were all basically the same - Figures in the foreground tended to be the primary focus with the background hardly factoring in at all, being almost anything but never being allowed to gain any real attention. Everything was about the framing, costuming (or not) and posing of the model. Sometimes, the model's positioning in the frame seemed wildly improper for a portrait but, at the second glance, communicated much by what was implied to be just out-of-frame.
Victoria supposed that one of the reasons why she, aged eighteen, didn't really appreciate Expressions for the fine journeyman work that it was that the model in every single piece was Kate Marsh. Victoria, who at the time had the conceit of being a great beauty, had been reduced to a blazing lather of jealousy at the effortless beauty and talent shown by Blackwell Academy's resident Church Mouse in her first ever modelling gig.
According to Max's notes, the first picture, chronologically, was Appeal and this was also probably the most complex in terms of background and context. Kate was photographed sitting on the window-sill of her dorm room in the Prescott Dorms, wearing what Victoria thought of as her 'school uniform', the black skirt-and-jacket ensemble with the high-necked blouse. The young woman had her pet rabbit (what was it called? Allie? Alexis? Oh, yes, Alice) in her lap. However, for those who knew Kate, it was the small differences that mattered. No shoes and socks; Kate's bare and sculpted legs, dangling inside the window; the top two buttons on her blouse undone and the smaller crucifix on a shorter chain that Max had bought her as a birthday present prominent on the young woman's bare neck and dangling down perilously towards an only-hinted cleavage; some of Kate's long blonde hair, loosened from its bun and trailing down the front of her left shoulder and breast like a wave; the woman's gentle, warm smile (the smile of a woman with a secret) and her glancing shyly up at Max through her eyelashes. Yes, the appeal was there and it was completely in Max and Kate's nature that, at the time, neither of them truly understood the message in Kate's expression and how Max posed her and caught just the exact moment.
Victoria's notes told her that Kate had actually encouraged Max to take the photograph; the hipster shutterbug had been as devastated as the rest of the art class that the charismatic Mr Jefferson was actually a monster and she had lost the will to make her art for a long time. Apparently, Kate had commissioned Max to take this portrait and had been very strict in demanding that her best friend carry it out. However, apart from the basic costume, the posing, lighting and framing of the picture and even the inclusion of Alice had been all Max.
Both of them had agreed that Appeal was too good for its intended purpose as a Thanksgiving gift to Kate's parents (and, Victoria suspected, that the sensual undertones of Kate's pose and body language made both of them reluctant to let the religiously-conservative Marsh parents see it).
"Max made me feel beautiful," Kate had said in a rare interview on the subject of the portrait. "I'd never felt beautiful like that before." This gift was reciprocated a few years later, a full-body nude oil painting by Kate of a neutrally- but not-stiffly-posed Max looking at herself in a full-length dressing mirror entitled Really a Woman (one of the few 'adult' works Kate had ever done, preferring her more usual ouvre of comic-style narrative illustration for most of her work). Max had always been a tomboy, reluctant to show her feminine traits, so the work Kate did on posing and framing, highlighting beauty and desirability without lapsing into overt erotica was considered quite an notable achievement... and probably made it a good thing that she was long estranged from her mother.
Back to Expressions, which was made up of forty-seven portraits of Kate in various clothing (and Myself, one very carefully-posed and dimly-lit nude with zero visible 'naughty bits') and poses, all communicating various ideas and feelings. It was produced by Max and Kate over a period of about five weeks in August-September whilst the pre-shocks of the Jefferson/Prescott trial rumbled on. If there was ever any doubt that Kate was entirely Max's muse at this point in her life, they could be safely laid to rest if one observed the anthology with any degree of open-mindedness or a critical eye.
Victoria had always loved Alive the most, featuring Kate posed against a brick wall somewhere (which she seemed to almost be jumping up against) in a simple white t-shirt and blue jeans, looking over her shoulder at Max with her face and hazel eyes shining with life, happiness and excitement, her blonde hair an unbound golden waterfall down her back. If there had been any proof that Kate was finally escaping from those horrible events of which Victoria had, to her shame, been a major part, this was it...
Max won the gold medal for art that semester and Expressions (save Myself, which was judged too emotionally intense and intimate for inclusion) went on to feature at an Oregon State Young Artists exhibition where it received a lot of critical attention and praise. However, Max was not there to receive it; indeed both artist and muse were already at the beginning of a journey that would take them mostly out of the public eye for fifteen months.