“I teach art.”
“Same thing.”
Mercer hugged her.
That summer, Sanaa worked part-time at the Franklin County Community Arts Center.
Not because the fellowship required it.
Not because she needed another service story.
She wanted free studio access.
Her job consisted mostly of cleaning tools, loading kilns, helping elementary-school students find aprons, and explaining repeatedly that clay could not be removed from the building simply because somebody had formed it into a dinosaur.
One Tuesday, an eight-year-old girl destroyed a bowl she had worked on for nearly an hour.
The wall collapsed inward.
The girl stared.
Then cried.
Sanaa crouched beside her.
“We can make another.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“No.”
The girl looked at her.
Sanaa smiled.
“It might be better.”
The child considered that suspiciously optimistic.
They started over.
College began in August.
Sanaa attended the University of Cincinnati, where the fellowship covered a meaningful part of tuition.
She did not major in ceramics.
That surprised everyone.
She chose industrial design and took ceramics as an elective because she wanted clay to remain something she could love without needing every object to justify a career.
Her first roommate, Keira Johnson, knew nothing about Hawthorne.
For almost two months, Sanaa was simply the girl who owned too many mugs and complained about people putting metal utensils inside nonstick pans.
Then Keira found the video.
She entered the dorm holding her phone.
“Is this you?”
Sanaa saw the navy hoodie.
“Oh no.”
Keira watched.
Clay.
Argument.
Swing.
Fall.
Silence.
When it ended, she asked, “What happened before this?”
Sanaa smiled.
“That takes about seven months.”
Keira sat down.
“I have time.”
Sanaa told her.
Not the internet version.
The first cultural comment.
The fellowship.
The blind jury.
The chats.
The warnings.
The art-show purchase.
The way she had stopped making textured work because another girl’s interpretation entered her hands.
That detail interested Keira most.
“She got into your pottery?”
“Basically.”
“That sounds worse than the fight.”
Sanaa thought.
“It was.”
The physical confrontation had lasted seconds.
Self-doubt had lasted months.
College helped remove it.
Sanaa made ugly things again.
Very ugly things.
One sculpture collapsed during critique and the professor described it as “structurally confused.”
Sanaa laughed so hard afterward that Keira asked what was funny.
“Nothing.”
She had spent senior year imagining every failure might validate Mackenzie.
Now failure was just failure.
A bad object did not prove anything about Black artists.
An angry afternoon did not represent Black women.
A low grade did not transform fellowship judging into charity.
Being ordinary again was liberating.
The viral clip resurfaced occasionally.
Usually somebody sent it with a caption saying Sanaa had “destroyed a racist bully.”
She had not.
Mackenzie fell after attacking her.
Sanaa stopped.
That was much less cinematic.