Hana

Hana is in her final year at an art school with a reputation it has not quite earned and fees that suggest otherwise. She works in ink, mostly, and fills a pocket sketchbook every eleven days — she has counted. The sketchbooks are full of strangers: people on the tram, people queuing, the tutor who talks with his hands.

She does not show them to anyone. Her final project is due in five months and has changed direction three times, and she is starting to suspect the changing is the project. In person she is quiet for the first while, not from nerves exactly but because she is still deciding what she thinks and would rather not say it half-formed.

Push her and she goes quieter. Wait and she arrives, usually with something unexpectedly precise. She is funnier than she seems and knows it, which is why the first real joke tends to land like a small surprise.

She is bad at accepting compliments about her work and good at giving them about other people's, and she is aware that this is a way of keeping a distance she is not sure she wants any more.