Veiled Envoy

The acrylic blank was warm in my hand, still smelling faintly of the laser cutter, that burnt-sugar stink that clings to the workshop no matter how many fans I run. I turned it over. The protective film on the back peeled up at one corner, and I pressed it down with my thumb, hard, until it stuck.

"Kak, jadi nggak?"

Rani leaned across the counter, chin almost on the glass. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Her hijab was the exact shade of a mango skin and her phone case matched, which I figured was not a coincidence. She'd been in here three times this week. Once to ask if I could draw a cat wearing a graduation gown, once to ask if the cat could also hold a tiny diploma, and once, today, to stand silently by the display case while I finished someone else's order.

"Almost," I said. "You want to see it?"

She nodded so fast her glasses slipped.

I slid the blank under the press and pulled the transfer sheet. The design was mine, drawn in Procreate over four nights, then printed and laid down layer by layer: a small round figure, chibi proportions, big head, tiny hands. Black hijab wrapped close around the face. Long skirt, dark blazer, a book tucked under one arm. Behind her, a globe, and around her, a semicircle of flags I'd simplified into flat color blocks because at this size, three centimeters across, detail turns to mud.

The press hissed. Rani held her breath, which people do around machines, as if their lungs might disturb the pressure.

I peeled the carrier sheet back slow. The colors came up clean. The little diplomat's eyes were two dots and a shine, but they had direction, they were looking slightly off to the left, at something beyond the frame, like she was listening to someone just out of view. That was the part I was proudest of. The rest of it was just layout.

"Ya Allah," Rani said. "It's her."

"It's a keychain."

"It's *her*." She reached for it and I moved it out of range, because the resin coating still needed to cure and I wasn't about to let a high schooler put a thumbprint in my work. "Kak Wulan, seriously, this is exactly what I described. Even the book. Even the way she stands."

"Standing is easy. It's a chibi. They all stand the same."

"No, they don't." She pulled out her phone and started photographing it from six angles. "Can I post this? Please. I'll tag you."

I said yes because she was going to post it anyway, and because the shop's Instagram had four hundred followers and I needed all of them. She typed fast, thumbs flying, and I watched the little diplomat sit there under the light, glazed and patient, waiting to be attached to a ring and clipped to a bag and carried around by a girl who would probably lose it within a month.

That's the job. You make a thing, someone loses it, someone else orders another. I've been doing it for three years now out of a twelve-square-meter shop in a mall corridor that smells like the bakery two doors down. I have a stool, a laptop, a press, and a wall of finished samples that I rearrange when I'm bored. The samples are mostly animals. Animals sell. Cats, rabbits, a corgi with a birthday hat that's outsold everything else I've ever made, including the anime girls and the wedding portraits and the one time I did a full set of the Avengers in batik.

People don't usually order themselves. That's the thing. They order their pets, their kids, their favorite characters, their boyfriends. They order the version of themselves they wish they were. Rani was the first person in months to walk in and ask for a girl in a hijab holding a book with a globe behind her, and to say, when I asked what the occasion was, *it's for me.*

She was still typing. I wiped the counter, which didn't need wiping.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Mm."

"Why a diplomat?"

She looked up. Behind the glasses her eyes were the kind of brown that goes gold in the right light, and the shop's light was not the right light, it was fluorescent and flat, but you could tell they'd be gold somewhere else.

"Because that's what I'm going to be," she said.

"Okay."

"You don't believe me."

"I didn't say that."

"Your face said it." She put the phone down. "Everyone's face says it. My mom says diplomat is a rich kid's job. My teacher says I should focus on my grades first, which, fine, but she says it like the two things can't happen at the same time. My uncle says why not just be a teacher, teachers are needed, and I said diplomats are needed too, and he laughed."

I picked up the blank and turned it to the light, checking the edge for bubbles. There were none.

"What's your English like?" I asked.

"Bagus." She caught herself. "Good. I mean, good. I read a lot. I watch things without subtitles."

"Arabic?"

"Learning. Slow. There's an app."

"And you know what a diplomat actually does all day? Because I don't. I know they go to meetings and stand in photos."

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "They talk to people who don't want to talk to them. And they keep talking until something changes. That's the whole job. My father works at the port, he deals with customs, and he says half of it is just knowing how to sit in a room with someone who's angry at you and not make it worse."

That was a better answer than I had for most things.

I told her the keychain would be ready Friday. She paid half up front, forty thousand rupiah, and wrote her number on the receipt in handwriting so neat it looked printed. At the door she turned around.

"Kak, if I bring you a photo of me, can you make one that looks like my face?"

"That's a different price."

"I'll save."

She left. The bell above the door did its two-note thing. I sat back down on the stool and looked at the blank again, the little diplomat with her book and her flags and her eyes fixed on something I couldn't see.

Here's what I didn't tell her. I made the design in one night. She came in Tuesday with the idea and by Wednesday morning it was done, and I don't work that fast, not ever. I usually sit on a design for a week, redraw the hands four times, hate it, come back. This one came out the first time. I don't know why. Some orders are like that. You get a picture in your head and your hand just knows where to put the lines.

But there was one thing I changed. In her description she said the figure should hold the book against her chest, both arms wrapped around it, like it was precious. I drew it that way first. It looked wrong. Too soft, too much like a girl protecting something she was afraid to lose. So I moved the book to one arm, tucked like a folder, and gave the other hand nothing, open at her side, and that was the version that worked. The version that looked like she was on her way somewhere.

I don't know why I did that. It's not my place to change what a customer asks for. But I did it, and she looked at the result and said *it's her*, so maybe I knew something she didn't, or maybe I just got lucky.

Friday came. She didn't.

I waited until seven, an hour past close, and then I locked up and walked to the bus stop. The keychain was in my bag, wrapped in tissue, ring attached, exactly as ordered. I told myself she'd come Monday. Kids forget. Kids have exams. Kids have mothers who say diplomat is a rich kid's job and take their phones away.

Monday she didn't come either.

I put the keychain in the display case, front and center, next to the corgi. A woman bought it Wednesday. She didn't ask what it was. She said it was cute and her daughter liked things with flags. I sold it for sixty-five thousand and I stood there after she left with the cash in my hand and felt something I couldn't name, something like when you write a word over and over until it stops meaning anything.

Three weeks later Rani's number called me at eleven at night.

Not her voice. A man's. He said he was her father, and he said it in a way that made me sit down on the floor of my shop with my back against the press, and he asked if I was the one who made the keychain, the one with the girl and the flags, and I said yes.

He said, "She took it with her."

Then he said other things, and I listened, and outside the mall corridor the bakery was closed and the lights were off and the whole place was quiet except for his voice coming through the phone, and I thought about the night I drew her, the way the lines came easy, the way I moved the book from her chest to her arm because I wanted her to look like she was going somewhere.