The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
PROLOGUE:
INTRODUCTION TO SKETCH
Introduction to Sketch was held in Prebble Hall, a building Professor McIntosh called “Ballister’s dirtiest secret” during our first class. Prebble was an ancient, pipe-clanking fortress on the edge of campus with heating problems, leaky ceilings, and those 1930s wall radiators we used to melt crayons on in grade school. “You pay fifty thousand dollars a year to attend this institution,” he said, “and they stick you in a hovel for four years. It’s because they hate art.”
The tuition comment didn’t hold much weight for me. I was on scholarship. My peers talked about skiing in Aspen and summers in the Hamptons. Ballister was their safety school when Stanford and Duke eluded them. They spoke with the opaque, offhand world knowledge of the privileged. My first weekend there, I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse. Terrified of the cafeteria’s clamor, I had taken to eating three meals of ramen noodles a day in my dorm room.
I went to Ballister because of the visual arts program, because they’d given me their Poor Appalachian Kid scholarship, and because it was as far away from home as I could manage. I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else. In high school, I sampled my way up and down the artistic spectrum methodically, like the good student I was, hoping I’d land on something that sparked me: I sketched, I constructed shadowboxes, I threw some rudimentary pots, trying a little of everything, committing seriously to nothing. Too scared, at that point, to put myself at stake for fear of failure. The revelation, maybe, that I had nothing to give. I had yet to encounter anything that made the risk seem worthwhile. I came to Ballister hoping that being there would put an end to my floundering. That I would finally buckle down and find what I was supposed to make, and that it would mean something.
I had taken the Amtrak train twenty-two hours out of Maysville, Kentucky, to the tiny upstate New York town in which Ballister was located. Ballister was, I was surprised to learn, not too terribly removed from Canada. My parents’ geographic sense of the north wasn’t much better than mine. They didn’t believe me at first, when I told them I was five hours from New York City and hence out of harm’s reach. Before I left, my father cleared his throat and thumped me on the back like I was another man. My mother gave me a fierce hug, something with a degree of pain to it, and said with her chin hooked over my shoulder, “Don’t you come back pregnant.”
My parents met working in a factory that made lawnmower parts. The brand’s claim to fame: George Jones had once drunkenly straddled its luxury model while pursued by the Texas State Police. They were resigned to their jobs, to each other, and to us, their children, who had all the fish sticks and Nintendo we needed. They watched Wheel of Fortune with three feet of space between them on the couch. They fought often, and loudly. Neither had gone to college; they hoped I would become something useful, like a CPA.