“Just some kids I hung around with this summer.” She had a funny voice, deep with the puncture of broken glass. It made me look up for a second before I went back to my sketchbook.
In my first weeks at Ballister, I kept my ambition secret. I wanted so badly to be more than what I felt. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be great, even. But I was cowed by the knowledge that everyone else here did, too—people who’d come from bigger places and better schools than I had, people who’d traveled and had training and experiences and seemed, in a strange way, more like people out in the world than I’d ever been or, I feared, ever would be. Seeing their work—good, bad, comparable to mine—only ever made me think of what I could do, if I could do it better, and not with a sense of confidence or competitiveness, but fear.
When I looked at Mel’s stuff, I felt something different. I didn’t know how to quantify what I was seeing in words, but I could feel it. She was naturally, easily good, and when I saw things she had done, I felt a curiously pleasurable pressure at my middle. It was an expansive, generous feeling. Before I saw her, even, I saw what she did.
Class ended. I watched Zack pick up his backpack and head out the door in the direction of the dorms, and saw one of the girls in class who did work I called, in my head, Hallmark crap—beatific faces, brave seascapes—catch up to him, blond hair bouncing against her coat.
Then I heard that broken-glass voice next to me. “Nice work up there today.”
I turned. Mel was pulling a denim jacket over her skinny shoulders. She smiled, ticked her head back in recognition.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I like seeing McIntosh clam up,” she said. “Like, when something floors him and he doesn’t have any Sorbonne stories in response and he’s forced to just shut the fuck up. Doesn’t that give you joy?”
“I do like it better when he’s not talking.”
There was a cluster growing behind us—Margaret, the diplomat’s daughter, a boy named Edward whose mother was some sort of photography bigwig at Vogue, and a girl from Mexico named Reva whose family was rumored to run a drug cartel and who was wearing a bracelet studded with what I assumed were real diamonds. Just a few in the parade of intimidation that was Ballister. They’d all been pulled in by Mel; were surreptitiously following her, in fact.
“We’re gonna try this bar downtown,” Mel said. “Wanna come?”
My sister had given me a gift before I left Kentucky. She’d never had much use for me—for most of our lives, the fact that we were related was her chief shame—but when I accepted the scholarship and we both knew I would soon leave for a place she’d never been, she began to look at me with new, slightly awed regard. The night before my train was scheduled to leave, she tossed me a little square wrapped in paper and said, “Here’s your going-away present.”
It was a fake ID, a very poor one, but in the days before holograms and magnetic strips, it was laminated and had the Kentucky Commonwealth logo on it, so it would do fine. The brunette in the picture looked nothing like me and was named Nicole Cockrell.
“Let’s see your fakie,” Mel said on the way to the bar. She leaned over, pushing her horn-rims to the top of her head. I was struck by the way she smelled—like men’s deodorant, low-grade and spicy. She pulled her fake out, we compared—she was Jocelyn Stone—and she went, “Heh heh.”
It was mostly me Mel talked to that night. The rest of the art kids eventually left, but we stayed, huddled at the bar with Miller High Lifes. “They can’t hold their liquor yet,” Mel said, wagging her hand at the door. “Kiddies.” I didn’t tell her that I could count on one hand the number of times I’d gotten drunk.
I saw the corner of a brightly colored book sticking from her bag. Deadbone Erotica. On the cover, wonky neon lizards cavorted with large-breasted Amazonian women.
I plucked it out, looked it over. “What’s this?”
Mel raked her hand through her pageboy. It was the longest I would ever see her hair. Two weeks later, she would hit it with cerulean Manic Panic and walk around Smurf-headed until Christmas. Then she shaved it all off and bitched about the northern winter teabagging her scalp.
“That’s fuckin rad is what that is.” She leaned over and tapped the Deadbone cover. “You like comics.” It wasn’t a question.
I flipped through. It was drawn in a bubble style: weird, druggy shapes. I had just started paying attention to method, color, how things were rendered, the technical shit they wake you up to in school that you can’t help but see everywhere after. The comic was alive, bright and blasted. But there was something else drawing me in—the yellowed paper, the deep, musty smell. It was like cutting down a tree and counting the rings within. A creepy awareness of the years passing.