“Comic book shop.” She took it, paged through. “I rode Greyhound up here and this book got me in trouble. Guy across from me saw me reading something with boobs on the cover and took it as an invitation to bone. Had to fend off advances from Atlanta to Cincinnati. It’s like, hey sports fan, do you not know a dyke when you see one?”
I tried to look nonchalant. I’d heard one of my more redneck uncles use that word in tones of absolute poison to describe his ex-wife. After my missing aunt Marilyn, Mel Vaught was the second lesbian I’d ever met.
“I took Amtrak,” I said, recovering.
She picked up a Ho Ho. Inspected it but did not eat. “Yeah. I thought about Amtrak, too. But the bus was easier. Mom’s out of the picture, and I lived with my aunt, who’s great, but getting up there, you know? Couldn’t really do the trip. I told her I’d be okay on the bus. Which I was, mostly. With the exception of Stiffie McGoo.”
“My parents couldn’t get off work,” I said. “I read a lot.” Guh. Lame, I thought. But Mel just nodded. Took down the Ho Ho in two bites.
“So where’s your mom?” I asked her.
“Jail.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. She’s in there good, too. She had a parole hearing last summer and she thought it would be a good idea to send the judge a great big bouquet of fuck-yous right before. I think she called him a ‘punk-ass bitch,’ if memory serves? Charm for miles, lemme tell you.”
Mel said this with a weird, offhand cheer. I still wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t joking. But I looked at her through the smoke and I saw something in her eyes, something strapped and grim I only saw in kids back home, the really poor ones. Holler kids who wore flannel shirts from the Family Resource Center, ones from families with too many kids to feed or parents who were crankheads, at their best when they were absent. The hard times kids.
I realized, with a start, that Mel was one of them. I wasn’t, not really. But she was, nevertheless, the closest thing to myself that I’d found at Ballister.
She must be drunk if she willingly told me that, I thought. Letting her guard slip. And this, I already knew about Ballister—the place was all about putting your guard way, way up.
She must have sensed what I was thinking, because she flopped over the side of the bed, upside down, and laced her hands over her belly. “Ballister’s weird. But it’s like my sketchbook, man. I have to draw what I have to draw, and if it’s where I’m from, so be it. And I have zero fucks to give about what McIntosh or anyone else has to say about it. I’m not interested in spending the rest of my four years trying to defend how I got here. I’m working.”
She burped, closed-mouthed. Pointed at me. “So it’s okay to say where you’re from, Kisses. All right?”
I’d been caught. I nodded.
“So what are you planning on doing with your stuff?” she asked me. “What’s next.”
“My stuff?”
“Your work.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Well,” I said, “I don’t really know yet. I was kind of hoping I’d figure it out here.”
She nodded. Waiting for more.
“Like, I know there are things I want to make,” I continued. “But I don’t know how they’re going to get made yet. You know? Like. I don’t know.” I scratched my head. Shrugged.
“It’s okay,” she said suddenly, splaying her hands out in a surrender gesture. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, man. It’s not a big deal. I’m just nosy as fuck.”
“That’s cool,” I told her.
“I’m gonna be an animator,” she said. “I thought that might be your thing, too, judging by your stuff. You’d be really good.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man. Animate. What else is there?”
I felt lucky that Mel was talking to me in the first place, had chosen to talk to me. If she believed in something, it had to have credibility. I shook my head anyway. “But you’re so talented,” I told her.
She laughed. Pawed, still upside down, at a pack of Zebra Cakes. “I don’t think they let you do it if you suck. Here. Lemme see that sketch from class today.”
She rose, made a grabby hand at my backpack. I pushed it to her and she rummaged through. Fished out the sketch and held it up, studying it, chewing thoughtfully for a moment. She tilted the sketch toward me. “Imagine your dog,” she said. “Right here. See, you’ve already got the beginnings. The sort of hazy quality here, right around his feet. The paws are where they are now, but you’ve made this, like, tension. There’s this potential to move. You were thinking about his next step, even when you were drawing him like he is. Weren’t you?”
She gestured to the paws, the wavery sense of them I spent hours getting just right. It was true. It was what I thought about whenever I sat down to draw something. The story. Where has this been? Where is it going next? I’d never said it aloud, but somehow Mel had known.
“It’s the greatest thing you can do for something,” she said. “Giving it movement. Possibility.”
She handed the sketch back. Looked at me very seriously for a moment, considering me. She said it again. “You’d be really good.”