“You know,” Wendy says, staring at the ground. “Like, whatever.”
I laugh. “No, I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, you can draw literally anything. Anything that exists and stuff that doesn’t even exist. You be more specific.”
“Specific,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” I say. “As in, narrow it down a little m?—”
“No, I know what ‘specific’ means,” Wendy says, and there is this edge to her voice that’s almost teenage and makes me want to smirk. “I guess I just don’t know,” she says. “I don’t get to draw a lot,” she adds in a softer voice.
I glance up. There’s another sketchbook on my cart. Strathmore. I accidentally got smoother paper than I wanted, not enough tooth to it. Makes my pencil skid all over the place, and I like a little resistance. “Here.” I reach, grab, toss it at her like a frisbee. “Go crazy.”
Wendy clutches the thing like it’s the holy bible. “Really?” she says. “You don’t need it?”
I give a short laugh. “I have more sketchbooks than any human could ever reasonably need,” I say, drily. “I’ll be buried under a pyramid of them like an Egyptian pharaoh.”
Wendy laughs, and I like that she got that it was a joke. It’s not alie, but it is funny. “Here.” I scrabble a pencil up from my cart and reel my arm back. “Go long.”
She flinches, but then I just hand it to her. “Only kidding,” I say quickly.
“I can pay you for it,” she says quickly. “I mean, I don’t have any money, but.”
“You don’t have to pay me,” I say. “That shit’s tax deductible anyway. I mean, stuff.”
Wendy frowns. “What’s deductible?”
“It…” I close my eyes briefly. “It doesn’t matter.” I glance at the wall clock. It’s now ten of eleven, which means my first appointment’s in forty minutes, and I’m still not, in a technical sense, done with this sketch I’m presenting to my client.
I look back at the sleeve design. “Listen, if you want to be helpful, you can…” I tap my teeth together, casting about the room for something that a kid can reasonably handle safely. No needles, obviously. Ink’s too expensive. “…go organize the flash binders? Over there,” I indicate. “By the lounge. Just fix any of the pages that are falling out.”
“I can do that,” Wendy says, and she jumps up. And does it, right away. At first I watch her, looking up every few seconds from my sketch. To make sure she isn’t, I don’t know, huffing the hypochlorous acid or something. But she doesn’t. She just gets to work. Tidying all the laminated pages, rearranging. The dog trott-trotting after her every step. It’s cute, kind of. I’ve never been one for dogs, more of a cat person. But this one’s very elegant. Like the sort of dog a Renaissance lady would have reclining in her lap for a portrait, or on a coat of arms?—
Bam. Yes. The sleeve. I see it before I can articulate it, and suddenly I’m back with a pencil, sketching, lining, rearranging until I have it: less stained glass, more heraldic crest. Not something I know as well in my visual memory, but I can evokeit okay. And the concept is cool. Elegant, almost baroque. A chance for me to work with strong lines and bold colors, but outside of just your Sailor Jerry type shit. I leave the figure rough in the center and focus on the frame: blossoms and vines curling around gold edges of the shield, a lion rearing and a dog sleeping. Natural and constructed, strength and softness, something something about contrasts, duality, I don’t know what. Don’t press me on the thematics here, but it works.
I get so into sketching that I almost forget there’s anyone else with me.
Until Wendy speaks so close to my ear, I nearly fall off my stool.
“Sorry!” She jumps back. “Um, that’s really good though.”
“Thanks,” I pant. My spidey senses notwithstanding, sometimes the act of drawing just swallows me up. Maybe it’s PTSD, I don’t know, but I am way too jumpy to be snuck up on like that. I drag my wrist over my forehead and the faint sheen of sweat. “Sorry,” I apologize again. “I just… I forgot you were there and…” I swallow. “You like it?”
She nods. “What’s going in the middle?”
“Oh, yeah.” I glance back at the sketch. “The whole idea for the sleeve was a Joan of Arc motif, so that’ll be Joan.” At Wendy’s blank stare, I elaborate. “She was like…a medieval knight?” I realize I don’t knowthatmuch about the actual history, only that Joan of Arc was alive sometime after Jesus but before Shakespeare. “She, uh, cut off her hair and led an army. And then she won. But then her people burned her at the stake because they thought she was a witch or something.”
“Whoa,” Wendy says. “For real?”
“Yeah,” I say.Don’t fact-check me on the specifics here, but.“Because women weren’t supposed to do that back then.”
“Cut their hair?”
I give a short laugh. “That, sure. I think the army part was the bigger problem.” I shrug. “So, yeah. The design’s kind of symbolic for the client. I was going to do this stained glass thing”—I flip back to show her my old sketch—“but then I thought maybe this one would be cooler. I just…” I chew my lip. “I can’t get her to look right.”
Wendy peers down, considering. “Yeah,” she says after a moment. “She looks weird.”
I’m so surprised I have to let out a laugh. “Gee, thanks.”
Wendy flushes a bit. “I just mean?—”
