STOP IT, NORA. You have more self-control than this.
My fingers twitch on the keyboard, but my eyes don’t move from the screen. It’s not even that Nick’s Facebook profile is that interesting. It’s just . . . he changed his profile picture. Now, instead of the soccer team photo, he’s posted a picture of him at a party, mid-laugh, looking away from the camera. His hair is wavy, almost wet-looking. In the corner of the picture is an arm that I know has to be Lena’s because—
Stop it. I slam my laptop shut, like I’m actually closing my mind to all things Nick DiBasilio, and I make the responsible, adult decision to turn my attention to something slightly less sexy than the second alternate goalie on the boys’ varsity soccer team: the drawing I’m working on of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy making out. The sneer in Draco’s upper lip isn’t quite right. I need to make it clear from their body language alone: This isn’t a truth-or-dare peck between Drarry—this is a full-blown kiss that’s going to turn into some full-contact wand play in the Gryffindor common room later.
The gay erotic fandom community on Tumblr has turned out to be surprisingly profitable. Last month, I made enough money from customers—people requesting the most specific scenes they could think of—that I was able to go to Six Flags with Lena. For twenty dollars, I’ll draw a cartoon of any two characters of your choosing. For thirty, I’ll include a more elaborate background. And for fifty, I’ll add you into the mix.
Today’s to-do list includes the aforementioned gay Harry and Draco kiss (“No background, with Harry also wearing Slytherin robes too, please?”) and one illustration of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes sharing a bathtub.
How long am I spending on the drawing? It could be ten minutes or ten years. My mind is so focused on perfecting that curl in Draco’s lip, the slight . . . bulge . . . in his Hogwarts robe, making Harry’s hair just messy enough, that by the time I finish the sun has gone down completely behind the white roof of the 7-Eleven outside my bedroom window.
I blow on the page, careful not to smudge any of the still-wet black ink, and set it carefully beside the letter that I’ve kept in the place of honor at the corner of my desk for two months.
The letter is written on gorgeous paper, cream-colored with a dark, pressed logo at the top of the page: a minimalist lighthouse. This is the type of letterhead Pinterest was born for, the kind of stationery porn that could launch a thousand BuzzFeed listicles.
And then my eyes sneak down the page, and it gets even better from there:
Congratulations! We are pleased to offer you a spot as one of eight fellows at the Donegal Colony for Young Artists in the summer of 2017.
I could recite the entire acceptance letter from memory, along with the rest of the welcome packet, which is filled with details about lodging and meals and travel tips. All of the shiny-haired, clear-skinned students featured in its glossy photographs look like they were caught in the middle of the most hilarious inside joke. The group of them—so casually diverse that they have to be staged—all have their heads tossed back in big Julia Roberts laughs. I practice opening and shutting my jaw, but I don’t think I can even get my mouth that wide.
And then, a creak from the hallway tears me from my multiethnic reverie. I don’t even need to look to know that my mother is standing in the doorway. I instinctually flip the packet shut and place it innocently atop my Drarry drawing (the ink must be dry by now, right?) before picking up another one of the commissioned pieces I recently finished—Hermione Granger reading in bed as a ten-year-old—and staring at it like I’m scanning for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“You shouldn’t be keeping this stuff,” my mother says, walking into my room without being invited (there goes my theory that she’s actually a vampire) and pawing through the pile of old sketchbooks and pages that have turned my desk into something of a paper Jenga game. I keep eyeing the drawing of Draco and Harry, worried that it might fly out from under the welcome packet of its own volition and show my mother exactly how intimate my knowledge of the cartoon male anatomy has become. “I swear,” she says, “this room becomes messier every time I pass it. Are you breeding papers?”
“No, I’m pro-shelter.”
She ignores my hilarious joke and continues surveying my room, her fingers playing with the chunky turquoise necklace that sits above her abomination of a coral-colored sweater. She was probably going for “Capable Mom Back in the Workforce!” but the effect is more “Middle-Aged Little Mermaid Cosplayer.”
Her eyes settle on the green streak in my hair, which has been a topic in every single conversation we’ve had since I bleached and dyed it two weeks ago.
“It’s like you’ve been using your hair as a Kleenex,” she says, chuckling to herself with a clucking laugh like it’s the funniest joke she ever heard.
“Do you mind?” I say. “I’m trying to work.”
With a single stride, she crosses the room and snatches the Hermione drawing from my hand and brings it close to her face. “These aren’t your applications,” she says. “You’re drawing cartoons, Nora. I mean, look at this.” She lets the ripped, crumpled drawing fall to the floor. “You promised me you’d at least have a rough draft of your personal statement before you left.”
I slide to the carpet to rescue the drawing, but the damage is done. Even after smoothing it out it, the wrinkles in the page mean I won’t be able to upload the image. At least not without a spiderweb of shadow lines across it. A small tear threatens to separate Hermione’s left leg from her torso.
“You ripped it!” I wave the ruined drawing in her face.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says.
“I’m not being dramatic!” I slam the drawing on top of the quivering tower of papers on my desk, and, with a sound like a cartoon splat effect, the entire stack comes tumbling down. Papers soar through the air and land all over my carpet.
Jenga.
“Ugh!” My mom jumps back from the swelling flood of papers as if she’s trying to keep the hem of her pants dry. “Your room is a pigsty,” she says, her gaze sweeping with disgust past the fallen pile of papers and toward the T-shirts and sweatpants that have settled into a nest on my bedroom floor. “When you leave, this is all going in the trash.”
“This isn’t trash! These are my drawings.” I pull out a piece of scrap paper on which I doodled a giant man-eating pineapple with dripping fangs. “I mean, most of it isn’t trash.”
“I don’t want to have to look at this.”
“So don’t. Just close my door and don’t look. It’s fine.”
She clears her throat and repeats herself. “If I have to look at your messy room—”
“—which you don’t.”
“—which I do because it is in my home,” she continues, straightening her already perfect-posture spine, “this is all going to be recycled.”
“That’s not fair. One, I need to pack. Also, don’t forget Dad’s wedding is tomorrow, and that means I won’t have time to—”
My mother stiffens. I’m surprised she doesn’t hiss like a vampire smelling garlic. She’s mentioned Dad a grand total of three times since the divorce: once when he started dating Ms. Wright, once when she found his old navy-blue golf shirt in the wash (I was using it as a smock), and once when the wedding invitation arrived.
I didn’t think it was biologically possible, but somehow, my mother’s spine gets even straighter. “Clean your room, or I will deal with this when you’re gone,” she says and then leaves.
Since she’s gone back to work, my mother has been stressed, but the past few weeks she’s been criticizing my summer trip—three weeks at one of the most prestigious art programs for high school students in the world—as if it’s a personal inconvenience. “I assume you’ll be taking the money for airfare out of your Bat Mitzvah savings,” she had said immediately after hearing I’d been accepted.
Grandpa understands, though. He knows what this opportunity means. He knows that listing the DCYA on my college applications is basically a golden ticket to the Rhode Island School of Design. He knows how long I spent agonizing over my application. Should I include a landscape or an abstract portrait? (I went with both in the end.) What’s the best way to ask my art teacher, Mr. Kall, for a recommendation? Will they even want an American there when, according to my research/stalking, they let in three Americans last year and their website says they want “diversity of nations among the admitted students”?
I assume Grandpa pleaded my case to my mom, because two days later, despite continuing to mutter about “wasting time” and “focusing on a precollege program,” she took me to get a passport. And when Grandpa broke the news that he was going to pay for me to travel around Europe before and after the weeks I would spend studying at the Donegal Colony in Ireland, she barely protested.
I begin cleaning up the papers from the floor: not just pineapple doodles, it turns out, but old English reports (“Red Light, Green Light: The Great Gatsby and American Industrialism”); several failed self-portraits created after spending hours studying my face in the mirror only to end up with a drawing that looked like Jar Jar Binks; a worksheet covered in calculus notes that don’t look even a little bit familiar; and sketchbooks that I can’t bring myself to throw away. Attempting to clean up now is akin to asking someone to drain the ocean with an eyedropper and be done by noon the next day: a futile effort. I let the pages fall from my arms back onto the floor and return to my desk to get a final look at the Drarry cartoon before I scan it to Tumblr. Let my mother yell about my messy room all she wants. I’ll be across the Atlantic Ocean.