The Art of Us Read online

  “I have to go back to the office right now, though,” I told her.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you’ll spend Saturday holed up in there!”

  “No, I promise I won’t. I got back on track for the next issue of Switch, so don’t worry about it. I just forgot my notebook and I feel kind of…naked.”

  She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Suit yourself. I’m going to meet my man. Call me if you feel like joining us later tonight.”

  I biked to the office, latched my bike on the bike rack outside our building, and went upstairs. I could have easily spent the rest of the day up there, but after the run-in with Amos the night before, I was afraid to be alone in the office.

  I was being irrational. I knew he wasn’t going to be here at that time—him or anyone else. I walked by his cubicle just to be safe, however, and was just a little bit disappointed when I confirmed that my fears were completely unnecessary.

  Still, I stopped and started to notice every little thing in his space. I ran my fingers over some sticky notes he had stuck on his desk; they seemed to be remarks about his storyboard. I took one of his pens in my hand and noticed it was slightly chewed on the cap. On a corner of his cubicle there was a small poster of Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a framed issue of The Incredible Hulk signed by Jim Steranko, and a laminated drawing of Strangers in Paradise signed by Terry Moore. I kept glancing around, looking for signs of his personal life, and realized just how stalkerish my behavior was.

  It dawned on me that he didn’t have a picture of him and his girlfriend.

  For some reason, this pleased me at first, but the feeling of victory was replaced almost immediately by a wave of self-loathing.

  I suck.

  What was I trying to accomplish, anyway?

  I’d told myself I was going to stay away from him, and snooping around his desk was not the right thing to do. I forced myself to walk away and went to my desk to retrieve my notebook.

  Only, when I did, I noticed something weird: my notebook was not on my desk, where I always put it.

  It was in my chair.

  I frowned, trying to remember if I’d accidentally put it there before leaving.

  My chest tightened and my heart sped up, a growing suspicion making me both scared and excited at the thought of what I might find.

  I opened up the book and flipped through the pages until I found what I was looking for.

  He did this.

  Amos had drawn pages upon pages of panels of sketches to mirror the ones I had been drawing. I hadn’t been working on my Aiko fanfic because I had gotten stuck with the storyline, and now he had taken the story forward.

  I traced my fingers over the vignette. His drawings were pretty similar to Ishikawa’s hand, and they integrated pretty seamlessly with my own sketches. It had taken me years to be able to mimic Ishikawa’s style.

  I dropped down in my chair, part of me in awe of what he’d done, and the other part completely pissed off.

  How dare he mess with my stuff? Why did he think it was even remotely okay to write in my notebook? Why had he done it?

  What were his motives?

  Then I found the explanation in one of the last panels, where two of the characters sort of relived the same moment we had gone through the night before, only, at the end of it, the two characters kissed.

  I was furious.

  I could be a cold-hearted loner, but I wasn’t one who played games with people.

  I grabbed a pencil and started sketching my response.

  AMOS

  “I’m having dinner with my parents this week,” Olivia said on Sunday morning as we waited for our breakfast.

  We were sitting al fresco at a newer establishment in Portland, one that had gotten rave reviews for their brunch. Their buttermilk fried chicken and waffles was supposedly to die for, and I couldn’t wait to try it myself.

  Olivia had chosen the Belgian waffle with a side of Florentine frittata.

  I took a sip of my coffee, trying to delay and avoid what I feared was coming next.

  “A, would you like to join us?” she asked.

  There it is.

  She’d tried in the past, when we’d just started dating. I hadn’t felt ready back then and had told her as much. Truth be told, I didn’t feel ready now, either. We had been dating for a year, but I didn’t feel ready to meet her family.

  Is it really wrong of me to tell her so?

  Her smile fell almost immediately as she took in the frown on my face.

  “Olivia, I—”

  “No, never mind. Forget I said anything. It was stupid of me to ask.” She shook her head and waved her hand dismissively, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out she was upset.

  “Olivia, it’s not that I don’t want to meet your parents, it’s just…”

  “Just what, Amos?”

  “I’ve never seen myself as the kind of guy you take home.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, making a disgusted face.

  I let out a sigh and paused as I saw our waiter walk in the direction of our table with our orders. Olivia smiled at him then gave me a pointed look, waiting for my explanation.

  Her brown eyes were terrifying when she looked at me like that.

  I could feel our next fight coming. We didn’t argue a whole lot, but it seemed that from time to time, we ended up sparring for the most bizarre reasons. When we fought, it felt like we didn’t even speak the same language, and it usually took us hours to find common ground again. I could sense we were going to fight about me not wanting to meet her parents.

  I understood where she was coming from, and I knew it wasn’t an unreasonable request, but I always thought of meeting the parents as a step forward in a relationship.

  As a grown-up, it usually meant you were serious about the person you were with and marriage was probably just around the corner. When I thought about Olivia and me, I didn’t think about marriage…not yet, at least.

  Maybe not ever.

  My mind flashed back to the weekend with Lena.

  Nothing happened, I told myself, but still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. After the initial awkwardness, we’d gotten along so well. We’d had so much fun together. We loved the same things and, in a way, we understood each other.

  But thinking about Lena also made me feel terribly guilty. There I was, having breakfast with my girlfriend, and I was about to turn her down because I felt unsure about my feelings, unsure about us in general.

  She started cutting up pieces of her waffles neatly, almost like a mother would for a child. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Could I see myself doing that?

  “I don’t understand what that’s supposed to mean. Are you saying you are never going to meet my parents?”

  “I just mean…” I struggled to find the words. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about her; I did. I did love her, even though just thinking the word made me hesitate.

  I wasn’t one of those guys who said it often, and Olivia had complained about it before.

  “Is this about your daddy issue?” she asked, pinning me with her eyes and the snide tone of her voice.

  I let out a frustrated laugh. “I don’t have a daddy issue.”

  “Sure you do,” she insisted.

  “My father and I are on non-speaking terms, but it’s not for lack of me trying.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” she asked, sounding as if she was purposely trying to get a rise out of me. Like I said, I could smell a fight brewing. It was just a matter of hours. What was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to give in and meet her parents just to appease her?

  Would that make her happy? Would that be enough?

  Why was she bringing up my father, anyway? She knew I didn’t like talking about him. Was she trying to hurt me on purpose?

  “I’m not going to do anything about it until the man comes to his senses. Why are you bringing that up, anyway?”

  My father a
nd I hadn’t really had a relationship since I’d bailed out on the family tradition of enlisting in the military after high school, and we hadn’t really been on speaking terms ever since I graduated college.

  I had been looking forward to enlisting since I was a kid, but when my big brother, Taylor, died while serving in Afghanistan, I changed my mind.

  His death had shaken my entire family to its core.

  We were all destroyed emotionally, but while my sister and I tried to go back to our teenager lives, my parents were unable to move forward and ended up alienating us both.

  Charleigh and I grew closer, but the bond between us and our parents had been severed in some way.

  Things never got better after Taylor’s death.

  While my mother seemed to be able to show some interest a while later and started to participate more in my life and Charleigh’s, my father was reduced to a shell of a man, only able to live through his grief…and eventually through his bitterness.

  The last conversation we ever had was about how much I’d disappointed him.

  He never forgave me for changing my mind. He called me a coward; the funny part was that I’d done it to spare them. Losing a child was painful enough, but losing two? I couldn’t bear the thought of my parents going through that all over again.

  Taylor’s death hadn’t been the only thing shaping my decision. Growing up, my interests had changed, too.

  Looking back, I didn’t understand why my father had taken me so seriously. Kids might say they want to follow in their parents’ footsteps, but how many actually do that?

  After Taylor’s death, flying a military chopper wasn’t so high on my list anymore.

  Comics became my solace. My teenage self found some consolation reading stories where the good guys didn’t die, where the heroes always defeated evil. I still had to train with my father every day—he was determined to make me the perfect soldier before I even enlisted—I started shying away from everything I had pursued until then.

  When I broke the news to my parents, they were both equally devastated, but while my mother seemed to eventually accept the fact that I had every goddamned right to change my mind and do what I wanted with my life, my father didn’t. He’d always been entirely too proud, and he took my change of heart too personally. When I graduated college, he came to the ceremony only because my mother begged him to, but he never offered his congratulations.

  We rarely spoke after that.

  Ever since then, my visits back home had been sparse, so much so that I’d started flying my mother out to Portland in order to avoid awkward holiday gatherings. My sister worked in New York as a chef, and her schedule was definitely not holiday friendly, so I only got to see her whenever I could fly out to the east coast.

  I thought my father’s disappointment would vanish once I could prove I was meant to be an artist, but it never did. Did I have daddy issues like Olivia was suggesting? Yes, it pained me that my father didn’t approve of me or the choices I made in life, but I didn’t need his approval to be happy with who I was.

  I was good at what I did, and I loved my job—that was all that mattered to me.

  Why couldn’t Olivia see it?

  I realized I still hadn’t explained to her why I didn’t want to meet her parents, and we were almost done with our breakfast.

  “I just don’t feel ready to meet your parents, Olivia. No, it has nothing to do with my father, although that would make for an awkward conversation.”

  “You don’t feel ready to meet my parents? We’ve been dating a year, Amos. If you’re not serious about me, what exactly are we doing?”

  “Define serious, Olivia. I have been seriously dating you for the last year, but if asking me to meet your parents is a way to tell me we need to start thinking about getting married or else, I will let you know that I don’t like ultimatums.”

  I had just turned thirty-three, and Olivia was twenty-seven. I had never given marriage any thought. Children, maybe…one day…but in this day and age, there were very few instances in which it would have made sense to get married.

  Was Olivia one of those women who had to get married before she turned thirty? Was she one of those with a five-year plan? And why was I just now noticing how upset she got when I talked negatively about marriage?

  She scrunched up her nose. “What do you have against marriage?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “It’s a sacred institution that shouldn’t be taken as lightly as ninety percent of the population does. I’m also saying I don’t know if I ever want to get married.”

  “Or maybe you just don’t want to marry me,” she muttered in a barely audible voice. “I’m going to the restroom, I’ll be right back.”

  Great, now I feel like a jerk.

  “Olivia, wait!”

  She turned around, her lips a tight line, her eyes as cold as ice.

  “I’m fine, Amos. Just give me a minute.”

  LENA

  To some, my life might have seemed miserable, but I didn’t mind it at all.

  I felt like my life was a definitive upgrade from my childhood.

  Now, I didn’t have a horrific childhood, but it wasn’t great, either. It wasn’t made of memorable holidays full of baking cookies with my mother and bonding with my father.

  Well, maybe I did have a few memorable holidays when my grandmother was around, but I was too young at the time to still remember them. She was the only person in my family I really missed, and she’d been dead for more than two decades.

  My parents…well, my parents were a different story. There wasn’t much to miss. In fact, sometimes I wondered if my life would have been different had I not gotten stuck with some of the most uncaring parents.

  I knew I had issues when it came to trusting people, and I knew all too well where they stemmed from. Yes, I had tried to get over my paranoia with the help of a doctor—twice actually. I had seen a counselor in school for some time after an accident involving me and another student—I wasn’t the bully, I was the one being picked on, imagine that—and I had tried going to therapy after the accident, but talking about my problems with a shrink never seemed to make a difference.

  It never brought me the sense of peace I was seeking, and after a while, I gave up.

  It’s never easy to accept the fact that your parents never really cared for you, and the only two people you loved died too soon.

  You can only cope with that.

  So, that’s what I did. I decided to learn how to live with my issues. I learned to self-medicate, and I learned to appreciate that being alone wasn’t the worst thing after all. I found joy in my work and tried to fill the hollowness in my heart with other things.

  Drinking was one of them. One-night stands were another.

  The sex wasn’t always the best. I learned through experience that most one-night stands could not rival a glorious, battery-powered orgasm, but I lived for the adrenaline high that came with getting naked with a stranger. The kisses, the clashing of tongues, the undressing—I loved the rush I got when I saw the guy open and vulnerable, completely at my mercy.

  It wasn’t lost on me that I kept people away because every important person in my life was either dead or had deserted me.

  Losing my grandmother had been the first blow. I remembered being ten and crying my eyes out to the point of annoying my cold-hearted mother. Fed up with my tears, she slapped me across the cheek when we got back from the funeral. I still remembered how much my skin stung, and how it affected the way I regarded my mother.

  My father left three years later. After my grandmother’s death, funds started dwindling. They didn’t have her pension coming in anymore and he couldn’t keep a steady job. I wasn’t sure if it was because of his terrible attitude or the fact that he’d started drinking a lot more.

  Probably both.

  My mother was no better. She waitressed in a couple of different places, but she never aimed for anything better. She never tried to do more with her life.


  Later on, I remembered a conversation I’d had with my grandmother once. She’d said my mother had never reached or even come close to her full potential. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but it made sense to me now.

  She was right. My mother was a smart enough woman and I was sure she could have done so much more, but when she and my father got together and subsequently got pregnant with me, they got stuck in a life they didn’t want, living idly for far too long.

  When they got married, they relied on the help of my grandmother, but then they ran away with it. They shrugged off commitment and never learned to make it on their own. They got themselves stuck in a mediocre situation because it was easy and comfortable. After my grandmother’s death, their relationship started to crumble; suddenly, life wasn’t so easy and comfortable anymore.

  Their lousy jobs could barely keep us afloat.

  It was a miracle we had the house, or most likely we would have ended up homeless, too. My grandma had left it to my mother since she had no other living children, but she hadn’t left behind any money.

  At least, at the time I thought there was no money. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother had transferred all her remaining wealth—mostly money from oil wells my grandfather had sold years prior—into a trust fund for me.

  The trust fund was nothing too fancy, but it was enough to cover my college education and then some.

  My mother’s resentment toward me only intensified in the years to come; I was the culprit of all her misery. I was the reason she had been left high and dry and was now stuck with a kid and a semi-alcoholic husband.

  Maybe at some point in the past she’d enjoyed being a mother, but I had no memory of that. What I remember from my teenage years was the omnipresent scowl on her face whenever I was around. She and my father started arguing more often, and I started spending more time in my room, trying to stay out of their way.

  I wasn’t allowed to have a TV, but I had an old yellow Sony Walkman. It was the late ’90s, but I had no money and couldn’t afford a CD player. The headphones still worked, so when they started fighting, I would turn it up as loud as I could.