The Art of Us Read online

  When they fought, my only objective was to escape reality.

  I began daydreaming before I began drawing.

  I would dream of faraway places, of a different reality, one where I could be happy, where I would have a loving mother and father who doted on me as I sometimes saw the parents of my classmates doing.

  One night, I picked up a pencil and started drawing in my composition notebook.

  At first it was just doodles, then it turned into some sort of abstract drawing, and then I started trying my hand at drawing still life. I started enjoying drawing more and more, and at some point I started sketching the characters of cartoons I saw on TV.

  Without me realizing it consciously, drawing became an integral part of my sad, lonely evenings.

  I guess I could have gone out, but I felt too ashamed to hang out with the neighborhood kids. I already felt awkward enough, and then one day a girl who lived on my street, Jessica, teased me about my parents, telling me how everyone knew they fought all the time.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised since they screamed loud enough for everyone in the cul-de-sac to hear, but I was still hurt.

  When my father left for good, it was one of those spectacular spring days in Saratoga. There were blue skies for miles, the promise of spring was in the air, and I held on to the tiny hope that my thirteenth summer was going to be the best one yet.

  My father was supposed to get a job at a new electronics store chain, but then he wasn’t asked back after the second round of interviews. He and my mother fought all night that night, and I heard him scream over and over about how he was done. I didn’t believe it, because I’d heard it so many times before.

  The next day, it was past noon when he finally rolled out of bed and started collecting his things. My mother was out at one of her waitressing jobs.

  I didn’t say a word to my father that day. I knew better than to talk to him when he was mad about something. Part of me was shocked he was really going through with it, that he was serious about leaving.

  Until the moment I saw him drive away, I thought he was being overly dramatic to get my mother to beg him to stay—they were both champions at that.

  If they’d handed out awards for most toxic relationship, my parents would have won first place. They seemed to thrive on getting each other riled up.

  I remembered my father avoiding my eyes, head down, shoulders slumped.

  He looked defeated.

  For a moment, I did feel sorry for him.

  For a moment, I wished we could wind back to a time when he and my mother were happy.

  Would have they stayed together if I hadn’t come along? Probably not, was what I used to tell myself. Despite circumstances—getting married and having a baby too young—I couldn’t forget that my parents were the cause of their own misery.

  They had been freeloading on my grandmother’s living arrangements for years, and now that they had to rely on their own resources, they couldn’t deal with it.

  They were thirty-somethings who didn’t know how to be adults.

  I opened the door of my room when I heard him start his car—an old sand-gold Chevrolet from the early ’80s—and came out of the house just in time to see him start to pull out of the driveway. The sun cast a golden glow over the car and his face. I couldn’t see his eyes because he was wearing bottle-green aviator sunglasses. His hair was a rumpled mess, his moustache and five-o’clock shadow giving him even more of a disarrayed look.

  I walked toward the car, unsure of what to do.

  Was my father really leaving for good? Was he leaving without saying goodbye?

  I stopped two feet away, stunned, waiting for him to say something to me.

  But I got nothing.

  My father’s last gesture to me was a nod.

  He nodded goodbye.

  There were no words spoken aloud, no speech.

  Nothing.

  He reversed down the driveway, turned the wheel, and drove away without even giving me one last look.

  My mother wasn’t too heartbroken about him leaving. I understood later on she’d been ready for him to move out for a while.

  Divorce papers followed months later, and even though he let us know where he was living, I never felt the need to go after him.

  I thought about looking for him. Even years later, as I graduated high school, I thought about reaching out, but I knew in my heart it wasn’t going to be pretty and wasn’t going to make me feel better.

  It was just going to be like in that Kelly Clarkson song where the estranged father who’s already failed you once does absolutely nothing to make it better.

  If all I got from the man when he left was a goddamn nod, what could I possibly expect from him years later?

  I knew I was better off without him.

  He had never been a father. He wasn’t cut out to be one.

  I didn’t need therapy to figure out that you had to accept people at face value.

  My parents were what they were.

  What I learned from them was that being a slacker will only make you miserable, and sometimes being alone is better than having to live every day of your life with someone you despise.

  That summer, not much was different except for the fact that I started riding my bike around town a lot more. My father was gone, and my mother started caring less and less about my whereabouts, and it was then that I began hanging out at the public library.

  It was the only place that had all the requirements for a weirdo like me: free, safe, and quiet.

  It was during one of my solitary trips that I discovered Japanese manga.

  I had seen comic books before, had seen kids at my school reading them, but they were mostly DC or Marvel comics centered around a caped superhero.

  These comics were different—pocket-sized, slightly smaller than a paperback.

  They were bound like a real book, not just with staples like American comics, and there were an array of different subjects.

  Yes, some had superheroes and robots, but most of them were about teenagers.

  Crushes, falling in love—those were the main subjects. A lot of them talked about feelings of inadequacy, the struggles of being a teenager, the peer pressure.

  Some talked about family issues. Some talked about loneliness and depression.

  The artists were able to encapsulate what it felt like to be a kid my age.

  I was still lonely, but I felt less alone. When I read manga, the weight on my heart was far more manageable.

  My thirteenth summer was indeed the best summer of my life.

  It was that summer that I fell in love with shojo manga.

  For the very first time, I found something I really cared about, something I absolutely loved.

  It was that summer that I decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  AMOS

  I was surprised to find her notebook on my desk on Monday morning.

  It meant she had come back for it during the weekend and had probably come across my drawings.

  I opened it up and laughed as I read the pages she’d sketched as a follow-up to mine.

  Judging by the reaction from one of the characters, she wasn’t too pleased.

  I didn’t know why I found the whole thing so amusing.

  I wasn’t sure why I enjoyed teasing Lena so much.

  Because you like her, a voice inside of me said.

  Whenever I thought about the possibility of us together, it was immediately followed up by shame and guilt. Why couldn’t I seem to keep the thought of her away? Why couldn’t I just be happy to be with Olivia?

  Why couldn’t I commit to my girlfriend, and why did I always seem to find myself thinking about the one woman who had pushed me away years ago?

  Part of the problem was that I believed in kindred spirits.

  I felt like Lena and I had many things in common. It wasn’t just work, and it wasn’t just that we knew, loved, and navigated the same world.

  She
and I both enjoyed being alone. It didn’t scare us or define who we were.

  What had attracted me to Olivia in the beginning was the opposite. She was bubbly and cheerful, a caring friend who still called the girls from her sorority her sisters and meant it. She was a respectful daughter who loved her parents.

  She was everything I was not.

  When she’d entered my life, she’d felt warm like a ray of sunshine, but now I felt as if her light was blinding me, forcing her happy-go-lucky attitude to shine on every dark corner of my soul.

  As I read Lena’s pages again, I knew I was lying to myself.

  I knew that as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I wanted her.

  Which meant there was only one thing to do.

  I had to break up with Olivia.

  I picked up a pencil and started drawing in the notebook again.

  LENA

  I avoided going by Amos’ desk that day, but at some point during the afternoon, my notebook was back on my desk, and it made me smile.

  However frustrated I felt about him messing with my things, now I was kind of looking forward to sparring with him in comic form.

  Also, I was dying to see how he would continue the story.

  I sat down and was entirely too excited as I read through the four pages he’d sketched. I finished the panels I was supposed to complete for the day for Switch, and when I was done, I picked up my notebook again.

  My Tinder match—Amos’ lookalike—texted me with the time and place he could meet me. I felt a pang of excitement, followed by a hollow feeling of sadness, because after all, I was going out with him on the basis that he looked like the person I was currently crushing on.

  I couldn’t deny that I did feel a bit pathetic, but I tried to shrug it off as I sketched a few more vignettes in my notebook, smiling as I went along.

  That was another thing that was incredibly weird about Amos: if he didn’t piss me off, he made me smile.

  The man knew how to elicit strong emotions from me.

  I left the notebook on my desk, hoping my colleague would come get it and pick up where I’d left off.

  I turned my computer off right at five, which was really early for me, and went home to get ready for my date.

  Having a date on a Monday night might sound insane to most, but it’s a proven strategy and it works every single time.

  If you’re not having a good time and the guy is a bore, you can say you need to get home to get ready for work the next day: I have to pitch a new comic in the morning and need to get home! If the date isn’t bad and you go to his house for…dessert, you can sneak out as soon as you’re done, since it’s a Monday night and you have a long week ahead of you.

  I had tested it over and over.

  Monday dates worked. Plus, it also meant that the guy was interested enough and didn’t want to wait until the weekend to meet you.

  Amos’ lookalike, whose name was Henry, was charming and had a great smile.

  I got bored when he started bragging about working at Nike, as if that made him more special than the other five hundred thousand people Nike employed in Portland. Still, I decided to go along with it and be patient, because I really liked how he looked and the way he talked. He kept his hand on the small of my back the entire time, and he listened to me as if he really wanted to get to know me.

  Too bad I didn’t feel the same.

  After a couple of drinks at the first bar, we decided we liked each other enough to go to another bar. We started making out before they even brought us our first beer, as if we were the only two people in the entire place.

  I decided I liked how he moved his tongue enough to find out how he moved other parts of his body, and we ended up drunkenly stumbling through his front door.

  He lived in a cute, cottage-style house on Edison, by St. John’s Bridge. As much as I was impressed the guy had his shit together, in my head I was trying to calculate how much the Uber ride back to my apartment was going to cost.

  Romance was definitely not my middle name.

  However, Henry’s lips were divine, and I was up for discovering how good he was with the appendage between his legs.

  He started undressing me slowly, his touch feather-like across my skin, and all of a sudden, I was imagining someone else’s hands.

  You have it so bad, I told myself.

  Henry pulled off my top, and then my bra. He cupped one of my breasts with his hand and I let out a sigh, imagining Amos’ hands touching me.

  My drunken state helped. It was dark in Henry’s house, and despite the fact that his hair was short instead of long and unruly like Amos’, he fit the part quite well.

  Until he spoke.

  “You like that, huh? You’re so fucking sexy, Lena,” my Tinder lover whispered in my ear, breaking the enchantment I had been so focused on creating.

  I kissed him to shut him up, wrapping my tongue around his eagerly, one hand cradling the back of his neck as the other fumbled with the belt of his jeans.

  He helped me, unbuckling his pants and pushing his jeans down before going for mine. His hands reached inside my underwear, but his fingers were too forceful, as if he was trying to make me feel something just by rubbing his fingers all around.

  His touch was all wrong.

  He moved a finger in and out but completely bypassed my clitoris.

  Amateur.

  I immediately imagined a cartoon clitoris in my head, and it was sighing at Henry’s blatant neglect. He kept moving one finger in and out of me as if that alone was going to bring me over the brink of pleasure. Okay, this was the part I honestly and truly hated about hooking up—the part where you’re stuck with someone and you kind of have to soldier on, hoping he’ll finish fast and you’ll be able to get home soon.

  I still wanted to have sex, but at that point, my expectations were low.

  Very low.

  Speaking of low, Henry pushed my jeans down and knelt in front of me to help me take them off. He hooked his fingers in my underwear and shoved them down to my ankles. He placed wet kisses right below my navel, and for a few seconds, my clit throbbed with anticipation at the thought of him parting my lips with his tongue.

  Instead, he freed me from the rest of my clothes, stood up, and placed a kiss on my lips.

  The cartoon clitoris in my head started weeping.

  Henry laced his fingers with mine and led me to the bedroom.

  I sighed, hoping for the best and expecting the worst.

  AMOS

  I went by her cubicle the next day. She wasn’t there. I considered leaving the notebook right then, but I wanted to give it to her in person this time, wanted to see how she’d react.

  I walked by the lunch room and overheard her chatting with Violet.

  They were both busy looking at her phone.

  “So, how was last night? Was he as cute in person as he was online?”

  She went out on a date. Jealousy sparked in my blood like a lightning bolt.

  It’s none of your business, I told myself. She is not yours. You still have a girlfriend, dumb prick.

  Lena made an incomprehensible noise.

  “No…well, I take that back. He’s not despicable, but he wasn’t memorable, either. In fact, he was quite forgettable. He made my clitoris cry,” she said in a serious tone.

  Violet laughed. “What do you mean? What did he do?”

  “Let’s put it this way: he was a good kisser, but a lousy lover at best.”

  “Oh, pity,” Violet replied.

  “I know. My love life is messy like a Tove Lo song.”

  “Your life is messy because you make it so,” Violet teased Lena.

  “Oh well, it’s not like I have to see him again. Actually, it was good, because I got an idea and I need your help to convince Marty.”

  “Errr, sure, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I want to pitch him some sort of informative comic to publish on our site.”

  “Informative how?”

&
nbsp; “Like sex-ed informative, kind of like those articles Teen Vogue publishes these days about knowing your clitoris and figuring out anal sex, that kind of stuff. I almost have the name down—it’s either Doris the Clitoris or Iris the Clitoris. I’m trying to figure out which one is better and sounds less like an old maid’s name.”

  Violet was snort-laughing and from where I was standing, I could see her removing her glasses and wiping her tears away.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Violet replied, “it’s a great idea, but I’m not sure Marty will ever go for it.”

  “Why not? He’s always looking for more ways to draw traffic to the site. I’m sure he talks about that kind of stuff in his sleep—and besides,” Lena said in a hushed tone, “I bet my ass one or two people around here could learn something from it.”

  “You’re probably right about that.”

  I entered the breakroom, and Violet spotted me right away.

  “Hi, Amos,” she said, immediately glancing at Lena.

  Lena turned around and stared at me. The blank look on her face turned into a smile as I handed her the notebook. I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen her smile like that before—maybe that night on campus, when we were dancing.

  “Ahhh, we’re not tiptoeing around it anymore, are we now?”

  “Guess not,” I replied, my smile as big as hers.

  “I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible,” she said, waving the notebook in the air.

  “Can’t wait,” I replied, biting my bottom lip. “By the way, I like Iris the Clitoris, and you’re right, that would increase traffic exponentially, but we would have to put an age restriction on it.”

  Her smile got bigger, reaching her eyes.

  “Noted,” she replied in an alluring tone.

  LENA

  “What’s that? Isn’t it your notebook? Why did he have it?” Violet inquired as we walked back to her office. She sat at her desk, and I took a seat across from her in one of the purple velvet chairs she’d found at a vintage store.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, just something we started working on. You know how I sketch just about anything in my notebook, right? Here,” I said, handing it over so she could look at it.