I hesitate for a moment. Honestly, it probably would beeasier to just let her watch YouTube and play games for several hours than try to get creative. But I’m a responsible adult now. And I’m worried that if we launch directly into zoning out on the tablet, I’ll have nothing to offer when she inevitably gets bored watching videos about making slime.
“Let’s go through the comics first, okay?”
She shrugs. It’s not quite the enthusiastic reaction I expected when Nick told me how much she liked the ones I lent her a couple of weeks ago.
I struggle to get one of the long boxes off the shelving unit. The whole fixture is slanting to the left. Maybe Nick was right about the wall anchors.
Kira immediately starts digging through the box.
“Some of these are worth a lot of money,” I tell her. “So be care—”
“Like how much?”
“It depends on the issue and the condition—if it looks like it’s brand-new or like it’s been read a bunch of times. We want to keep them looking as new as possible, so don’t take any of these out of the plastic bags unless I say it’s okay. Sound good?”
“ ’kay,” she says.
I start by pulling out some kid-friendly things, but Kira doesn’t seem interested in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. With every character I suggest, she asks about their love life.
“This is Kitty Pryde,” I say. “She has a psychic bond with a dragon. And in this book, there’s this amazing arc with her and Colossus—”
“Is that her boyfriend?”
“This one’s kinda fun,” I say, trying to pivot to a book without love interests. “Scarlet Witch and Vision host Thanksgiving and they invite some fellow mutants and Avengers and everyone shows up in costume except Magneto. He’s just, like, wearing asweater. I always thought it was hilarious that this dramatic supervillain shows up in a casual outfit because he’s trying to be a normal father and everyone else is in spandex. Like, this guy is in his swim trunks at Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Whose dad is he?” Kira asks, flipping the pages.
“Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are twins. And they found out right before this issue that their dad was Magneto. So that made Thanksgiving a little awkward.”
“Did he do something bad to them?”
“Oh yeah,” I reply. “He was terrible to them for a long time when it seemed like he was totally evil. Later on, we started to learn more about him and why he became a bad guy. And eventually he kind of turned into a good guy,” I say. “He’s my dad’s favorite.”
“The bad guy who was mean to his kids is his favorite?”
I stare at Kira, letting her simple, but deadly potent, choice of words permeate.
I decide to put the comics away and dig out the bin of art supplies I haven’t touched in years. Crayola markers would probably be more kid-friendly, but Kira seems interested in what she calls “real art stuff.”
I pull out my sketch pads in various sizes, feeling the different weights and textures of the papers. My pencil cases, stuffed with drawing implements of various lengths—my favorites sharpened over and over again, down to barely usable nubs: Tombow Mono 100s, Faber-Castell 9000s, Mars Lumographs.
“These pencils don’t have erasers,” Kira says.
“One of my drawing instructors wouldn’t let us use erasers,” I say. “She said erasing lines slows you down. You’re supposed to commit to each line.” We were supposed to look at our mistakes, not hide them.
The perfectionist in me never liked the look of erased linesanyway. Rubbing away the graphite always leaves this blurry ghost of a drawing. Sometimes I’d just start over.
“That’s dumb,” Kira says, confident as usual in her opinion. “I change my mind all the time when I’m drawing.”
I pick up one of the pencils, almost testing to see if it still feels natural to me. If it’s still something that could bring me joy, or too tied to that feeling of failure. The embarrassment of genuinely believing I was talented at this, only to learn that I was “derivative.”
I push the tip of the pencil against a page from one of my old sketchbooks. There’s no divine inspiration. No lightning-flash, aha moment. I have no idea what to draw now.
Kira has no such problem. I watch her sketch away and turn to the box with my drawings. It’s obvious to me now that while I remember creating a ton of different sketches—animals, landscapes, fashion drawings—none of them is represented here. I only bothered to give my dad the drawings of subjects I knew would appeal to him: his big truck, the sign that he’d put up at his estate sales, and of course all those sketches of Magneto. I got so much practice drawing those particular curves and proportions of that helmet. I bet it’s locked in my muscle memory. Derivative, indeed.
“I drew Kitty Pryde,” Kira says, showing me her paper.
“I like that pink streak in her hair,” I say.
