“Lucas, I can’t be whatever you wantmeto be. I’m trying to become somebody, and you ... you’re holding me back. I thought we could evolve together, but I don’t think youcan.” He was standing straight again, immune to my tears, the way I reached for him. “Don’t make this harder.” Darren held out his palm.
I didn’t understand, nothing was making sense, and I could barely see through the haze that was hovering at the edges of my vision.
“My key, Lucas.”
Somehow my fingers found my key ring, fumbling over the shape of his house key, the one I’d waited so long to be given, which hehadgiven me. I let it tremble into his hand. “Please—”
And Darren smiled, and I knew that smile—it was the one he always wore when listening to me talk about my photos, or about the future, or when, for some brief, gleaming moment, I was proud of myself.
It wasn’t sweet—it was pitying.
“Take care of yourself, Lucas.” He slipped his hands into his pockets, then jerked his chin toward the door. And stared at me.
I couldn’t breathe, but I forced my feet to move, to push me back outside into hateful sunlight, down the front walk to my car.
July 22nd- Twenty-four days until the convention
“All right.” I threw up the slide I’d made of several pages side by side: a classic Kirby dynamic spread, a Satrapi progression, a Tezuka action sequence. “You lot can see this, aye?”
There was a general murmur of assent from the class.
“You see the movement? It’s not always about fancy panels, action lines, and all that. Look at thebreathshere, the negative space. The bits you show, the framing, the perspective, they’re important, aye? But it’s also the bits youskip, where youlinger— Er, yes?”
I should have known all their names by now, but the girl with her hand in the air was unfortunately known to me only as “the one with blue glasses and afro puffs who needed to work on her word-to-picture ratio.”
She beamed at me. “Like pages twenty-two and twenty-three in Issue Two?”
I tried not to visibly cringe, but I did audibly gulp. The only thing worse than people reading or discussing my current work was people reading or discussing mypastwork. The spread she was referring to depicted a trulyloonysequence, involving a drop of water and a moth, that, to be fair, I’d drawn while coked out of my mind four years ago.
She had a point, however.
“Oh, aye, right.” I tried to smile at her. “Exactly. It’s about the choices you make. You get to ... tocurate. To make good choices. Encapsulation, see?” I switched the slide to a page from Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’sGrass.
There was another murmur of understanding that made its way through the classroom. People made notes or nodded, as if what I’d said had made perfect sense to them.
“Young artists tend to throw all their energy into characters and micro-expressions,” I heard myself continue to ramble against all odds, “becoming slaves to the close-up and allowing the rest of the world to hang off them like scenery, but—but it’s always struck me as a flawed approach, you know? I want you lot to at least have the tools you might need to create story-scaffolding through form decisions—a stage for your characters to perform on that’s more than just a bland vehicle for content. Is that so wrong?”
The students stared at me wide-eyed, almost somber. After a moment, one of them said, “No, we get it.” And the others nodded along as if I’d just given them a rousing speech outside the gates of Syracuse.
This was never going to stop beingbizarre.
But ithadgot a bit ... fun.
My rapport with the classroom had been improving steadily, to the point where I no longer vomited before class. However, they still left me drained at the end of every evening; I felt I’d come off eight hours of manual labor rather than two hours of talking.
The students, strangely enough, seemed to be enjoying themselves. More strangely, their work wasimproving. Some were hopeless, aye, but a few seemed to be picking up what I was trying to teach them and applying it to their artwork. Nearly everyone’s pacing had gotten better.
Even Finch had refined hisoddvampire romance cartoon. Though he’d seemed rather distracted lately.
“Hey, Armand.” He approached me awkwardly after class, worrying his hands. “Um, sorry, I messed up the schedule. I’ve got rehearsal tonight; is there any chance you could take a rideshare home?”
Something was clearly wrong. Finch usually exuded joy like cartoon stink lines, but now he was gray and sketchy around the edges—it was abundantly clear that his “hot date” had not gone to plan. He still carried the same amount of nervous energy, but he was framed by a blight of sheepishness rather than his usual crackle of mischief.
I felt bad now for having been annoyed by his chirpiness. “Not a problem, Titch. Er. Are you all right?”
“Huh? What? No, I’m great.” He gave me a brittle grin. “Sorry again. Gotta run. Have a good weekend!” And darted out of the hall.
Right.
