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Shira: We?
Leo: See you there!
13
Year Four
Having neglected to pay the twenty-five-dollar seat-selection fee, Shira ended up, of course, in a middle seat on the plane. She grimaced as she slid her way in past the woman on the aisle, who seemed to have bathed in mothballs before boarding, and settled into the cramped space next to the teenage boy by the window, who was furiously mashing buttons on his Switch. This was going to be a long six hours from LA to Phil—
Her jaw dropped as she realized that the teenager wasn’t killing monsters or fighting war battles on his screen but…picking litter off a cobblestoned path. She blurted, “Hey, is that Washing Dishes at the End of the World?”
The kid shot her a glance. His screen beeped in celebration. She was so excited to see it that she didn’t even take a second to pray that he’d brought earphones. “Yeah?”
Pride swelled her chest. “My friend made that game!”
“Yeah?” The kid’s eyes slid back to his screen. “Cool. Tell him he did a good job and that he’d better not kill off Antley.”
Shira cringed inside because Antley did indeed die a glorious death, depending on the player’s choices, but on the outside she only smiled, a master at avoiding spoilers. “I’ll pass that along.”
She settled into her seat, sticking her headphones in and letting herself be washed away by the sound of the latest hit historical Broadway musical. Or trying to let herself be washed away, at any rate. Every time she closed her eyes, she was jostled in the side by the teenager furiously jabbing buttons, in the elbow by mothball lady annoyed that Shira was using their shared armrest (come on, plane etiquette said that the middle seat got the armrests), or in the mind by the approximately one thousand deadlines she had coming up. If you close your eyes now, you’re going to get behind.
Her eyes popped open. She sighed. She pulled out her headphones—she couldn’t listen to music while drawing; it impacted her lines—and pulled out her tablet. Got to work. What was up next on the docket? The cover for someone’s self-published young adult book, due next week. She’d already gotten approval for one of her sketches—a scene that pulled from The Little Mermaid, with the book’s mermaid heroine sitting wistfully on a rock by the shore and the book’s hero staring wistfully at her from the beach—and now had to do a finalized version with full color.
The odor of mothballs grew bigger and stinkier in her nostrils. The lady on her left was leaning in, looking curiously at her tablet. “Wow, that’s really good.”
“Thanks,” Shira said wearily. She wished she could say the same about the book. Though she’d promised to read the whole thing, she’d barely managed to plod through the first third.
“What do you do? Are you an artist?”
A ghost of a smile stretched out her lips. “Yup. Full-time artist.”
“Wow, that’s the dream,” Mothball Lady said admiringly, pushing her bleach-blond hair out of her eyes. “Lucky you.”
Shira allowed herself to feel it for a moment. Not the luckiness. But the feeling of impressing someone, that golden glow that came whenever someone thought she was really cool.
It faded within seconds. It was like a drug, kind of. The more she’d felt it, the more she needed to feel it again. And, sometimes, it no longer even felt good. It just felt like she needed it to avoid the crash.
“I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but it’s just a hobby currently.” Mothball Lady clicked her long red nails against her lowered tray table. “Do you have any tips for me?”
Any tips? Well. She wouldn’t recommend her current path. She still heard that conversation with her boss sometimes in her stress dreams, the ones she awoke from gasping in a cold sweat. I’m afraid we can’t offer you a raise this year. The most annoying thing was how sympathetic he’d sounded. The man had complained to her last year about how frustrating it was to be in the highest tax bracket. Typically, by this point, people at your level have started bringing in their own artists to work with and are earning commission that will take them to a higher salary level.
But she couldn’t bring in her own artists, she wanted to say. Because she was already staying up late exhausting herself working on her own stuff, trying desperately to get something in shape to submit to galleries. To prove to herself and to everyone else that there was more to her than who she was on the outside, the performance of Shira. She didn’t have time.
“Well,” Shira said carefully. “When I left my full-time job, I found that I had to earn money taking on freelance projects that I’m not super passionate about.”
Mothball Lady’s eyes widened. “Like monster sex?”
Shira choked on air. “Excuse me?”
“I mean, it’s not something I have experience with personally.” She examined her long red nails. “But I hear it’s booming business online. Kraken and giants, oh my.”
Shira hated that, for a split second, she wondered if she should try it. But that would definitely not fit her brand. “No, I started out as a painter and I worked at a gallery, so I have a lot of connections through my old workplace with other painters and people looking for painters,” she said. “One of the painters does a lot of book covers and freelance illustration work, so he’s sent some of those projects my way when his own schedule is packed.”
“Oh, how cool,” she said. “I love going on gallery tours. I saw that show recently that everyone was talking about at LACMA, the one with the creatures from Ukrainian mythology? The artist has a show at the Whitney soon. I’m hoping to see it while I’m in New York. Ah, what was her name?”
Shira was suddenly grateful for the vomit bag in the seat back. “Not sure,” she said, reaching for her headphones again.
Mothball Lady raised her eyebrows. “If you’re really tuned-in to the gallery scene, wouldn’t you have heard about another young artist getting a solo show at the Whitney? Isn’t that one of the biggest honors an artist can get, and this one is so young?”
