17. Kit
KIT
It’s too early for this shit.
I don’t say that out loud, obviously. Not with the kid around. Wendy. But I sure am thinking it.
It’s barely ten in the morning, the caffeine hasn’t hit my bloodstream yet, and I’ve got a shit ton of ink to scratch into people today.
Now, on top of all that, there’s a child lurking around my shop space that I’m supposed to keep occupied for…
however long Tink and Pan need to do their scheming, I guess.
Great.
From my station, I glance back in the direction of the staircase, to see Wendy hovering at the little step between the landing and the shop floor proper. Like she’s a vampire and needs to be formally invited in. Which, weirdly, I do kind of appreciate.
“You can come in,” I say. Just in case she is some kind of vampire and we’ve got a Kirsten-Dunst-Lestat situation on our hands.
She does, stepping forward in her bare feet with the dog close at her heels.
Right. The dog. Well, I can’t say I object to saving an animal either.
Fox was always the one who really wanted a pet; I’m just neutral. But this one seems fine.
We hang out there in silence for a moment.
I grab for my coffee cup and drain the last little drop, partly just to have something to do and partly because I’m beat, and I have an hours-long sleeve outline today that I can’t just be falling asleep at. I haven’t even really finished the design, actually, so that’s going to be step one.
“Well, I’ve gotta…work,” I say, feeling the need to explain to her.
She nods. “Okay.”
I feel bad. I don’t not like kids. I just haven’t spent a lot of time with them since I was one. And the whole fact of her being here is…well, pretty weird. Like, a daycare, this is not.
But it does beat the alternative. Of whatever she’d be headed to. If the system’s anything like what it used to be, then even the worst kids don’t deserve that.
And, from what I can tell, Wendy seems like a good kid.
I decide just to go about my business. If she needs something, I reason, she’ll ask.
I pass about five, maybe ten, minutes that way before I realize I’m being watched.
I’ve always had a kind of sixth sense for that, probably an overactive nervous system always on alert for someone noticing me, especially when I’m working.
Because being noticed is the first step to, well, having the shit kicked out of you.
So doesn’t matter if someone’s silent as a goddamn ghost; I will just feel their presence, and I can certainly feel hers now.
But even if I couldn’t, the dainty little clicking of that dog’s toenails would be a dead giveaway.
Wendy’s definitely watching me.
At first, I just ignore it. To be polite, I think, and not weirdly hover over this kid like some kind of helicopter parent.
But after a few minutes of straightening my cart, flicking through my bookings, and warming up in my sketchbook, it occurs to me that maybe letting a ten-year-old roam unsupervised in a tattoo and piercing parlor isn’t exactly safe. Or legal.
Plus, she keeps getting closer, like she’s trying to see what I’m doing.
Finally, I sit back up, push my glasses up my nose, and set down my pencil.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
Wendy giggles. I hadn’t really meant it as a joke, but…I guess I’m glad it makes her laugh. Better that than sounding scary.
“Oh. No. Sorry. I just…” She backs off a little, but cranes her neck at my sketchbook. Not very subtly.
“I’m sketching,” I explain. “Drawing. You know, tattoos?”
“Oh.” Wendy nods.
For a moment, she’s silent. Then:
“Um, not to be rude, but don’t tattoos go on people?”
I set down my pencil. Again.
“Well, yeah. But I have to know what I’m doing first, you know? You can’t erase on skin. So you want to have something planned out first.”
“Oh, yeah.” Wendy nods like she does know. She bites her lip, rocks back and forth on her heels. I pick up my pencil, but I don’t bother getting too invested, because sure enough:
“So you draw all this stuff before they even come in?”
“Yeah,” I say again. This time I look up, swivel around on the stool. “Unless they’re doing flash. That’s like, stuff I’ve already drawn and they can just pick out. Or unless they’re a yoman.”
Wendy frowns. “What’s a yoman?”
“They’re those guys who come in and say”—I put on my best dumbass bro voice—“yo, man, I’ve got twenty-five bucks, what can I get?”
Wendy laughs.
I don’t hate kids.
“Also,” I go on. No idea why I am still talking to her. “I just like to draw, so.” I lift a shoulder, look back at my sketchbook. Wendy stands there.
“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”
“Really?” I ask without looking up from my sketchbook.
This piece is going to be tricky. The client wanted a Joan of Arc sleeve—girl power and all that—which I thought sounded cool.
I’ve been running with this sort of stained glass inspired style, like a church window, but curvature of it all over her arm is going to be complicated, and the style already isn’t especially conducive to accurate anatomy. “What kind of stuff?”
“You know,” Wendy says, staring at the ground. “Like, whatever.”
I laugh. “No, I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, you can draw literally anything. Anything that exists and stuff that doesn’t even exist. You be more specific.”
“Specific,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” I say. “As in, narrow it down a little m—”
“No, I know what ‘specific’ means,” Wendy says, and there is this edge to her voice that’s almost teenage and makes me want to smirk. “I guess I just don’t know,” she says. “I don’t get to draw a lot,” she adds in a softer voice.
I glance up. There’s another sketchbook on my cart. Strathmore. I accidentally got smoother paper than I wanted, not enough tooth to it. Makes my pencil skid all over the place, and I like a little resistance. “Here.” I reach, grab, toss it at her like a frisbee. “Go crazy.”
Wendy clutches the thing like it’s the holy bible. “Really?” she says. “You don’t need it?”
I give a short laugh. “I have more sketchbooks than any human could ever reasonably need,” I say, drily. “I’ll be buried under a pyramid of them like an Egyptian pharaoh.”
Wendy laughs, and I like that she got that it was a joke. It’s not a lie, but it is funny. “Here.” I scrabble a pencil up from my cart and reel my arm back. “Go long.”
She flinches, but then I just hand it to her. “Only kidding,” I say quickly.
“I can pay you for it,” she says quickly. “I mean, I don’t have any money, but.”
“You don’t have to pay me,” I say. “That shit’s tax deductible anyway. I mean, stuff.”
Wendy frowns. “What’s deductible?”
“It…” I close my eyes briefly. “It doesn’t matter.” I glance at the wall clock. It’s now ten of eleven, which means my first appointment’s in forty minutes, and I’m still not, in a technical sense, done with this sketch I’m presenting to my client.
I look back at the sleeve design. “Listen, if you want to be helpful, you can…” I tap my teeth together, casting about the room for something that a kid can reasonably handle safely.
No needles, obviously. Ink’s too expensive.
“…go organize the flash binders? Over there,” I indicate.
“By the lounge. Just fix any of the pages that are falling out.”
“I can do that,” Wendy says, and she jumps up.
And does it, right away. At first I watch her, looking up every few seconds from my sketch.
To make sure she isn’t, I don’t know, huffing the hypochlorous acid or something.
But she doesn’t. She just gets to work. Tidying all the laminated pages, rearranging.
The dog trott-trotting after her every step.
It’s cute, kind of. I’ve never been one for dogs, more of a cat person.
But this one’s very elegant. Like the sort of dog a Renaissance lady would have reclining in her lap for a portrait, or on a coat of arms—
Bam. Yes. The sleeve. I see it before I can articulate it, and suddenly I’m back with a pencil, sketching, lining, rearranging until I have it: less stained glass, more heraldic crest. Not something I know as well in my visual memory, but I can evoke it okay.
And the concept is cool. Elegant, almost baroque.
A chance for me to work with strong lines and bold colors, but outside of just your Sailor Jerry type shit.
I leave the figure rough in the center and focus on the frame: blossoms and vines curling around gold edges of the shield, a lion rearing and a dog sleeping.
Natural and constructed, strength and softness, something something about contrasts, duality, I don’t know what.
Don’t press me on the thematics here, but it works.
I get so into sketching that I almost forget there’s anyone else with me.
Until Wendy speaks so close to my ear, I nearly fall off my stool.
“Sorry!” She jumps back. “Um, that’s really good though.”
“Thanks,” I pant. My spidey senses notwithstanding, sometimes the act of drawing just swallows me up.
Maybe it’s PTSD, I don’t know, but I am way too jumpy to be snuck up on like that.
I drag my wrist over my forehead and the faint sheen of sweat.
“Sorry,” I apologize again. “I just… I forgot you were there and…” I swallow. “You like it?”
She nods. “What’s going in the middle?”
“Oh, yeah.” I glance back at the sketch.
“The whole idea for the sleeve was a Joan of Arc motif, so that’ll be Joan.
” At Wendy’s blank stare, I elaborate. “She was like…a medieval knight?” I realize I don’t know that much about the actual history, only that Joan of Arc was alive sometime after Jesus but before Shakespeare.
“She, uh, cut off her hair and led an army. And then she won. But then her people burned her at the stake because they thought she was a witch or something.”
“Whoa,” Wendy says. “For real?”
“Yeah,” I say. Don’t fact-check me on the specifics here, but. “Because women weren’t supposed to do that back then.”
“Cut their hair?”