The Animators

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

She leans in. Her eyes are wider. She’s angry, I realize. She’s furious. This has been curdling inside her. “Anything that makes you in that way, anything that makes you hurt and hungry in that way, is worth investigating. No matter how disgusting the source.”

Being happy makes work’s shitfest a lot easier to handle. Who cares if I never draw again?

This is the trade-off, I tell myself, for a man so genuine, a man who feels so deeply. This is what you wanted, I remind myself as I sponge the vomit from his torso.

Uh oh

“Your phone is never quiet. It goes off when we’re trying to sleep.” It also went off once in the middle of sex. I started to move for it, him on top of me, then made the save and wrapped my arms around his waist. But he saw that I had to stop myself. And he saw that I saw.

I can’t go back. I can’t do New York like I am, wounded, still limping. I can’t do the dodging and weaving, the constant intimidation. I can’t do the specific kind of loneliness that comes with being there. I think about the crowds of people pushing at each other as they climb from a busy subway station, all blank faces and swinging hands. My stomach burns.

“When you take the things that happen to you, the things that make you who you are, and you use them, you own them. Things aren’t just happening to you anymore. Make this thing because you are compelled to, and because it’s yours. And do it whether or not it suits Teddy ‘Fuck you Mel’ Caudill or anyone else.” She merges onto the Mountain Parkway amid semis and

I’d forgotten the bleeding, limping endurance race that is arguing with my mother.

Missing Teddy has become a physical need. The heat of it moves through my bloodstream with nowhere to go but back around the track, tapering, returning. It feels like my body is digesting itself. I call. Hope he will have forgiven me. Grit my teeth against my mother’s voice in my head.

The week we finish, I get a tentative clean bill of health from the doctor: sturdy enough to not have to return for three months. I can travel overseas, I can drive, I can—shakily—resume normality. When he gives me the news, I ask him, “Are you sure?”

The party is the biggest cliché I have ever seen. Later it will be embarrassing to explain what we were doing there.

Ten times a day, I turn—actually physically turn my body—to look for Mel, to tell her something, before realizing she’s not there.

it makes you feel any better,” I say, “you were kind of right.” It’s the wrong thing to tell her, but I’m too stoned to correct the damage. Brecky tries to speak, sniffs, dips her head down. I freeze, not sure I’m actually seeing what I’m seeing. This is horrifying. Brecky Tolliver doesn’t cry. I lean over and take her hand. We both pretend to watch TV. I think, Mel’s gonna shit when I tell her about this.

Oh honey

“November Rain” is playing in the bar. Fuckin love this song, man, she always said. It’s sadness porn. Skanky, melodramatic sadness porn. But we both knew it meant something more. Both knew that if you were a child, and you watched TV in a room by yourself as we did, saw this video, heard this song, it struck something primal and private in you, the sense of being at your most alone in the anticipation of adult pain, a gray future memory. It was reassuring to be with someone else while you listened, so you were no longer the only one in the room, could be reassured that your adult life was not entirely the thing you had feared.

“Holy shit,” Ryan says reverently. “That’d be awesome.” He glances at Tatum, then back at me. His face is so earnest, so hopeful. This is a person who hasn’t lost much yet. I get up and start putting on my shoes.

The less I could do, the more I wanted. Wanted things I couldn’t have and I wanted things I couldn’t even think up yet, but I could feel myself wanting. And that feeling, it’s like itching. Like to drive you crazy.” She shakes her head slightly. “I just wanted and wanted and wanted. You ever felt that way?” “Yes,” I tell her. “I have.” I feel something warm light my chest. It’s maybe the first time in my life that my mother has put something into the right words for me. “That’s kind of what I was trying to show. In the movie.” “I know,” she says. “I know you.”

I am beginning to understand what I did to Teddy, what he was trying to tell me, when I look at Mel’s sketches. Finding yourself in a world someone else has made is a theft that is difficult to put into words—the magnitude of your life, smeared to their order, your voice impersonated or, worse, winked out altogether.

know what Mel and I did with memory. We ran our endurance dry with our life stories, trying to reproduce them, translate them, make them manageable enough to coexist with. We made them smaller, disfiguring them with our surgeries. We were young. We did not know what we were doing. I am protected by my forgetting: What I can recollect is subject to my own personal slash-and-burn, my inability to lay off. It is not in me to be able to leave well enough alone. Thank God I forget. Thank God.