Drawn That Way

by Elissa Sussman

  I thought Nick would be better. I thought we were the same.

  “Henry Selick is one of the most well-known stop-motion directors in the world,” I said. “He directed James and the Giant Peach and Coraline.”

  Nick and Karl stared at me.

  “The Nightmare Before Christmas is Tim Burton’s movie,” Nick said, but he sounded less than sure now.

  I counted to ten in my head. “Like I said, he produced it. He didn’t direct it.”

  The room was silent, all eyes ping-ponging between me and Nick, waiting for one of us to admit that we were wrong. It sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

  “I can look it up,” Zoe said, hands poised over her keyboard.

  “Whatever,” Nick said. “We’ll all watch The Corpse Bride instead.”

  I was grateful for the new distraction of our lunchtime lectures.

  “What group are you in?” Nick asked on Wednesday. Even though I hadn’t seen him that morning, he somehow managed to find me as I headed down to the cafeteria. We were expected to get our lunches and go immediately to the room listed on the schedule.

  I was pretty sure Nick had gone back to the dorms the night before, looked up The Nightmare Before Christmas, and realized that he was completely wrong and I was completely right. Not that I was expecting an apology or even an acknowledgment of his wrongness.

  “Group one,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “I’m in group two.”

  I was relieved. Whatever friendship we’d formed based on our mutual love of BB Gun Films and Bryan Beckett seemed to be curdling the longer we worked together. Between that and the silent treatment I was still getting from the other girls, this collaborative animation internship felt incredibly lonely. And I knew it was partially my fault.

  Okay, probably entirely my fault.

  “You’re going to editorial, right?” Nick asked but didn’t wait for me to respond. “We’re speaking to one of the producers today. Madeline something.”

  Madeline Bailey. She’d been at BB Gun Films since the beginning and had produced A Boy Named Bear. I wasn’t surprised that Nick didn’t know her name. I was starting to realize he only knew the big, flashy names in the industry—exactly what I was usually accused of by guys like him whenever I mentioned my love of animation.

  “I’ve heard she’s a real ball-buster,” Nick said. “My mentor says she made a story apprentice cry. I can’t imagine I’ll get much from her talk,” he said. “I plan to focus on the creative side of things, not worry about scheduling and money.”

  I didn’t know much about producing, but I imagined it was more than that. I also imagined that BB Gun Films wouldn’t have set up these lectures if they didn’t think we would learn something important from them. But there was no point in trying to convince Nick of their worth.

  He shifted his sketchbook in his arms and a few pieces of paper fell to the floor. I knelt to help him pick them up, but Nick leapt on them so quickly that his head knocked against mine.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Sorry.” He grabbed at the drawings but one of them was stuck under my shoe.

  I lifted my heel and got a good look at what he had been grabbing for.

  “Is this me?” I asked.

  A rhetorical question. It was very obviously me. A roughly drawn sketch of a girl wearing a button-down shirt and trousers, her hair big, her mouth wide as she shouted, BUT WHY?? Nick’s name was scrawled across the bottom.

  “It’s a joke,” he said. “You know, because you’re always asking questions.”

  I stared at it, my face hot.

  “It’s funny,” Nick said.

  It was like the Sloane/Jessica Rabbit drawing. A “rite of passage,” she’d called it. I just hadn’t expected to experience it so quickly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

  Nick looked relieved. “You can keep it,” he said.

  I tucked it into my sketchbook. It wasn’t a bad drawing, and Nick was right—I had spent most of yesterday asking questions—but it still made me feel like my skin was too tight. Like I was being seen, but not in a good way.

  “You have to have a sense of humor about these things,” Sloane had said.

  Nick got his lunch, and I got mine. Today’s lecture would be in the same place I’d gone with Sloane to record the lines for No One Fears the Woods.

  Zoe was sitting at her desk when I walked into the editorial department where a long table and several chairs were set up in the middle of the room. I was the first one to arrive.

  “You’ll learn a lot from John,” she said. She was wearing a pink dress with brown shoes and a red cardigan. It should have clashed, but it didn’t. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail with a little bump at the crown.

  “He seems nice.” I glanced toward John’s office, where I could see him standing behind his desk in the dark, watching something on the screen.

  “He is,” Zoe said. “Tends to go off on tangents and has some unintentionally hilarious dad jokes, but he’s one of the good ones.”

  I was tempted to ask her to point out some of the “not good” ones, but before I could, other interns began shuffling in. Chris, who was working on Nick’s movie, was also in group one. I waved at him, lowering my hand when I saw who walked in behind him.

  “Saffitz,” Bear said.

  I sat down at the table, my lunch in front of me. Ignoring my attempt to ignore him, Bear took the seat next to mine. He put his sketchbook on the table next to my tray. It was closed, but I was deeply tempted to flip it open. No doubt I’d find another stick figure waving at me.

  “How’s the short going?” Bear asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  He was being normal. And nice. Why?

  “Jack and the Beanstalk, right?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  I knew I was being rude, but between our brief interaction on the quad and moments like these, I didn’t really understand why Bear was attempting to be friendly all of a sudden. Did he feel bad for me? Was this pity-friendliness?

  That would be way worse than him continuing to be a jerk.

  “John,” Zoe called out when all eight of us had arrived. “Are you ready?”

  The editor came out of his office, blinking a little at the bright lights. He was wearing a button-down shirt with big green leaves on it and a pair of seventies-style glasses.

  “Thanks, Zoe,” he said, standing at the end of the table. “So. Editorial. Anyone here know anything about how my department works?”

  I raised a tentative hand. I was the only one.

  John crossed his arms. “Really, Bear?” he asked. “I’m hurt. Truly hurt.”

  Bear gave one of his patented So what? shrugs.

  “This kid used to terrorize my department back in the day,” John said. “I’m sure I have at least two hours of you screaming directly into my microphone.”

  “Because you tortured me with lectures on the importance of needle drops,” Bear said.

  John sighed. “The importance of the appropriate use of needle drops,” he said. “Jeez, it’s like you’ve learned nothing from my tutelage.”

  “One can only hope,” Bear said. Both of them were grinning.

  “Did you work on A Boy Named Bear?” Chris asked.

  John nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I was only an apprentice editor back then. My boss was an absolute perfectionist.” He glanced over at Bear and winked. “A real pain.”

  “She’s said the same about you,” he said.

  “She taught me everything I know,” John said.

  Were they talking about Bear’s mom? They had to be. I’d looked her up at the start of the internship—googling “Reagan Davis” instead of “Reagan Beckett”—but there hadn’t been much except a sparse IMDb page listing some projects I hadn’t recognized and a few random comments on articles about BB Gun Films. Comments that seemed to suggest that she had worked on A Boy Named Bear but had never been credited. Was John implying that
she had worked in this department?

  On IMDb the only editor was listed as Matt Griffin. Had she edited part of the film?

  John seemed to realize that the rest of us were all staring at him with rapt interest. He cleared his throat.

  “Editorial,” he said. “Even though it’s the same basic set of skills, there are a few major differences between the way live-action editors and animation editors work. That difference is most clearly illustrated in how our pipeline functions.”

  He pulled out a small stack of papers and began passing them around. It was a time line that showed the order and the number of steps between putting a scene into production and getting it finaled.

  “Notice anything in particular?” John asked.

  I scanned the sheet. “Shots come in and out of editorial a lot,” I said.

  “Bingo,” John said. “In live action, editorial is one of the last departments to work on a scene. It’s written, designed, and shot completely independent of this department. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘We’ll fix it in post’?”

  Some of us nodded.

  “Editors hate that because most producers think it’s true,” John said, and laughed. “Unfortunately, as talented as we are, we can’t perform magic. In animation, however, the editorial department is one of the first—and last—departments to work on a sequence. We work very closely with the story department to sort out as many problems as we can before anything goes into animation. And even after that, we’re working on shots as they cycle through the rest of production. As you’ll see in the pipeline, every time something is finaled in a department, it comes back here before moving on.” He looked at me. “Good observation. Hayley, right?”

  I sat up taller, pleased that he had remembered me.

  “Hayley would know a little bit about shots coming in and out of editorial,” John said. “Just the other day, she was here while her mentor, Sloane, helped us out with some scratch dialogue.” John paused. “You did some voice-over work for us as well, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Thinking about it gave me a shiver of embarrassment. I’d been terrible. Utterly terrible.

  “Is there nothing you can’t do, Saffitz?” Bear asked, before turning to John. “Is it still cut in? Can we watch it?”

  “No,” I said at the same time John pressed his lips together thoughtfully.

  “I think it’s still in there, actually,” he said.

  “Only one way to find out,” Bear said. He got up from the table and headed into John’s office like he owned it.

  There was nothing I wanted to do less than relive my horrible voice-over attempt, but everyone was already moving into the edit bay. From her desk, Zoe shot me a sympathetic look as I trailed after John. Guess I’d been wrong about Bear being nicer to me.

  John stood behind his desk. His keyboard looked nothing like a regular keyboard.

  “Editing shortcuts,” he said when he noticed me watching.

  “Maybe we could watch something else?” I asked, shooting him a desperate look.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I made it sound good.”

  I had a hard time believing him. I could still remember my performance—shaky and awkward and flat. I hated doing things poorly and I really hated other people witnessing it.

  The scene appeared on the screen. Nothing was animated—at this stage, it was only a set of drawings edited together to get a sense of timing and a feel for the dialogue. Dialogue that I had butchered.

  Sloane had given me the quick rundown of the story. It was about a boy who lived near a massive forest. His father—who has plans for the land—doesn’t believe the old wives’ tale about the place being haunted, but when he disappears, the son decides to go into the forest to find him. In it, he encounters the hag—the character Sloane was always being asked to voice—and a mysterious young girl named Hazel.

  In the scene I’d recorded, Hazel—who befriends the boy—warns him about following in his father’s footsteps to destroy the forest. On the screen, drawings showed her standing up high on a tree branch, hands on her hips.

  “We are the trees,” my voice came out of the speakers. “We are the trees and the birds and the grass and the sky, and everything that grows from above and below. Your fire cannot burn us. Your machines cannot destroy us. We were here before you and we will be here when you are gone.”

  My shoulders rose with each word, wanting to escape the sound of my own voice. John was right, though. He’d done something with the audio to make it sound airy and inhuman. It made my toneless delivery creepy and unnerving. And it worked. So much for editors being unable to create magic.

  After the lecture, I gathered my tray, preparing to take it back to the cafeteria.

  “You have hidden talents, Saffitz.” Bear fell into step next to me.

  I turned toward him, using my tray to put some space between us, my sketchbook tucked under my arm. I was tired of this. Of Bear’s taunting. Of his attempts to get under my skin every time he saw me.

  “What do you want, Bear?” I asked. “You got the director role, okay? Congrats. I hope you do something really special.”

  He didn’t say anything, looking down at my tray. Then he reached out and wrapped his hands around it—his fingers brushing mine. I was pretty sure the spark I felt was just static electricity.

  With a tug, he took the tray from me. It jostled my sketchbook and Nick’s drawing fell to the ground for the second time that day. Both Bear and I looked at it. I could see Nick’s signature staring up at us.

  Bear frowned. “You don’t look like that at all,” he said.

  Then he took my tray and walked away. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized he’d stepped right on the drawing, leaving a big, dark boot print. It was ruined. I threw it out, more than grateful for the excuse.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I tried to push Bear’s words out of my head, but they kept coming back to me—nudging me every time I tried to wrangle Nick’s train wreck of a story. You have hidden talents, Saffitz, he’d said.

  Talents that were going to waste. By the end of the first week, we barely had a plot, let alone a script. It was bad enough that the short was going nowhere—but I also didn’t have anyone to vent to about it. Sally and I were exchanging pleasantries, but we weren’t hanging out. The rest of the girls all seemed to get together in the evenings, but I wasn’t invited. Samantha and Julie were busy and our schedules barely met up, so the few times I was able to text them, I usually wasn’t able to get a response until hours later. It wasn’t worth it to try to explain to them what was going on. They cared, but they didn’t understand.

  I even tried to confide in Zach, but my brother was capable of a single form of sibling support, which was teasing. Anything I told him just resulted in more Willy Wonka GIFs, or the occasional WWVBD text. It stood for “What Would Violet Beauregarde Do?” and he was far too proud of his own perceived cleverness. I didn’t bother with my parents. I knew they’d just remind me that I could give up and come home.

  “You guys need to create a beat sheet, at least,” Zoe told us on Friday. “The rest of your team is waiting and if you don’t start getting something into production you’re going to run out of time.”

  The entire short was expected to be ten minutes long, twelve max. Film was usually a page a minute, but with animation it could be longer, so we had been encouraged not to go beyond eight pages. Right now, Nick had thirty pages of mostly unrelated jokes and extended sequences that explained the history of the Stalk—all of which he’d had us storyboard.

  “I just don’t know what I can cut,” he said.

  “You’ll have to figure it out,” Zoe said. “You have too many scenes, for one. A short film needs to be concise. Simplify what you can. Leave only what you absolutely need.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Nick said as we headed to the shuttle at the end of the day. “She’s in production—she doesn’t get what it’s like to be creative.”
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br />   I didn’t say anything. Out of all of us, Zoe had the most experience actually making an animated film, and if I were in Nick’s shoes, I would be paying close attention to what she said. Then again, if I was in Nick’s shoes, we’d already have something in production because not only had I developed a tight, succinct storyline, I’d also had a beat sheet ready to go.

  I dreaded every production meeting. Working on Nick’s movie was agonizing—it was hours of him and Karl regurgitating the same ideas and jokes and expecting a different response each time. I’d already storyboarded different versions of the same gags multiple times.

  Still, I wanted to make the film better. I wanted to be exactly who Sloane thought I could be—a team player. Someone who helped elevate a project.

  I tried working in the library that weekend, but it didn’t feel right. The space had lost whatever magic it’d had and reminded me of the time when I was still working on my pitch—when I was so sure I’d be chosen. The memory of that girl—so sure, so arrogant—was a little like the lingering soreness I’d felt the last time I’d gotten a flu shot. When I’d have to flex my hand to distract from the pain.

  I tried working in my room, but it was tense there, with Sally wearing her headphones or hearing the other girls hanging out in their rooms with the doors open. It was a distraction—that awkwardness—and I needed to focus. It wasn’t until Saturday night that I realized that no one seemed to use the central stairwell.

  Even though the two sets of stairs—which separated in the middle—linked the boys’ and the girls’ dormitories, everyone seemed to enter on the opposite ends of the building. I sat on the girls’ side, just above where the stairs met, sketching as the ambient noise of feet and doors faded into the background.

  I was pretty sure that no one else on Nick’s team was spending their evening trying to fix his short. But I couldn’t help myself. The thought of just letting it be bad was unfathomable to me.

  “Artist compulsivist,” Zach told me once. “That’s your diagnosis. No known cure.”