Inkling

  “I thought it was good,” said Brady.

  Brady liked everything. Ethan had known him since first grade, and there wasn’t a movie or book he hadn’t liked. There was no food he didn’t like either. You could give him all the scraped-up bits from the bottom of the fridge and he’d like it. Once he’d chewed gum he found on the ground.

  “What do you think, Pino?” Ethan asked.

  Everyone waited. Pino was one of those kids who knew the best way to do everything. The best way to arm-wrestle. The best yo-yo tricks. The best way to make an origami swan. Ethan wished he had a big brother who would teach him all this stuff. Dad always managed to be busy.

  “I like it, too,” said Pino, “but maybe we could make it even cooler. . . .”

  Ethan tuned out as his friends talked about the gorilla and whether he needed to save the entire universe, or whether just the planet was enough. He looked over at the next table, where Vika’s group was working.

  He stood up a little in his seat so he could catch a glimpse of her artwork. She’d finished inking an entire two-page spread, and it was amazing.

  She caught him looking. “Don’t even think of copying me.”

  “Why would I copy that?” Ethan said, wrinkling his nose.

  Vika’s eyes narrowed. “Well, you’d better copy something, because it doesn’t look like you have anything.”

  “I forgot it at home!”

  “Uh-huh. I hear a hamster peed on it.” She smirked. “Maybe you peed on it because it was so bad.”

  Ethan glared. Vika Worthington was, without question, the best artist in their grade. Last year she’d made fun of his stick figures and said he couldn’t draw to save his life. To get her back, Ethan told her that her drawings sucked and that his father, who just happened to be a world-famous artist, thought so, too. He finished up by telling her that she could kiss good-bye her dreams of being a famous artist, or even a lousy artist. Vika was taller than him, and she’d been doing martial arts for years, so she tornado-kicked him into a garbage can. The can tipped over and Ethan sort of fell into it. It was after lunch and it was full of everyone’s banana peels and empty yogurt containers and things with ketchup on them. That was over a year ago, but he had not forgotten.

  Ethan had read a lot of comics, and Vika might not quite be a supervillain, but she was definitely an archenemy.

  What made it even weirder and more complicated was that her father was Dad’s publisher. Karl Worthington was the founder and owner of Prometheus Comix. When he’d started his company, it only had a couple of artists, and one of them was Ethan’s dad. But since then, after publishing Dad’s entire Kren series, Prometheus had gotten a lot bigger. Sometimes, at comic conventions or book signings or parties, Ethan ended up in the same room or at the same table as Vika, and they ignored each other. Amazingly, their fathers didn’t have a clue that their kids were mortal enemies.

  “Our graphic novel is going to kill yours,” Ethan told her now.

  “Maybe if your dad does it for you. But it doesn’t seem like your dad’s doing much of anything lately.”

  Ethan saw an angry flash of red-and-black lightning inside his head. “Shut up, Vika!”

  “Sixth graders!” said Ms. D, looking up from her desk. “I know you are being hardworking and respectful of your fellow classmates. Let’s stay focused on our work, please.”

  Chapter 3

  While Ethan was at school, back home the ink splotch was exploring.

  From the top of the doorway, it peeped into Peter Rylance’s studio. Pen in hand, Ethan’s dad hunched over the big sketchbook on his drafting table. The sight of that sketchbook sent a shudder through the ink splotch. It remembered pulling free, and how the thirsty pages had tried to pull it back.

  The book seemed to frighten Mr. Rylance, too, because he kept leaning back and shaking his head and making loud grunts. Once he even pounded the book with his fist. He hadn’t yet drawn a single thing on the blank pages.

  Cautiously, the ink slid down the hallway, high up the wall, keeping watch for the cat. Inside Sarah’s bedroom, it flowed over to a shelf of books near her bed. The ink liked books—normal books, not that terrible sketchbook. The ink seeped over one of the covers, erasing part of a colorful pig, and then slipped inside the pages. It was an alphabet book, and the ink moved across As and Ds and Js, absorbing them, and practicing making the shapes on its own as it slid around, erasing words and pictures. It left the book completely blank.

  Next there was a sticker book filled with happy faces and sad faces and all sorts of emojis. The ink slurped these up, too. Then came a book about babies. It was one of Sarah’s favorites. The ink splotch seemed to like it as well. It poured itself over pictures of kittens and puppies, a baby kangaroo peeping from a pouch, human babies being cuddled by their mothers. The last picture was of a mama gorilla with a baby gorilla holding on to her back. The ink absorbed that one, too.

  With all this new ink, the splotch felt very energetic and swiftly finished off a few short chapter books, practicing all its new letters and words on the now-blank pages. It was learning a lot. By this time, the splotch had swelled up and was rolling itself lazily across the floor. It lurched out into the hallway, sticking close to the wall (it hadn’t forgotten the cat), and returned to Ethan’s room.

  After a brief rest, it explored the insides of Ethan’s chest of drawers—socks, underwear, T-shirts, nothing very interesting. The top of the chest of drawers, however, was very interesting. It was cluttered with all kinds of strange things: playing cards, and colorful multi-sided dice, and a shark tooth, and a model of a volcano with lava hardened on the sides. Propped against the wall was a bulletin board. On it was tacked a picture of Ethan and his mother, both smiling.

  The ink flowed onto the photograph, slowly lapping over Ethan and his mother, erasing them both.

  The ink paused. This was important. It didn’t know why, only that it was. There was something the ink was supposed to do, something it was supposed to find. What was it?

  The ink seeped away, pausing, as if looking back at the photograph it had erased. Then it flowed to the floor and over to the illustration board where it had rested last night.

  Next to the illustration board was a crinkled piece of paper covered with words. It was actually the first page of the story Soren had written for the graphic novel. This was the script that Ethan was supposed to follow when doing the drawings. The ink moved across the text. It didn’t just take the ink inside; it took the story, too.

  The ink pulled itself onto the edge of the illustration board. For a moment, it was still. Then it nudged forward and erased Ethan’s work, all of it, smears included. All it left was the borders of the panels and Ethan’s penciled stick figures.

  It rested thoughtfully another moment, and then, with a tiny black tendril of ink, it began to draw.

  Last period was math, and Ms. D told them to get out their textbooks so they could review their homework. Mind elsewhere, Ethan started paging through his text.

  He knew he was in deep trouble with the graphic novel project. He needed help. The few times Dad had actually given Ethan a lesson, Ethan worried that his father was getting impatient, and worried even more that his father was disappointed in him. He’d say things like “You’ll get better with practice” or “You can’t really teach art.” Ethan hoped this wasn’t true, because he needed to get a lot better, and fast. He needed his father to teach him to draw tonight.

  When Ethan got to the right place in his math textbook, he stared in confusion. It looked like someone had painted a thick, wavy white line across both pages. But it wasn’t paint. It was nothing. Part of the book had just been erased. It hadn’t been like this last night. . . .

  That weird bug thing! It had done this!

  “Ethan, would you start us off with question twelve?”

  Ethan looked frantically at the textbook. Question twelve was gone. His eyes flicked to his exercise book, where his answers were written. You were suppos
ed to show your work, but Ethan hardly ever did.

  “I got eighteen,” he said.

  “Good. Now, can you tell us how?”

  “Yeaaaaaah,” he said, and then guessed. “I took . . . both sides of the triangle and squared them, and then . . . yeah.”

  “This isn’t a question about triangles, Ethan.” She started walking toward him. “Did you actually do your homework?”

  He panicked and slammed the textbook shut, then tried to make things better by giving a big stretch and yawn. He lifted his exercise book so Ms. D could see his answers. She glanced at it but then opened up his textbook. She stared at the erased pages.

  “This is school property, Ethan. Other students are going to need this book next year.”

  “I don’t know how that happened!”

  “See me after school, please. You’ll need to fill in all the missing words and numbers. Very neatly.”

  “Oh, man,” said Ethan.

  Down the aisle, Vika smirked at him.

  After class, Soren came up to him, his forehead creased with concern. “You’re going to work on the graphic novel tonight, right?”

  “Yeah, as soon as I finish detention,” he said.

  Soren looked around and then overhead, as if something might be hanging there, ready to drop. “Everyone else is a lot further ahead.”

  “Hey, it’ll be fine!!” said Ethan, adding two exclamation marks.

  His plan was to go home and ask his dad for help—a kind of crash course in drawing gorillas and, well, drawing in general.

  “Hey, Ethan?”

  He looked over to see Heather Lee walking toward him shyly. Maybe something good was actually going to happen today.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, feeling the heat in his cheeks. “Hi, Heather.”

  From her bag, she pulled an envelope. “I was just wondering if—”

  A party! She was going to invite him to her birthday party or something!

  “—you could give this to your father.”

  Ethan’s hopeful smile disintegrated, and he plastered a fake one on top. “Yeah, sure, totally, I’ll give it to him.”

  Heather beamed. “Really? Thanks so much. I love your dad’s Kren series so much! I’ve wanted to write him a fan letter for ages!”

  It took Ethan almost an hour to fill in all the erased bits in his math textbook. Ms. D was very particular. She made him use correction fluid when he made a mistake or was too messy. He’d never liked geometry, but now he never wanted to see another polygon or parallelogram as long as he lived.

  Walking home, he planned out how to get help from Dad. Even though he started his days as Coma Dad, chances were that by the end of the day he’d have morphed into Grumpy Dad. He absolutely didn’t like being disturbed during his work hours, so Ethan decided to wait until five-thirty, after Dad had picked up Sarah from her after-school program, after he had a glass of wine in his hand. That was the plan.

  When he got home, he’d barely kicked off his shoes when he heard his father call out, “Ethan?”

  Surprised, Ethan walked down the hallway. His father was standing in the doorway of his studio, holding his sketchbook.

  As long as Ethan could remember, Dad had a sketchbook on the go. The covers changed, the size changed, but the inside was always a magical world. He loved paging through them, just looking at the things his father drew from quick observation, or conjured from his imagination. It was like his dad was sightseeing in some new world, jotting down all the strange, wonderful things he saw. Ethan would have given anything to be able to do that—with only a few lines, to create a person you could tell was sad, just by his shoulders. It all seemed to come so easily to his father.

  “Were you in my studio this morning? Or last night?”

  Ethan frowned. “No.”

  Dad opened up his sketchbook. “There’s two pages missing.”

  “What?” He went closer.

  “You didn’t cut them out?”

  “No!”

  It wasn’t a completely unfair question. Ethan had actually done it, just once—razored out a couple of pages to show his friends at school what his dad was working on. To prove that his dad really was Peter Rylance, and to make himself more popular. Still, that had been a long time ago.

  “If I had, you’d see lines where I cut,” Ethan said. “There’s no lines!”

  His father bent the book back and peered into the crease. “Then why’re they gone, Ethan? Drawings don’t just disappear!”

  “I don’t know!”

  His father sighed. “They were good. I was really close to something.”

  Ethan heard this phrase a lot. His father got really close, but never close enough to actually start a new graphic novel. His sketchbooks were full of sketches, but he hadn’t finished anything in two years. And that was why, in the afternoons, Dad became Grumpy Dad.

  There was everyday grumpy, when he’d talk in grunts and sigh a lot. Then there was medium grumpy, when he’d rub the space between his eyes really hard, and snap at Ethan for messing up the fridge. Then there was super grumpy, when he’d yell at Sarah for watching the TV too loud, and say his career was over and no one liked good things anymore, so what was the point of even trying.

  Ethan knew this was probably going to be a super grumpy day. His hopes of getting drawing help crumbled. No way could he ask Dad now. But . . . there was one thing that might cheer him up.

  “Oh, here,” said Ethan.

  He dug Heather Lee’s fan letter out of his pocket and handed it to his dad.

  His father winged it into the recycling bin inside his studio.

  “You didn’t even read it!” Ethan cried.

  “I know exactly what it says.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Believe me, I do. I’ve had thousands of them.”

  Ethan knew his father got lots of fan letters—not as many as he used to, but still a good number. He’d never thought much about what his dad did with them, but throwing them out unread seemed so mean. Ethan went to the recycling bin and fished out the letter.

  His dad gave a weary sigh. “Fine. Open it.”

  Ethan carefully tore the side of the envelope and pulled out the letter.

  “Okay,” said his dad. “Here we go. It’ll say how he or she—”

  “She.”

  “—loves my Kren series, maybe even more than any other books she’s ever read. The third book was probably her favorite in the series. Then she’ll tell me how upset she was when Kren died.”

  Reading hastily, Ethan had to admit his father was right so far.

  “She’ll ask, or maybe even beg, me to write another book in the series, and bring Kren back to life. She might even say I’m a terrible person for killing Kren, or call me a rude name.”

  “There’s nothing rude in here,” Ethan said. Heather wasn’t like that.

  “And she might suggest a story line so I can bring Kren back to life and continue the series.”

  Ethan folded up the letter. “Okay, she did give you an idea.”

  “Maybe a lightning bolt, or a magical elixir . . .”

  “Okay, yes, but still . . .”

  Not for the first time, Ethan wondered what it would be like to get letters, even just one, telling him he was an amazing artist or storyteller, or an amazing anything.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel good at all?” Ethan asked.

  Dad grunted.

  “You get letters every day from kids who love your series!”

  What Ethan loved most about Kren was that he seemed like the best friend you could ever have. Yes, he was a weird-looking mutant created by evil scientists, and sure, he lost his temper sometimes and threw cars around or made volcanoes erupt, but in his spare time he went to school, helped out at an animal shelter, and made these incredible banana splits with more toppings than you could imagine.

  “Yeah, well,” Dad said, “I finished that series a long time ago.”

  Kren had made him famous, but now he was
blocked. That was the word Dad used. The way he said it, it wasn’t just a little chunk of concrete in the road—it was a huge black stone wall topped with barbed wire and guard towers.

  He said he just didn’t have any ideas that got him excited. His publisher wanted him to do more Kren books. Kids wanted him to do more. But he wouldn’t. So every day he sat at his drafting table and sketched, and at the end of almost every day he was grumpy.

  “Have you ever thought of doing it?” Ethan asked. “Bringing him back?”

  “Kren?”

  “Why not?”

  His father said nothing for a moment, then rubbed hard between his eyes. “Sometimes people die. That’s just the way it is.”

  Chapter 4

  In his bedroom, Ethan dumped his backpack and dropped heavily into his chair. He flipped open the laptop. He had a ton of work to do—and he knew he also needed to check under his bed for tarantulas or worse—but he couldn’t face any of it yet. If he could just play a game or two of Realm of Evil, he’d feel better.

  His screen lit up. He logged on and started fighting orcs. His dad could be such a jerk. Accusing him of stealing his stupid sketches.

  Why didn’t he just do another Kren book? Everyone wanted one, and at least he’d be doing something useful instead of grumping at everyone all the time.

  From the corner of his eye, he could see his graphic novel project on the floor, but he refused to turn and face it head-on. It was too depressing. He cut off more orc heads, but there was something about the project that kept nagging at his eye. He turned and looked—

  And kept looking. Because even though the project was exactly where he’d left it, it couldn’t have been more different. Ethan jumped from his chair and crouched in front of it.

  Panel after panel, the entire first page was drawn and inked. Every scene he’d sketched with stick figures was finished. And it was so good! The zoo, the animals, the secret passages—and the gorilla! The gorilla was just the way he’d imagined but been completely unable to draw.

  Ethan hunched over it and felt a flood of relief, and also happiness. Not just because the work was so good, but because he thought his father had done it for him. Dad must have come into his room while he was at school, and felt sorry for him, and done the first page, just to help him out, and show him the way!