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doesn’t seem to mind the moth holes in her green sweater, or her greasy, faded pink hair, or the obvious paint crusted onto her jeans. I notice she wears her piercings with much more ease than I do.
    Bitch,
I think.
    “I noticed you sketching,” she says.
    “I’m doing my homework.”
    “We’re doing a
bande dessinée en directe
here tonight. I could give you a board to draw on.”
    “I don’t have any money.”
    “You don’t need money. I give you a board and then you draw on it and then give your drawing to someone else to ink and then we collect them and make a mini-comic out of it. See?”
    She slips me a mini-comic.
    “This is from the last event,” she says.
    “I’m not really a joiner,” I say.
    Unfazed, she moves on to bother the people at the next table. They eagerly take a board from her.
    I put my notebook down and look around at the other people in the room. I look at the person at the next table. He’s drawing stupid stick figures. I draw way better than that.
    Maybe I
could
draw something. I get up to find pinky nerdy girl with the blank boards.
    “Oh, great!” she says as she hands me my board.
    I can always leave,
I say to myself.
I don’t have to have anyone ink my pencil picture.
I start to walk back to my table and run right into Max Carter. My blank board falls to the ground. Max picks it up.
    It takes me a long time to find a place that I can call my own. Somewhere I won’t run into anyone I know. Somewhere I can be alone. And yet here is Max, invading my territory,
again.
    “Hey. Wow. I didn’t know you did stuff like this,” he says.
    “I don’t,” I say.
    He laughs. “Yeah, obviously not.”
    “No, really, it’s an accident that I’m here. I didn’t know they were doing this tonight.”
    “Do you have an inker yet?”
    “No. I’m probably not going to even do it.”
    “Where are you sitting? Let me get a board and we’ll ink each other’s drawings.”
    He leaves me there to go off and find his own board. I shouldn’t let a stupid blank board drive me into a fit of not doing anything. I go back to my seat. I feel fluttery, like I am on a tightrope. I am exposed in the air. Naked. Out of my element. Feet not on the ground. The fluttery feeling turns into nervousness. Which then turns into anger. Which then turns into action.
    I attack my blank board. I start with wide lines and circles and begin to draw my newest alien creations, the ones I am keen on making into masks.
    Max moves my cloak from the back of the other chair and begins to draw. We don’t even talk once, even though the café is buzzing with conversation. The silence stretches out between us, and that suits me just fine.
    After a bit Max hands me his board.
    I scan it. It’s a sketch of an apartment building with eight windows. Each window reveals a scene about the loneliness of the person inside. Growing up the side of the building is a vine of flowers.
    I don’t say anything about the drawing, but it moves me.
    “It’s an idea I have for a story in the graphic novel I’m working on.”
    I nod.
    He takes a marker out and starts on the board with my multiple monster alien faces on it.
    “I love the way you draw with such detail,” he says. “Where do you get your ideas for these?”
    “My dad’s workshop, I guess,” I say.
    I decide to ink his drawing in grays and blacks, but make the flowers a hopeful dusty pink.
    “I’m glad I found this café,” he says. “It reminds me of a place where I used to hang out in London. They were always doing cool shit like this there.”
    “Uh-huh,” I say.
    I don’t know how to make small talk. But Max does.
    “It’s essential, don’t you think, to find a place that you can call your own?”
    “Yeah,” I say. “I really don’t like to run into people I know.”
    “I know, me neither,” Max says. “I like to be alone sometimes. Especially when I’m drawing. Especially when I’m doing stuff like this.”
    Suddenly I find it strange. Max and