Drawing Not to Scale

Some people have friends. Others have imaginary friends. I have the people in the book.

Three people live in a small black notebook Mom gave me. I had been drawing comics since second grade. When she found someone’s discarded sketchbook at a second-hand shop, she thought their work might inspire me.

The notebook is bound in black leather and while not completely smooth, it is well-worn as if it is four-hundred years old instead of little older than the few years I have owned it.

I say owned in the sense that the book is in my possession. I do not own the people inside. They make their own choices, sometimes to my great sorrow. I will tell you about them because they are my friends.

I was ten when I first met Takashi and Sadao.

I left the book on my desk at first, and it would be weeks after Mom got sick before I picked it up again. I flipped through the pages until I came to an older Japanese man, drawn in a loose manga style, smiling at me.

Then he stepped back and gave a quick, shallow bow while greeting me in Japanese. I couldn’t speak, as if I were the character in the book. He raised one hand. “Ah. No speaking Japanese, eh? I know a little English. We will get by.”

When I could not answer, Takashi offered to introduce his grandson.

“Turn to the next page,” he said. So I did, afraid that he would be waiting or that he would disappear forever.

Someone else drew Sadao. Inked rather than lined for a manga, he had a wooden sword and challenged me in Japanese. His grandfather scolded him from the previous page, so Sadao bowed while holding his sword at his side as if sheathed.

“If you draw me a kite, I will be your friend.” He leaned closer. “Grandfather thinks kites are for meeting girls.”

Takashi chuckled from the other sheet.

I would draw Sadao many things over the following years. His favorite was the puppy, which he named Spot. “I’ve always dreamed of having a puppy,” he said, as if he were eighty instead of ten. Takashi and Sadao helped me with schoolwork, even though I went to an American school. They helped with--everything.

Kisha arrived the same day I first met Bryan Clark. I was thirteen. Bryan was fifteen yet still in my grade. I had only seen him in the hallways at school. He waddled when he walked because of a wide stride. I wanted to call him birdman. From watching Takashi and Sadao, I learned that this is cruel. Childish. Much like how Bryan tripped me when I passed his locker or pelted my head with spit wads from across the room. Sadao suggested beating Bryan up in the locker room, something I’d never have considered. Wrestling left me feeling twisted and lopsided like Dad’s beans and tomatoes after the neighbor dogs chase a rabbit through the garden. Takashi urged kindness.

The day I met Bryan in person, he kicked my foot out from under me. School hallway floors are unforgiving, and I grunted when I cracked my knee on the floor. It must have been an awful sound because everyone left, even Bryan.

When evening came, I moped in my room while my stepdad worked on supper. Ted was okay. Since he was shyer than I, he was not much help with Bryan. I flipped through the pages of the black notebook, looking for Takashi or Sadao. Takashi had once explained that Japan was very far from Ohio, and it was night there when it was day here. Sadao whispered that it was because the sun had a girlfriend and couldn’t spend time with all of us at once.

That particular night, neither visited me. Instead, I found a page near the middle of the book where a previous owner had drawn night beaches. The style here was an ink wash. While I imagined the colors of the moon overhead, something moved behind a palm tree. Several minutes passed as I borrowed patience from Takashi. Finally, a black girl with coiled pigtails peeked from behind a tree. When she saw me, she ran away.

“Don’t talk to her,” Sadao said. “She’s not very nice.”

Takashi laughed. “What my grandson means is that she is too old for him and too shy.”

I knew shy--quite well. I drew a butterfly barrette on the bench near the beach where I’d seen Kisha. The next day, she made a little sign. “Can you do dragonflies instead?”

I was happy to even though that day Bryan stuffed me in a locker and my mood was terrible. Drawing a dragonfly was therapeutic, like ice cream and cake following a hot, lazy afternoon at the pool.

Kisha left me another sign. “Thank you. It’s perfect. Sadao says you are nice but you need a breath mint.”

Takashi and Sadao changed very little over the next few years. They changed clothes and where in the book I would find them. They lived their lives in spaces between the pages where I could not follow. Sometimes I would not realize Takashi had grown a beard until he trimmed it.

However, Kisha grew up with me. She was better at helping with schoolwork. I think this was because she was also from Ohio. She was more like a classmate or someone I’d meet in the hallway. By my senior year, she was slender and tall and as beautiful as anyone I’d ever seen.

That December, I signed up for a scholarship from a New York art school. The other contender was a girl named Heather, who had an extensive gallery of watercolor nature paintings. Her work was beautiful, but she had only ever seemed annoyed by my art. How could I compete with her lovely flowers and birds?

The day Counsellor Bastian announced the winner, I woke paralyzed with anxiety and put the black book in my pack to keep my friends near. I got dizzy when the counselor told us the scholarship was going to me. My three characters, based on my friends, showed a witty, mature take on life. Bastian admired their grace in helping each other face the terrors of childhood and the world.

Heather bit her lip and said nothing, but she came to me later. “He’s right, you know. Your comics are wonderful.”

Stunned is not strong enough to describe my feelings. Dad and I struggled, even just the two of us. The scholarship was twenty thousand dollars off my tuition. This was--I had to tell Kisha.

When I thought I was alone, I pulled out the notebook. My friends had helped with my comics, like with so many other things. They were as responsible as I.

Kisha was not around. She lived part of her life between the pages, like Takashi and Sadao.

“Sadao,” I cried when I found him flying his kite in the park on page 43. “I got it. I got the scholarship.”

“See?” he smirked. “Who told you this would happen? Was it--the bus driver? I think not. The meter maid? Of course not. No, it was I, Sadao, master of blade and wisdom…”

His voice cut out when someone jerked the book out of my hands. When I turned, Bryan Clark and a trio of his friends had blocked the hallway. Bryan flipped through the pages of the notebook.

“What you got here?” Bryan demanded. I wasn’t worried that he would notice Sadao or the others. I learned long ago they only moved for me.

“That’s mine, Bryan. Give it back.”

Bryan sneered. “No, I think I’ll keep it.”

I lunged for the book with desperate speed and yanked it from his hands. Bryan snatched back, though, and ripped a page. I shrieked when I saw it was the page with Sadao. Bryan had torn him in half. My howl echoed through the hallway. Students at the far end turned, and teachers emerged from their classrooms.

I sank to the floor, staring at half of Sadao’s body. His head and the other half were on the part Bryan had. He glanced at the teachers, one of them coming our way, and wadded the paper into a ball to throw at me.

I hid in the teacher’s lounge and taped the ruined page back together as well as I could. I called Dad to pick me up.

When I got home, there was no sign of Sadao on the ripped page. Nor was he or Takashi on any other page.

I stayed in my room the next day and wept, pacing and flipping through the notebook every few minutes, anxious to find my friends. Late that night, Kisha peeked from a doorway into a living room on page 22, emerged, slumped on a couch.

“Takashi is going to be gone for a few days,” she whispered.

“Why?”

Her lips curled into the worst thing I’ve ever seen. “He has to take care of Sadao’s funeral arrangements.”

I cried. “I wish I could hold your hand,” she said. “I’m leaving, too. I’m going to take care of Takashi for a while.”

The school board suspended me for three days for fighting in the hallway. Dad argued with them. He was amazing. I weathered everything, waiting to see Takashi, wishing Sadao was still okay, wishing I had left the notebook home that day.

Five days later, Kisha left a note on the bench by the beach. Takashi had sent a letter, which she then passed on to me.

“Alex, my son,” Takashi wrote, “Please know that I love and respect you. Watching you grow into a man has been one of my fondest pleasures in a long and happy life. I cannot bear to continue without my grandson. You were a perfect balance for his enthusiasm, and he was the perfect balance for my pedantry. Without him, the thought of walking the grounds where he played and laughed is a pain I cannot endure. I am taking him to my family’s ancestral home, and I shall not be able to return. Go with peace, Alex. Always go with peace. Forever, Takashi.”

At the end, Kisha had added in her lovely handwriting, “I’m sorry, Alex. I’ll see you soon.”

But she did not return. Winter grew unbearably cold, then passed as it always did. I managed to finish school and graduate. I still had the scholarship, and Dad made arrangements to get me to New York in the fall. Going to school did not hold my interest. Art would be lonely without my friends.

I stopped looking for Kisha. The book gathered dust on my desk, the way it had before Mom left us. I got a summer job at an office downtown and took my lunches at a café with a patio. I sat at one of the tables and doodled while watching people’s reflections pass in the windows.

I’m writing all this down so you can know a little of my story. I don’t have much more to tell because it has caught up with me.

Kisha caught up with me.

Yesterday, I saw her in the window at the café. Like the day we met, she peeked around a tree behind me, then ran away when I saw her.

She came back today. While I doodled dragonflies, I watched her cross the street in the reflection, tall, slender, beautiful. She put her hand on my shoulder--and giggled.

I have to go.