Page 7 of Whistle

Annie heaved a quiet sigh of relief as their visitor returned to her table.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to her editor. “I’m just not up—”

The woman had stopped, as if forgetting something. She turned and came back to the table, looking directly at Annie.

“I just wanted to add—I didn’t know whether to bring it up a moment ago—but I just have to say that, of all your books, our favorite has to bePierce Takes Flight. It’s simply wonderful, and I’m here to tell you,ourEmily was certainly smart enough not to go jumping off a balcony.” She smiled broadly. “You have a wonderful day.”

Two

When John Traynor landed his first real live job at an animation studio in New York after graduating from art school, he decided to mark the occasion by getting himself a Mickey Mouse watch. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“No, no,” said Annie. “Not Mickey. Too cliché. I’ll bet half the people who work there have a Mickey Mouse watch. Go for something a little different.”

They wandered in and out of shops in SoHo and Greenwich Village, including a stop at an animation gallery—not because it sold watches, but because it carried framed, original animation cels from early Warner Bros. cartoons and more recent shows, likeThe Simpsons, all out of their price range. As a couple in their mid-twenties, they squandered any money they had left over after paying the rent on pot and lattes.

But now that John had the prospect of a regular income, a minor splurge did not seem inappropriate. They were at that age when they felt they had everything they could ever want because they had each other. Who cared about fancy cars and penthouse apartments and dinner at the Rainbow Room?

They’d finished school and were trying this whole being-an-adult thing, even if their take on being grown-ups involved creating entertainment for children. At least, that was John’s goal. Annie was less sure where she was headed.

Her dream had always been to write and illustrate books for young readers, but what chance did she have against the millions of others pursuing the same dream? So she’d put her résumé into several web and graphic design places. Being creative with a screen, a mouse, and a keypad was not her first choice, but you had to make a living, right? It beat waiting tables or being one of those poor bastards hawking umbrellas on a street corner when it started raining.

“This one,” Annie said, pointing into a display case.

They’d found their way to a comic book store that sold much more than adventures of Aquaman and Wolverine. It carried action figures, models of ships fromStar WarsandStar Trek, and every version of the Batmobile Bruce Wayne had raced through Gotham City in pursuit of the Joker.

And it had watches.

“Let’s have a look,” John said.

The kid behind the counter unlocked the cabinet and placed the watch in John’s hand. On its face was not Mickey Mouse, but that oddball character whose goal of blowing up the earth was thwarted at every turn by Bugs Bunny.

Marvin the Martian.

He had his arms folded across his chest and an annoyed expression on his face, like,Everytime I want to kill all of humanity I can’t, and I amsooooangry.

John hooked it around his wrist and admired it. “What do you think?”

“What doyouthink?” Annie replied.

“I think it’s perfect. Quirky.”

He didn’t bother to take it off so that it could be placed in its factory packaging. Paid for it and wore it home, where they dined on macaroni and cheese made from a box, killed off a bottle of thecheapest sparkling bubbly the local wine shop carried, then screwed their brains out before watchingLetterman.

God, it was a great life.

One day, the two of them sitting at the breakfast table, John said, “You wanna get married this week?”

Annie took a sip of coffee. “I got nothin’ planned. How’s Friday?”

They called family and friends, keeping the number to under twenty, since that was the number of guests you could invite to a city hall ceremony, then invited everyone back to their place for wings and beer.

They weren’t the kind of couple to get all corny about it, but they truly believed they’d been destined to find one another. They’d met in the art school’s animation class, Annie doodling oddball creations more than she took notes, John leaning in, whispering how much he liked them. Not the most gorgeous guy Annie had ever dated. Already, in his twenties, starting to lose his hair. Had a little roll of fat over his belt, looked at the world through thick glasses, but, hey, this was art school, with a heavy nerd enrollment and light on jocks, and if she were honest with herself, she was no pinup model. Big frizzy hair, heavy through the hips, bought most of her clothes at “vintage” shops, which was a nice way of saying someone else had had the pleasure of wearing them before she did, and she didn’t spend a lot of time, or money, at the makeup counter.

Fuck all that. She wasn’t put on this planet to have others gawk at her. She wanted tocreate. She wanted to makeart. Even as she sat at her workstation picking out fonts and background colors and creating links, there was always a fine-point Sharpie and a sketch pad on the desk next to the mouse pad.

She filled one entire notebook with sketches of an adorable polar bear she christened Barry. Barry traveled the world to warn people about the melting polar ice caps. She moved on from sketches to puttogether a prototype book. Twenty pages, words and illustrations on every one of them. Annie also, as was her custom, created a six-inch-tall, three-dimensional model of Barry so that she could picture what he looked like from any angle. She started with a wire armature, bulked up the body with crumpled tinfoil, then used plasticine to make his body, limbs, and head.

Annie sent the book off to multiple publishers. Few responded, and those that did took a pass. Too preachy, they said. Nothing wrong with a message, but you don’t have to hit the kids over the head with it.

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