Page 1 of Caught in a Bad Fauxmance
CHAPTER ONE
Thirty minutes in the backseat together and my sister wants to kill me—a new record.
“Devin.” Maya snaps her manicured fingers in my face when I ignore her. “Move over.”
It’s the third time she’s made that demand since we piled into the car. Any other day I would pack up my drawing tablet and laptop and give her free rein over the backseat, but I’m holding my ground this time.
I push her hand away. “No, I’m working.”
“No, you’re not,” she scoffs. “You’ve been looking at your phone this whole time. Your tablet isn’t even on.”
Up in the peaceful driver’s seat, Dad sighs while Andy tries and fails to hold back a snort. We should’ve seen this coming when we let Andy call shotgun. It made sense at the time—shoving our six-foot-three stepbrother into the cramped backseat of our Honda Civic wouldn’t have beenfair—but Maya hates long drives, and my tablet takes up all the extra leg space. It was a recipe for disaster.
“I’m doing research,” I reply indignantly.
I turn my attention back to the profile I was scouring, only for Maya to snatch the phone out of my hand. She tucks it right into the one place she knows I’m not willing to go: her bra. “Social media stalking your classmates doesn’t count as research.”
Scoping out the competition absolutely counts as research. “Yes, it does.”
She gives me a deadpan look.
Okay fine, it doesn’t.
Not that I’d ever admit it to her, but Maya’s right. If I want any chance of not shooting my barely existent art career in the foot, Ishouldbe working on my application for the Cardarelli mentorship. Every spring semester, one CalArts freshman is whisked away to undergrad stardom by Professor Lila Cardarelli, an animator with so many accolades under her belt she needs a separate Wikipedia page to list them all.
Professor Cardarelli’s protégés are basically gods, according to my roommate, my advisor, and just about everyone else at CalArts. You give up any semblance of free time in exchange for shadowing one of the most iconic names in animation. Internships at Pixar and Disney are essentially guaranteed once you’ve got a recommendation letter from Lila Cardarelli, who has the Disney family on speed dial. No one has any clue how Cardarelli picks her mentees, but it’s the same application every year. Standard background information, and one enormously daunting assignment: attachonepiece that you feel best expresses who you are as an artist.Which sounds easy enough, except I barely have any idea who I am as a person, let alone an artist.
My first semester of almost-adulthood was less than stellar. Being surrounded by people who have been creating since they could hold a pencil and can produce gallery-worthy art in their sleep isn’t exactly encouraging when you can barely grasp the basics of color theory. Especially when you’re like me, someone who didn’t consider animation as a profession until their junior year of high school. Six months ago, I thought I’d be in my element—living the cool, aloof LA art school kid life I’d seen in movies. Instead, I spent the past four months hardly ever leaving my dorm room just so I could keep up with all the homework. I’ve been in the land of eternal sunshine for three months and I’m even paler than when I arrived, and I’ve spent more time with the vending machine on my floor than my roommate.
So, yeah, I could really use a win right now.
The application isn’t actually due until the first day of spring semester, and while procrastination has never done me any favors, I can’t focus on productivity when my innocent phone is being held captive in my sister’s gross, sweaty clutches.
“C’mon, give it back,” I whine, nudging my knee against Maya’s.
“Nope.” She smacks her bubblegum and waves a finger at my tablet. “Pack it up or get drawing.”
I can explain to her for the hundredth time that that’s not how my artistic process works, or I can play dirty.
“Dad, Maya stole my phone.”
“Give your brother his phone back,” Dad mumbles, squinting at a sign about road closures.
Maya’s glare would turn me to stone if I wasn’t so used to being on the receiving end of her rage. Whoever said twins have a special psychic bond lied. The last time Maya and I were on the same page was when we sent Mami into labor ten weeks before our due date. We’ve been menaces since the day we were born.
We stare each other down, unblinking and unrelenting, until she lunges at me. On instinct, I curl around my tablet, protecting it from her wrath. She goes for the cord connecting it to my laptop instead, ready to yank it free, when Dad springs into action.
“Hey!” he shouts, startling all of us, even Andy, into total silence. “Watch it around the tablet,” he warns, focusing back on the road once Maya retreats to her side of thecar.
She begrudgingly hands me back my phone, sticking her tongue out at Dad when he’s distracted by a Prius that gets too close to us. “Sometimes I think you love that thing more than you love either of us.”
“With how much I paid for it, yes, I do,” Dad replies.
Guilt settles too comfortably in the pit of my stomach. It’s no secret that my tablet’s price tag was more than we should’ve spent, but Dad had insisted we splurge on the CalArts recommended model instead of the used three-generations-old one I’d found on eBay. It was for a special occasion—an eighteenth birthday and “congrats on getting into art school” gift rolled into one—but bills like ours don’t leave room for five-hundred-dollar special occasions, as Maya, the golden child who abandoned her grand plan to move to New York and study cosmetology for the moreaffordable option of staying home and commuting to Florida State, loves to remind me.
Case in point: this entire trip. We haven’t been to our cabin in Lake Andreas for four years, but Dad begrudgingly kept up with the payments for the sake of nostalgia. Swinging the extra couple hundred bucks a month felt worthwhile when there was still a slim chance we’d spend another summer or winter break at the lake. Especially after we gave up our childhood home to find a place big enough for Andy and his mom, Isabel, to move in last year.
With two college tuitions, a new mortgage, and unpaid medical bills that have been sitting on the kitchen counter for what feels like eons to keep up with, nostalgia doesn’t make the cut anymore. As much as it might suck, avoiding lifelong debt outweighs sentimentality.
