Scribbling Away

Abby Wong - Palo Alto, CA

Once, there was a little girl in China who had just learned how to use a pencil. The girl was so excited that whatever shape or line she scratched onto a hard surface stayed there, she scratched these onto any hard surface she could find. Especially the little blue table. Never on top of the table, no, that was for homework. The little girl lay on her back on the cold hard floor. The table always seemed bigger when she was lying down. Bigger meant more space for drawing.

Sometimes she just scribbled shapes. Maybe her parents had scolded her, or school had upset her. Stories also developed -- of the brave, of the cowardly, from her own ordinary life, exaggerated. Quadrilateral dragons found their way onto the corners of the table’s light blue canvas; stick people (warriors!) were painted into the center to show how main the main characters were. Some grew fish tails and became mermaids and swam into the depths of the ocean, or grew wings and flew off to become citizens of the sky kingdom. Due to much begging her father taught her to draw an oddly shaped horse that had sausages for legs and a fatter sausage for a body. The girl loved this style and these sausage-shaped horses splattered onto the oddly-shaped wobbly table’s legs.

Her family moved to another apartment, then another, and the blue table came with her, all the way to America where she kept scribbling under the table. Then one day, around first grade, she found herself struggling with things like how to spell the word ‘the’ in English. Sometimes she would get so frustrated that she’d shout out her question right in the middle of the classroom. Friendships became complicated. Homework piled on top of more homework. At some point, she looked down at the top of the table and realized she’s stopped scribbling beneath it. When the blue table disappeared, she hardly even noticed.

The little girl wasn’t that little now. Due to a book called “Warrior Cats,” she read in 3rd grade, she’d begun to draw strange-looking creatures others could not quite interpret. “Hmmm.. long gray body, weasel?” “Four paws and a long tail... possibly a rat?” “Weird pointy ears, gravity-defying face fur? Maybe a lynx?” “Blue neck speckles...Some mystical creature from a far-out universe?” One rainy Saturday, while stuck at home drawing her cats on a new tall white desk with steady legs that were even able to go up and down, she leaned back in her fancy little pink chair and it hit her as hard as a baseball bat. Her cats didn’t really look like cats, at least not like the cats she saw on Pinterest, DeviantArt, and Tumblr. She would never and she meant never be as good as the other artists.

“Look more feline!!” she yelled as she ripped the paper and stuffed it into the trash. She drew with pencil, paper, and eraser but the eraser was the most important because there was so much erasing: every missed line, every wrong stroke, every accident. The pencil marks rubbed off the sides of her sweaty hands and onto the white desk, turning it almost black. The chair tired of holding her up. One day in the 4th grade she went out to look at high schooler’s drawings hung up in her school hallway. “You will never ever be this good,” they shouted down at her. “You are just a silly little girl scribbling under a lousy table. You can’t even get the proportions right for a cat.”

A cold gust of wind traveled down the hallway through the open windows. The little girl was wishing she’d never held a pencil or seen that little blue table when she felt a tug on her shirt. A little girl, in second grade, maybe younger, had come up beside her. “Wanna see my really cool drawing of a horse?” the little girl asked, face plastered with confidence. It’s not every day that someone offers to show their ‘really cool drawing of a horse.’ The girl looked and there on a flimsy piece of paper, crumpled from the second grader’s hand, was the most deformed horse in the world. No offense, but had the second-grader not told her, she would’ve thought it was a mouse on really long stilts. Still, the second-grader girl was smiling a big toothy smile that said ‘this is the best drawing ever. I’m going to win so many prizes.’

The second grader’s smile carried the girl away from the hallway and back to the little blue table. She scooched herself underneath to lie next to the smaller version of herself who was, as usual, scribbling away, telling the usual stories of mermaids, bird people, warriors, and dragons.

“What is that?” she asked herself.

“Oh, it’s a story about a warrior who always wanted to be the best dragon-slayer in the world but no matter how hard he tried, he found himself back where he began,” the little girl responded.

“How does it end?” she asked, studying the messy scribbles that outlined a stick person with long straws for hair, who was practicing with his sword on what seemed to be a cardboard dragon.

“He keeps practicing,” her little girl self said, and took her crayon and drew a thought bubble above her stick person that said “have confidence, have fun” “one swing at a time?”

The girl found herself nodding.

“Will he be able to slay the dragon?” she asked. “Yeah! Lots and lots of them,” the little girl said with the same confidence as the little second grader who stood beside her in the hallway.

The girl smiled gratefully down at the little second grader.

“That sure is a cool drawing of a horse,” she said. “You’ve taught me a lot.”