Keeping On

Two years later, Tegan and I hit junior high. It was 2006, we were in seventh grade, and it was the year we discovered Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday and all of those other bands we now listen to whenever we’re nostalgic for our shameful scene-kid days.

We kept up with our art. We aligned our schedules almost perfectly so that we’d be together for most of the day at school, but while she took theatre as one of her electives, I didn’t have anywhere else to go except business keyboarding. Our other elective was art, and I hate to toot my own horn, but we were probably some of the best kids in our entire class.

I liked to draw cartoons, but every once in a while, I could pull a still life out of my butt and make it look okay. She had her fingers in everything – painting, sculpture, drawing, makeup, you name it. I had a comfort zone, and that year, it came in handy.

Our art teacher had picked a few kids from all of her classes to represent our school at the county-wide art show in the local mall. Tegan and I were shoe-ins, and when she told us we were picked, we just had to decide on which assignment to submit to the show.

Tegan went with a watercolor painting she did based on a word we were each assigned; hers was “scatterbrains,” and it was so neat and poppy that I was almost scared to place mine alongside hers. I just submitted a self-portrait I drew in my backyard one day as homework.

Mine was messy, with graphite and charcoal smudging into the background, ghost lines showing through after trying to erase everything. My teacher gave me an A, saying that it looked like something a college kid would draw. I didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.

All I knew was that my dad heard the news and dragged me to the mall that Saturday, gushing with excitement about how proud he was.

“You are practically famous, mijo! This is a huge deal!” he smiled all through the drive, elbowing me every now and then.

I didn’t understand the hubbub at first. In fact, I was kind of nervous to see so many people crowding around the makeshift walls in the middle of the mall, where our art was mounted and thumb-tacked. There were high school artists standing next to their elaborate paintings, and a few of my peers were walking around in awe.

It was scary, being around all that talent. I had pigeonholed myself, focusing on one area of art, and here were all these people who had multiple talents when it came to my dream. It was even a little hard to look at Tegan, knowing how she could adapt so quickly to new mediums. She was living the life – she even won one of the first-place spots, and there were only three of those!

But she was just as awestruck as I was, albeit less negative. I even got away from my own self-doubt for a little while, walking next to her amidst our peers’ artwork. No matter how much I wanted to beat myself up over the fact that I felt like a lost kid in a supermarket, it was nice to just let go and fish around for inspiration.

And all wasn’t totally lost, I have to admit. Even though there were only three first-place ribbons placed precariously on engaging pieces, there were six second-place slots – and I was one of them.

My ribbon was a little smaller than Tegan’s, pinned to the white mounting board behind my newsprint self-portrait, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had won something, after all. I wasn’t the best, but I did my best, and in the end, that amounted to a fairly big deal.

Believe me, my dad kept telling me that on the way home.

“Second place, Oshie! That is incredible,” he grinned as we pulled up to a stoplight. The sun was setting, pinks and purples above our heads. “Congratulations, mijo. You should be proud of that!”

I looked down at my hands, at the blue ribbon shimmering with gold text. “Yeah, but it’s not first place,” I joked, hoping to convey sarcasm.

Dad bumped my shoulder with his hand and said, “Do not say that. Second place is good too. If I was in charge, you’d be in first place for sure, though.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re my dad,” I rolled my eyes with a little smirk.

“You know what I mean,” he went on. “Now, where do you want to eat? I am not cooking tonight. You choose where we go.”

We ended up going to Saturday’s, a generic sports-themed restaurant that always seemed to hit the spot. The whole time, Dad kept asking me questions about what I wanted to do in life, but not the overly-invasive kinds of questions adults always ask when you’re in your senior year of high school. Just gentle prodding, I guess. I talked to him about animation or graphic design, and the whole time he kept reiterating the fact that he didn’t mind where I’d end up, as long as I was happy.

I always sort of knew I’d end up happy, or at least I had all the right ingredients to be happy. There were a few mishaps early on, a couple of ingredients that weren’t mixed or measured properly, but at that moment, I was okay with everything. In fact, I was glowing.