Chapter 1: The Fountain Incident
John Rich peeked out from behind his easel where he’d been hiding all evening, and glared at the man across the terrace. John had been studying this jerk for hours, and now, finally, could put his face down on paper.
Tonight was John’s first fancy New York City party, and he was there because of The New York Review, the fancy magazine he was newly employed as the cover artist. His job this windy October evening? Draw three raffle winners on a ritzy rooftop as the sun went down over Hell's Kitchen. No problem. Someone would wander up to John, hand him a weighty orange raffle ticket, and then they’d sit for twenty minutes or so and get a beautiful portrait. Oohs and aahs all around. It was like John’s art was a big prize, and they were at an extremely pretentious Chuck-E-Cheese. They placed John near the bubbling fountain at the edge of the rooftop swimming pool, and John had drawn a poet, a TikTok influencer, and some guy with a popular podcast on global politics.
Now, he pulled the yellow #2 pencil from behind his ear and drew what he saw. At the top of the sketchbook page, his pencil blocked out a long triangle, a smiley face, thin outstretched arms clapping—the pop star Catarina Harlow’s in her vintage cream Dior dress. Next to the triangle, he scribbled a flurry of hashmarks: Bella the dog from TikTok.
Yes, this party had a dog. The New York Review was snobby, but also sometimes quirky. John had wanted to draw Bella because she did this thing where she would leap into the arms of anyone who clapped at her. And maybe John was glaring at the crowd of starlets because, quite frankly, they had been monopolizing Bella’s time.
As John’s pencil raced across the page, his head bobbing up and down to look and document, he captured the string lights, the band, the catering staff with trays, and the entire New York Review Festival’s guest list. A bouquet of poets drawn in profile, a cluster of ovals that were East Village gallery owners, a forest of literary agents, actors from buzzy streaming shows, influencers, and a lopsided grid that was the buildings of the Manhattan skyline.
But at the center of his sketchbook page was Tyler Hughes, the star of the blockbuster Jacob Raw action movie franchise, and the object of John’s glaring. John’s eyes peered over his sketchbook page, and his pencil hovered. Hughes was currently a series of manly rectangles with no face, but oh—Oh! John would get him eventually. Hughes was handsome in a four quadrant, uncanny-valley way that was throwing John off. Plus, this guy kept moving, first facing away from John, then elbowing some comedian while shout-laughing, and now on all fours trying to psych out Bella the dog. Everyone crowed, but Bella stared, confused by this display of unprofessionalism.
John had been tracking Hughes in his peripheral vision since the guy had strolled past John’s easel setup and pointed at John and laughed, “Love your work, mate!” While most people delicately cradled cocktails, he held a wet beer; while most of the celebrities were discreet about selfies, Hughes put an arm around John’s shoulder and grinned widely for the event photographer, leaving a wet handprint on John’s sleeve. But as hard as Hughes was to ignore, he was proving impossible to draw. It was ruining the composition of John’s sketchbook page, and that alone was enough to resent him . John sketched and then erased. He drew the shape of his head—and then Hughes leaned back and laughed as Bella rolled over. John sighed and erased again.
Hughes had a movie out last summer called Case: Raw 3: Nexus, a title that John felt had an irresponsible number of colons. His coworker Hunter wanted them to see this movie, and that was an immediate no for John. Nevermind the military-industrial complex and rugged manosphere of it all, John had seen the trailer:
Big drums and Hans Zimmer horns. A cityscape flyover with gray-blue color grading. Men in black tactical gear carrying guns patrol a dark warehouse. A chord of brass and pounding drums builds to–
JACOB RAW (VOICE OVER)
It’s not about if I’ll get the answers I need.
JACOB RAW (VOICE OVER)
It’s when.
A blade of light falls on a pillar—zoom in— lighting up one of JACOB RAW’S (Tyler Hughes) very pretty blue eyes. Cut to JESSICA ORLOV (Catarina Harlow) as she looks over her shoulder.
JACOB RAW (VOICE OVER)
And even if it’s from the people who trained me.
JESSICA ORLOV
Raw. You’re supposed to be dead!
An explosion of artillery fire. Raw knocks out guards. Bone cracking sfx. Punch.
The screen goes black.
Jacob Raw drives a sports car with a grim, joyless gaze. He looks like he wants to make love to death. He looks like he is late to freedom’s birthday party.
JACOB RAW (VOICE OVER)
It’s not what I destroy. It’s
what I leave in my wake…
Jacob Raw running through an explosion.
JACOB RAW (VOICE OVER)
…that’s what you should worry about.
It was like, so dumb.
“Goddammit,” John muttered to himself, rummaging around his Garfield pencil bag for an eraser. This sketch was beautiful, done, other than this guy’s face. As cover artist, John could draw a portrait in under thirty minutes, and that portrait would then be reproduced on tens of thousands of copies of The Review. But for whatever reason, he couldn’t eke out this teensy, tiny sketch. It’s like his fingers slipped whenever he set down a feature. But you know, it was fine. Sometimes it was tricky to draw people like Tyler Hughes who had clearly gotten several rounds of plastic surgery. John brushed eraser dust to the floor with the back of his hand. If Tyler Hughes did not have jaw implants, John would eat his hat.
John finally dropped four lines down for Tyler Hughes’s face: two squinty eyes, a perfect nose, a confident smirk. But when he glanced up again, Bella the dog had jumped into Tyler’s arms and licked the face that John couldn’t draw. His pencil scratched out the line of Hugh’s jaw, and John crossed that line where his neck met his collar. He drew a speech balloon pointing at Catarina Harlow that said “Awwwwww.” Finally, on the opposite page, John drew a large, strong hand caressing a shower of light fur.
That was when Hunter Henderson emerged from the crowd of glitzy attendees. She was draped in a red and cream Issey Miyake dress, her honey-colored microbraids were done up in an immaculate bun, and she texted while narrowly avoiding a server. Hunter was pretty skinny and John towered over her, but she could easily take him in a fight. John once saw a video of Hunter doing Pilates and was convinced that she could kill him with core strength alone. She looked up from her phone, and sighed at John.
“Okay," she began, "before you judge this guy—”
“Let me guess,” said John, “he is either straight and awful, or gay and unavailable. Or a fun third option: gay and awful.”
“Gay and delightful but lives in Chicago,” said Hunter pulling an exaggerated frown. As soon as one of the catering guys offered John a drink, and smiled and looked John up and down, John had sent Hunter on a mission. “He thinks you’re cute, though! But he likes to go out and meet people and make friends. You know, stuff you hate? You’re going to die single. Listen to me. He texted me info about a circuit party—”
John held up a hand. “Please, Hunter, if he ever wants a one-night stand after a tense and overly serious game of Wingspan, only then can he slide into my DMs.”
Hunter Henderson was his very first friend at The Review and ran entirely on celebrity gossip, iced coffee, and the ability to text while power walking. Once, John had accompanied her to a Kylie Minogue concert, and between emerging from the depths of Madison Square Garden and sitting on the train, she had drafted an entire article. Now she pulled John into a side hug and snapped a picture of them both. John always thought that they were the perfect casting choices as “the best friends” in a movie about a 20-something trying to make their way in New York City journalism. Hunter was Black, fashionable and always had the hottest news. John was white, for all intents and purposes very gay, and had billions of problems dating. Sometimes, when John and Hunter were talking alone at a bar, he looked around for the straight white woman with brown hair who they were supposed to be ushering through her character arc.
She stopped texting to put an elbow on John’s shoulder. “I wish,” said Hunter, squinting into the skyline. “I wish someone would have a heart attack or something, tonight. Or get drunk and make a terrible speech. Or throw a drink at a co-star. Something newsworthy. Review parties used to be legendary.”
John sniffed her forearm. “You smell like an orange.”
“I got doused with Catarina Harlow’s perfume.” Hunter moved to New York for mundane run-ins with celebrities. She beamed and lowered her voice. “You don’t think she’s actually dating Tyler Hughes, do you?”
John also lowered his voice. “Oh, juicy. You don’t think speculating on strangers’ relationships is healthy, do you?”
“Hah. Mr. Cover Artist, you don’t think creepily drawing a bunch of celebrities off the clock counts as stalking, do you?” She tapped his sketchbook page. “Seriously. Stink lines? You freak.”
“What?” John looked down. This happened to him often: he would snap out of a reverie and find a sketchbook page taken over by his unconscious mind. “These aren’t stink lines,” said John, flipping to a new page. “They’re emanations of self-importance. It’s visual metaphor, Hunter. I am an artist.”
“What’s that?” asked Hunter, pointing at the new page.
“That’s an anvil dropping on Jacob Raw’s head,” said John.
“And that?”
“And that’s Garfield wearing a backwards baseball cap,” said John. He smiled down at Garfield. “Fine, they were stink lines. I’m a cartoonist.”
There was another burst of laughter and clapping, and Hunter and John watched Bella the dog leap into Tyler Hughes’s large arms. He picked up the wagging dog, holding her like a baby, while iPhones and event photographer cameras flashed.
“Dear God. The most notable thing at The Review Festival after party is a viral dog,” groaned Hunter, looking forlorn into the fountain. “Someone should be reciting poetry into a glass of champagne. Can you imagine Truman Capote throwing a party with a viral dog?”
“Andy Warhol is turning in his grave,” John agreed.
“What did Andy Warhol have against dogs?” Hunter asked.
“No,” said John, “he went to cool parties in New York, and this isn’t one. Though I’m sure he’d be obsessed with photographing Tyler Hughes with dubious consent. Why is he here again? I didn’t know coming to The New York Review Festival could help boost summer blockbuster sales.”
Hunter tapped the drawing of Jacob Raw. “An entire profile in the magazine next month.”
John looked up from his sketchbook so fast that his stool wobbled. The New York Review loved to ricochet wildly between high and low, coverage of feminist muralists and then reports on sweaty, nothing action film stars.
“Hah,” barked John. He didn't mean for his laugh to sound that acidic. At least John wouldn’t have to draw him; they had a fixed schedule for cover portraits, and Tyler Hughes was nowhere on the list. “Him? Why? Is someone writing a critical analysis on the rise of the Western Himbo?”
“He’s doing Broadway now,” said Hunter. “Sondheim. Jacob Raw is rebranding as an artiste. Probably because, you know? There was that thing last summer in Miami with him, and a car wreck, and some property damage. Anyway, his agents probably don’t want him forever typecast as a maverick frat boy. John, he might win a Tony.”
“That should be illegal.”
Hunter looked over John’s shoulder. The cute catering guy was waving at them both. John panicked.
“Don’t worry. The catering guy likes you but loves me. He’s letting me steal the rest of the fig wraps. Toodle-lo, my dear.” She kissed John on the cheek. “See you Tuesday?”
“See you Tuesday,” John replied as she scurried off under the string lights and the grey Manhattan sky. John was alone, and suddenly very tired of this party.
He closed his sketchbook, grabbed his Garfield pencil bag, and weaved through the crowd of after party goers. He picked up snippets of polished pleasantries and the laughter that accompanied productive networking. He sidled past Clyde Fotheringay, the tall and professor-looking editor-in-chief who was finally heading home after a night of gladhanding. And when he reached the bathroom, he let out a huge sigh and let warm water run over his hands. He washed the ink off his fingers and turned the water gray. He looked up and staring back at John in the mirror was a tall, skinny, white guy with a rush of brown hair, wearing a neat suit. When John was a senior at Samwell, he had been accused of dressing like a game show host. This was mostly true. When his great uncle died he inherited two dozen vintage suits that all fit him perfectly, so it became a uniform for him, especially for gigs like this.
John Rich was also very good at analyzing faces and concluded that his own face was completely and utterly boring. He had given up on ever growing respectable facial hair, and couldn’t get rid of the spray of freckles across his nose, and his ears stuck out to a shocking degree. The haircut, the suit, the watch his dad gave him for his birthday—these were John’s attempt to offset the Jimmy Olsen babyface he had been cursed with his entire life. He would give anything to look his age, 28, instead of a terrified college freshman in a suit.
At this point John had been to the bathroom so many times, he and the bathroom attendant, Dan, were old friends and war veterans. Dan was probably the same age as John, and probably took the A train to get down here to hang out with all of these clueless rich people. This guy didn’t see John as part of the crowd; John was just a fellow guy working the event. John reached into his suit jacket.
“You don’t have to tip every time you come in here,” said Dan. “You’re good, bro.”
“Aahhhh,” argued John.
Dan was seated in the tiny atrium that fancy hotel bathrooms sometimes had, and he shrugged as John put a few dollars on the flat steel plate that was for tipping.
“You do weddings?” Dan asked.
“I do weddings, but since I started working for the magazine, I have been told to stop,” said John. “How much should I charge for weddings for these people?”
Dan shrugged. “Oh, shoot, boss, I dunno. $6k.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. “6,000 dollars? Per wedding? Per hour? Per drawing?”
“Hey man, with this crowd, per hour,” said Dan. “One guy just tipped with two hundreds.”
“Must be nice,” said John, pushing open the door to the bathroom. He paused. “I did not give you two hundred dollars, Dan. I gave you three dollars. But I appreciate you, Dan.”
“Can you draw me?”
And almost a second too late: “You got 6,000 dollars?”
But Dan laughed. “Damn—have a good night, boss.”
John smirked to himself. He would be riding the high of that wit for a month. But as John crossed the rooftop, the smile from that little interaction quickly faded.
Let’s say the atmosphere had shifted.
At the fountain, completely surrounding his easel, there was now a crowd of people, and the terrace’s chatter focused there. It was like everyone from the after party had been drawn to John’s easel like a magnet. John heard Bella’s bark followed by a cheer, and that was when a voice burst out like a bell.
"Oh, he's back, he's back," John heard. And then, hopping, the pop star Catarina Harlow pushed her way through the crowd, and with her a sweet cloud of citrusy aroma. She grabbed John's hand. "I'm so glad you're back. We all thought you'd left, and I would be devastated if you couldn’t do this portrait. Follow me—"
“Sorry," said John as Catrina dragged him to his easel. She was a 5-foot-1 soprano—why was she so strong? "There must be some sort of misunderstanding. I'm done for the day. Guys—everyone. The raffle is over."
But no one heard him. Cheering drowned that out. And the crowd parted, Catarina leading him through it with the small delicate steps her dress could allow. John pardoned himself past all of the people who had just been living in his sketchbook—the poets, the East Village gallery owners, the literary agents—Hunter?
"I tried calling you," she yelled at John when he gave her a helpless look. She snapped a picture of him on her phone. She looked thrilled that Catarina Harlow was touching him.
"Thanks, Hunter," John yelled back hoping the sarcasm carried through the thicket of people.
Then when John emerged, he saw standing next to the stool, opposite his easel, a bubbling fountain lit up behind him, was Tyler Hughes. He turned around.
“Oh, wow, hey,” said Hughes, with a wide, perfect, movie star grin. “John, right? Absolutely love your work.”
Even though Tyler Hughes was only a few inches taller than John, he was enormous. Like, huge. Like if a skyscraper had a pretty face. For some bizarre reason, John imagined wrapping his arms around Tyler Hughes and not being able to get them the entire way around, and then bashfully apologizing for trying. Hughes flashed him that movie magic smile. John saw him going for the handshake and stepped back.
"Sorry—I seriously don't know how this happened. Catarina, I am very sorry, but the raffle is over. It's been over for half an hour. There were only three tickets." John lifted his head to the crowd, waving it off. "Sorry, I'm not drawing anything else."
Catarina gasped toward the crowd and then to Hughes. "But Tyler, you said you had a raffle ticket?"
Tyler held up a raffle ticket between two fingers—heavy, crisp, and orange. John frowned. He patted down his suit jacket. He produced the tickets he had collected throughout the evening—from the publicist, the influencer, and the podcaster. He fanned them out in his hands. Three. There were only three raffle tickets, but somehow Tyler Hughes was holding a fourth. How? Without asking, John walked up to the stool and plucked it out of Hughes’s hand.
"Where'd you get this?" he asked Hughes, studying it, incredulous. "We only gave out three, at the beginning of the party."
Hughes cleared his throat and pointed at the ticket in John's hand. "Oh, my agent handed it to me. Said she won the raffle but had to clear out."
John turned the ticket over in his fingers. Hughes's raffle ticket was thick orange stock paper—thicker than a credit card—embossed and screenprinted. The magazine’s specialty font spelled out THE NEW YORK REVIEW with a small impressed owl, the mascot of the magazine. The year on the raffle card was right. The date was right. The card was, in fact, authentic. John looked up at Hughes, who shrugged innocently. And he looked innocent. But John, be smart—he's an actor. He’s a professional liar.
"Oh," said Catarina, glancing between them. She turned huge brown eyes to John. Her voice was like a sweet, tiny piccolo: "Oh no. If you're packing up to leave, we shan't trouble you. We just thought you could do a quick sketch of Tyler—He’s such a huge fan."
"Shan't?" mouthed John, and then, "I was just about to leave," he lied. For the last five minutes he had been thinking about flirting with the catering guy and getting fig wraps. Hughes had not sat down on the stool, but he stood next to it expectantly.
Looking at Tyler Hughes, John finally realized why he’d been tracking Tyler Hughes all night: Tyler Hughes set off John’s fight or flight. He looked like every jock in Boston who had called him a fag for drawing on the bleachers during gym class, except he had an Australian accent. So he had probably been some nightmare bully for some kid in Sydney or whatever. John imagined his Australian counterpart peacefully drawing anime on the bleachers at a high school in Sydney, then he pictured Tyler Hughes tossing a rugby ball and the ball colliding with the Aussie art kid’s glasses. They flew off the kid’s face and exploded under the bleachers, obliterated. Asshole, John thought. Asshole! Why couldn't you just let that kid draw Naruto in peace, huh? He wasn't hurting anyone. Why must people like you ruin the lives of peaceful nerds like me?
John’s eyes narrowed.
“Listen dude,” said John. “Listen, man. They said three tickets, I drew three people, and now I’m done. Drawing people isn’t something I do for free. Well, actually I do it for free a lot, because I absolutely love it, but that’s on my own time.” He turned to the crowd. “Tonight, I am here working. Do I go to wherever the hell you all work, and go up to you, and shout ‘Act for free! Sing! Make content! Perform for me you jesters!’”
The rooftop crowd fell silent. John watched several heads sink in shame, and Bella the dog wagged her tail apologetically, though she was perfect and faultless. But John couldn't stop now, his back straightened and he turned to Hughes. John dug his index finger into his broad chest.
“I don’t. Because I respect the arts, goddammit.”
They all stared at him, and then, one by one, they went up to John to apologize for forming a mob around his easel and seeing him, The New York Review cover artist, as cheap entertainment. They thanked him even. As they left, John heard “wow, that John Rich is a brave young man who values himself and his art. We respect him. He stood up to Tyler Hughes.”
The End
But that was all in John’s head. Instead he said:
“Welp!” He handed the fourth raffle ticket back to Tyler Hughes, smiled, and clapped his hands together. “Fine by me!!”
A cheer from the crowd went into the night sky.
“Really?” asked Hughes, eyes opening wide. This irked John. What was John going to do—not draw one of the biggest movie stars on the planet while everyone was expectantly waiting? It was like Hughes seemed surprised that pure deception and raw celebrity had gotten him exactly what he wanted. “This is amazing! Seriously, I can’t believe this. I’m such a fan. Do I just sit down over here?”
John didn’t answer, but instead sidled through the group of people around his easel, sat down, pulled out a piece of Bristol, and taped it to the sketch board. Perfect. John liked smooth Bristol paper because the clean surface let him draw fast. Hughes was already comfortable on the stool across from him, stupid fingers laced together across a stupid knee, and he gave John a patient, pleasant, stupid, smile. Catarina Harlow fixed Hughes's tie, swiped the perfectly swept hair further to the side. John picked up a gray blob of Staedler eraser, his brush pens, his markers, and twisted his pencil sharpener in his fist. He put the yellow #2 pencil behind his ear, leaned out from behind his easel, and looked.
Hughes looked back.
Okay. Got it.
John whipped the pencil out from behind his ear and started to draw.
"Seriously—Cat knows, I’m a huge fan of Cover Sessions," called Hughes, around the easel. "I watched the whole series when I had COVID.”
Catarina proceeded to explain to some livestreamer the concept of John’s Review-produced YouTube show, Cover Sessions, which John thought was fairly straightforward. John Rich was the newly appointed cover artist for The New York Review. Every issue of the magazine had one of his portraits on the cover. Notable people came into The New York Review offices, John drew them, they recorded it. And for whatever reason, people on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram found this endlessly entertaining.
Catarina let out a peal of laughter. “You kept sending me delirious texts asking how to get on it. He’s obsessed with you.”
“And you're brand new, right?” asked Hughes. “Like, relatively, in the grand scheme of the magazine? The new cover artist?"
That first statement—that Hughes was “obsessed” with John—seemed empty and suspect. The sort of thing people from Los Angeles said because it sounded nice, but was inherently untrue. But these questions, however...why did Tyler Hughes know things about him?
"I am the cover artist," answered John, pencil scratching the paper. He was still pondering how Tyler Hughes had stolen a fourth raffle ticket. "I have been told that I am the youngest artist to do covers for the magazine."
“Do you have a favorite portrait?” asked Hughes.
“Yes, but that is a secret,” answered John, crisply.
People laughed. But Hughes did not smile.
"How long does it take to get good at something like this?" asked Hughes. He inched forward on the stool seat. “Like, is this even hard for you at this point?”
Again, John chose to ignore what sounded like genuine curiosity, because, again…fool John once? Shame on John. Fool John twice? Shame on…shame on the beefy big-budget Australian movie star.
“You do enough weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bachelorette parties, it gets easy,” said John, trotting out a canned response. Talking while drawing wasn't an issue; when you did enough live portrait drawing, it sort of felt like a performance. “Once you’ve drawn a maid of honor who is minutes away from throwing up? You can draw pretty much everyone.”
More chuckling, and John grinned to himself. His hand did not stop moving even as he leaned around his easel board, and he kept looking. Rectangular head. So much stubble. An unusually small, cute nose. Tiny, steely eyes—John’s focus wavered—Hughes was really staring at him—short blonde hair. Huh. Hughes's haircut was a trapezoid. A bunch of trapezoids, a bunch of very expensive trapezoids. How to communicate expensiveness and sharpness with trapezoids…well, he’d figure that out while inking. Normal (enough) ears, long rectangles for eyebrows, a brow that sat low and that made the eyes seem tinier and steelier than they actually were—John's focus wavered. He hid behind his easel.
Catarina rounded John’s stool. She put a hand over her mouth.
"You're so fast," she said, her small flute of a voice fading away to something less theatrical.
Other people moved to join her. They carefully stepped on the ledge of the fountain, crowding John on either side, filling the air with the scent of wine and the light of iPhones. Hunter stood off to the side beaming, recording the entire thing. At this point, John had started going over the drawing with a black brush pen, and Tyler Hughes's celebrity entourage had gathered around John, leaning in like a Kindergarten class, and the star sat alone on the stool.
The event photographer appeared out of nowhere, and John smirked, raising his brush pen to sight Hughes's face, even though he was nearly done with the portrait. An artist only sighted at the beginning of a drawing, when you were taking measurements with your pencil and fingers. Nevertheless, it looked very cool, and John squeezed one eye shut, extended his arm, and the camera flashed.
To John's annoyance, Hughes laughed.
“This is mild torture,” said Hughes. “Everyone gets to see this drawing except for me? Come on."
"You can see it when I'm finished," said John.
"Well, I'm itching," said Hughes. "Thank you. You know, I wanted to come and chat with you earlier, but…"
Hughes’s sentence trailed off into a bashful shrug, and when his eyes met John’s again, something terrifying happened. John’s hand stopped moving, and his stomach clenched.
This happened, sometimes, when a subject's expression changed and all of the hard-studied proportions shifted and softened, and everything fell out of whack. John looked at his drawing and back at the subject and wondered if anyone else could see it too. The face before him changed, eyes less narrowed, open and honest. Panic rose in John, quickening his heartbeat, making the rooftop tilt. The sweet smell of marker ink was probably getting him high. This wasn’t Tyler Hughes; he had drawn someone else. Even up close, with the guy sitting right in front of him, completely unmoving, something was off about this portrait. Why?
How?
John realized he had stopped breathing, and the sweat down his back was dripping cold. He dragged the felt-tip of the marker along the drawing's neck.
"Done,” exhaled John, even though he wasn’t. He picked up the canvas, and turned it around.
In the end, it was Catarina clapping, then the rest of the crowd clapping, and then the general, polite applause that filtered across the terrace that made everything go wrong. John was not sure if it was his love of cartoons, or simply the fact that he was a cartoonist, but strange, cartoon-like things manifested around him. He remembered, in the 8th grade, slipping on a banana peel in front of his entire class at general assembly. And then there was the time, back at Samwell, when he nearly fell down a manhole—only to sidestep it and slip on another banana peel. It was for this reason John was mortally scared of anvils and was convinced that in the end, quicksand would get him. Cartoonish things always happened to John Rich, and one such thing was about to engulf his life.
“Bella, no!” Someone shouted.
But it was too late. John watched as a blur of gold fur jumped into his arms at full speed, then he was falling back, stool toppling, into Catarina Harlow, and into a crowd of people perched on the ledge of the fountain. And then, like a screaming, crumbling house of cards, everyone went in.
The droning chatter of the rooftop, the band, the gasp of the crowd—woosh—all went silent for the second that John’s head dunked under water. John wrenched his eyes shut and he held his breath and dragged a hand in slow motion until it hit the shallow pool bottom. And then, John sat up in a cloud of chaos.
There was screaming. Running. A gaggle of cameras. John pushed a flop of cold wet brown hair out of his eyes. To his right, Catarina Harlow was shrieking, but with laughter, flinging water up and then dousing—while getting doused by one of the young poets who had also stumbled into the pool. The event photographer had a foot on the ledge and showered the cluster of wet famous people with camera flashes. Bella the dog was out of the pool, smiling like the good girl she was, and shaking off. John panted, water dripping down his face and suit sagging in the pool.
John's easel and drawing board were tilted into the fountain like an Oreo dunked in a glass of milk, and between his legs, unfinished and increasingly soggy, was the drawing of Tyler Hughes. John glanced down: the brush pen in his hand was bleeding out a cloud of black ink and seeping into his Great Uncle’s jacket.
"God dammit," hissed John, tossing it out of the pool. Then there was a hand stretched out to him.
Tyler Hughes was on the ledge of the fountain, extending a hand out to John.
There were no other ways to get out of the pool, so John took the hand and let Hughes pull him up.
"Oh my god, mate, are you all right?" Hughes asked.
“I am a waterlogged cartoonist, so obviously not, dummy” John wanted to say, but instead went “bwuh” and stepped out of the fountain as the party continued to erupt around him. An actor from a streaming show Hunter wanted John to binge, did a cannonball at the far end of the pool, and some of the Review writers carefully toed the shallow end. As John snatched his drawing board out of the water, his dress shoes squelched.
“Here, I got your sketchbook and pencil bag,” said Hunter. Those were still dry at least. Hunter was positively beaming. “This is incredible, John! You’re soaked!”
“Yeah,” said Hughes, “Do you want a towel or—”
“—A towel?” asked John. Drops of water flew off his suit arms as he turned. A gust of wind cut through the terrace and John started to shiver. “A towel? No. I don’t want a towel. Jesus Christ. You? Are exactly who I thought you were.”
“What do you mean?” asked Hughes.
“The worst,” spat John. “Here. For a big fan.”
John fished out the warped, soggy Bristol board from the water where it had been dancing over one of the pool fountain’s jets. He let it plop in Hughes’s hand like an unhappy fish. Tyler Hughes blinked his very pretty eyes down at it, while Hunter snapped a picture on her phone. Hughes scoffed.
“I didn’t want you in the fountain, mate. I didn’t push you in!”
"Aha! But you had that extra ticket. And just had to be the life of the party,” said John with jazz hands. Then the words were tumbling out of his mouth. Maybe Tyler Hughes would tell his publicist about this and get John fired. John no longer cared. Because if he didn’t say what he felt right this moment, then it would be like all the other times jerks like Tyler Hughes stuffed him in a locker, back when John was too scared to speak up for himself. He took a deep breath. “And, you know what? Your movies are just fine. Like, my mom is an art critic, right? And she wanted to go see your movie because she likes to see bad movies on purpose. And she asked me if I wanted to go with her, but I was like, ‘no Mom, why would I ever do that?’ And then she was like ‘John, camp offerings are important for your artistic diet, blah blah blah,’ and then we started arguing about camp! And satire! And whether all of this means that we’re in a recession? And conversations like that happen all the time when your mom is an art critic—anyway.” He was getting off topic. “I have better things to do with my time. And I spend a lot of time bidding on vintage Garfield merchandise. So what does that say about your cinematic projects? Huh? Hm? Big guy?”
Hughes stared at John like a viral Golden Retriever. “I mean, not much? It means you’re a nerd? A little bit?”
Touché.
“Well then,” said John, “have a lovely evening.” John straight guy clapped Hughes on the shoulder, and left a wet handprint on Hughes’s sleeve. “Hunter, I’ll text you. See you on Tuesday.”
John picked up his bled-out brush pen from the stone floor and put it in his briefcase. With his easel under one arm and the drawing board under the other—and a pool bacchanal behind him—John Rich left his first New York City after party. ✏️