Excerpt from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A close-up of Red Line's mouth: luscious, cruel lips, yellow teeth. Jaw unhinging softly as he bellows, "Run!"

The scene fragments, goes sharp and bright. There's the sound of shots fired— the frames go crimson at the pops— as Red Line and Kid Mel scrabble to a waiting truck. They throw themselves inside. The truck takes off.

Didn't even have time to tell him I was a girl, Mel's voiceover says.

In the motion of the truck, Red Line whips off his hat, reaches out his hand. Kid Mel smacks a bunch of batteries into it, then slowly removes the Skittles from her pocket and tips the contents, careening in the light, into her mouth. Red Line taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned, the voice says. Never work for free.

"Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses," the announcer says. Someone pushes us out, and there we are.

I've seen the footage: the way Mel steps up to the mic, blinking, eyes almost rheumy under the lights (we are both breathtakingly stoned), hair blinding white, and me behind her (looking really good, actually, I can see that now; mouth painted red, hair piled high, giggling). She's handed the Hollingsworth platter. Speaks briefly, gestures to me. It seems, on film, that I need to be beckoned, that I don't want to speak. She has to pull me in, hand on my lower back: Go.

In the recordings, I don't look anything like how I felt that night, so well concealed am I below the layers of manners and makeup. I don't trust myself to diverge from the script. I can't be funny like Mel; God knows if I tried I'd blow my load on a knock-knock joke. So I make my remarks short: Thank you, you don't know how much this means. Something forgettable, something I forget right after I watch the video. But whatever it is, I mean it.


We skip the official after-party and take it back to the powder room for half of Mel's joint on the way out to the real party, in Bushwick. I put my hair up, tug it back down. Muck up my eye-liner, glance in the mirror to find I resemble Alice Cooper. Redo. Descend into the subway to sweat it all off.

It's Friday night. The L train is full of surly girls in minidresses and young, loosened- tie professionals. We hang from the pole entering the tunnel, letting our bodies sway with the train's stops and starts. Walk in companionable silence in the dark.

This party is in our honor to celebrate the grant. Our friends know how to throw down in varying, encompassing ways; Mel is not the only one who knows how to dance with the monkey, though many would argue that she does it best. We're mostly artists here, animators and editors and ink- and- color guys. Our friends have all brought their friends, writers from DC and Marvel, a few novelists watching from the periphery with slow pink eyes. There's the grad students we get for scut work, extra tracing and color help: Jimmy the Fire Maniac, quiet Indian John Cafree. Our digital team mills around the drinks table, giving us the two-finger hello in unison. Surly Cathie the sound tech is talking shop with an engineer named Allan Danzig, who claims to be third cousin to the musician. They all holler and wave.

And then there's actual applause. It makes me jump a little— the room rippling with whistles and hoots. All our friends are here, and they're happy for us. My stomach breaks into blossom. I forget the reception, I forget about Beardsley. Something wonderful has happened, and we have enough people in our lives who are made joyful by our success to fill a room. I am lucky, I think, with a stab of shame. I don't remember that enough.

Our draftsman buddy Fart approaches. I asked Mel once what his real name was. "That is his real name," she said. "Franklin Am-brose Randolph Turner. How's that for an acronym."

Excerpted from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Copyright © 2017 by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.