She began moving the green crayon up and down at the bottom of the paper until it became evident she had drawn the green grass of a wide lawn. She switched colors, and on that lawn, she drew a large tree with many crooked branches. On one of those branches, she rendered a tire swing in black crayon dangling from a line of rope, done in brown crayon.
As she worked to create the rest of her drawing, Eve bit the side of her lip, tilting her head this way and that, appraising her effort with an artist’s critical eye. He noticed her right leg bouncing to the rhythm of the crayon strokes, up and down, her focus intensifying with each pass. Instead of sitting shoulders back with Eve’s world-be-damned posture, she was looser and more relaxed as she quietly assessed her creation.
She continued to draw, acting as if she were alone in this room, just her and her art.
“What are you making?” Mitch asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said proudly. To his ears her voice had a different cadence, flatter and slightly higher pitched, too. “Younger” was a word that came to his mind.
To make sure Mitch couldn’t see, not yet anyway, she hunched over the table, positioning her free arm across the top of the paper to block his view.
“Eve, I could leave the room if you want to work in private.”
“No, it’s fine. You can watch if you want.”
She didn’t flat out reject the name, which Mitch had used on purpose. Something told him, though, that it wasn’t Eve he was addressing. He watched her work, saw her body grow increasingly still, her focus intensifying as the crayon strokes became more purposeful. Smiles came and went from a face that now looked sweet to him, almost innocent. Surely, the expressions she made were nothing like Eve’s natural intensity.
She created in silence, eyes seldom leaving the paper, glancing up only to switch crayons. She kept her body hunched forward, arm strategically placed, to prevent Mitch from getting an early preview. There was a fierce determination to her effort, like she had to get whatever was in her mind onto the paper before it vanished.
When she appeared to have finally finished her masterwork, she leaned back in her chair to give it an appraisal. It took great restraint on Mitch’s part to resist the temptation to look at what she’d drawn, even upside down. He knew to respect the artist’s wishes and let her make the big reveal on her own terms. Eventually, her facial expression morphed from a contemplative look to a pleased one, and she spun the paper around, giving Mitch his first peek at her efforts.
She kept a hand over the lower portion of the drawing, blocking out whatever was underneath, but the rest of it Mitch could see. He had no trouble making out the cross-section of a house, one that allowed him a view inside its many rooms. It did not look like a drawing a seventeen-year-old girl would make, but it wasn’t a young child’s drawing, either. There was perspective and proper scale to the structure she’d made, though it was a bit lopsided. Some of the furniture, the windows, and even the doors were a bit too big for the rooms they occupied, while other pieces came out too small.
Everything about the work felt intentional. There was nothing to suggest she’d made it in a spontaneous creative frenzy. From what Mitch knew of the developmental stages of art, he would have said the artist of this piece was somewhere between the ages of eight and ten.
Scale issues aside, the contents within were easy to identify. Standing in the kitchen were two figures: a woman with large ears and a blue dress, shaped like a triangle, and a smaller figure, also adorned in a dress （this one red）， who had pigtails for hair. The table between them was a simple line with legs descending down to the floor, as if it were a one-dimensional object. For whatever reason, she had neglected to draw the chairs.
Mitch concluded the large rectangle near the kitchen table was a counter. On it, she’d drawn a coffee maker, a bowl with oranges in it, and a small box, from which poured gray and black swirls drawn using long, billowing strokes to represent smoke.
“This is really terrific,” Mitch said, instinct telling him to offer the kind of praise Eve wouldn’t be receptive to hearing. “It’s such a beautiful house.”
“I hate it,” she said, sounding discouraged. “It doesn’t look right. My drawings never look right.”
“I knew what it was,” Mitch said brightly.
“It’s tilted. It needs to be straight, but I can’t draw straight lines without a ruler. I should have used a ruler,” she said with a sibilant vent of anger, her face dipping into a frown.