Isabella, twin braids writhing like black snakes as she scratched her head, inspected the latest ink art she had painted onto the wall. It was an awe-inspiring scaled creature with wings; a ‘dragon’, I believe she called it. As it stretched out those enormous leathery fingers and took off for the jagged mountains on the north wall of Isabella’s room, I thanked my lucky stars that drawings didn’t have stomachs. Me being just a little cat in a cowboy hat would probably be a trying time, otherwise. Luckily, being art pieces without basic needs, we could all be content as a big happy family drawn by the greatly talented Isabella ‘Inky’ Inkpot. You’d think, being able to literally make her own friends, that she’d be the least lonely person in the world. Well, you’d be incorrect. I can’t count the number of times she’s come storming into her room, all alone, complaining about someone or the other.

“I can’t believe how annoying people can be!” she’d start, slamming the door and flopping down onto her ink-splattered bed. “I was just trying to help someone in my class out, and what does he say to me? He says: “You’re way too critical, Isabella! I’m allowed to make mistakes, Isabella! Not everyone has to be like you, Isabella!” Hmph! If everyone could be a little more like me, the art world would be better off for it. I took every care in drawing you all, poured hours into every piece, and look how you turned out! Perfect. So perfect that you can move! How can he get mad at me for helping him out?!”

“Now darling,” said Mrs. Pimmson the Tyrannosaurus Rex, who was lounging on the beach on the south wall, “you must realize that only your magic requires such a fine hand. We must be perfectly detailed to move, after all.”

Her floppy sun hat kept blowing off of her head, and she couldn’t put it back on because her arms were too short.

“Yeah!” chimed in Scraggles, who was a rodent of some sort. It wasn’t easy to identify which one specifically because he had two giant, muscular arms, each about three times the length of his body, sprouting from his sides. He muscled up Mrs. Pimmson’s body with her hat in hand and placed it gently back onto her head. “And you aren’t just critical about art. You expect people’s personalities to be perfect too! That’s just not right, Inky.”

She didn’t hear a thing. She doesn’t speak Inklish, after all. When she celebrated, she celebrated bold, smug, and alone, and when she cried… well, she did an awful lot of that alone too. I’ve heard her say that there are over five-thousand highly skilled students at this prestigious College of Magical Art, but not a soul comforted her when she came through the door with tears streaming down her face every day for the next week. She pressed her cheek against the flourishing black and white plains on the east wall, desperate.

“I wish you’d talk to me,” she managed to say in between shaky breaths. “You’re the only ones who would want to.”

We couldn’t even get close enough to comfort her without being smeared out of existence by her tears. I would’ve risked it, since it was tearing me apart anyway, so I decided then and there that I would canvas the whole school for someone to talk to Isabella Inkpot. 

I went out the very same day, crossing mediums for the first time in my life. I jolted and jittered across the wooden doorframe, missing the consistency of my smooth plaster wall, but eventually I managed to translate my way through the crack between Inky’s room and the outside. Just like that, I was moseying along paths I’d never been down before. I dipped and ducked through words on fliers, skipping across the spaces between elegant phrases like “open gallery” and “senior exhibition.” I navigated bravely through the landscapes hung up on every wall, peeking from behind bright magnolias, snow-drifted firs, and sun-drenched limes. All static, of course; none of them were Inky perfect. There were, however, a whole lot of interesting folks that could almost give her a run for her money: a young fella who could turn his fingers into art supplies, a girl who was made entirely out of clay, somebody who could copy any color into their palms, playing around with and projecting it however they liked. If there was going to be anywhere that people would know Inky, it’d be here, I thought. I was right, in a way.  

“Did you hear about Isabella?” came the whispers from people walking in the halls.

“I heard she went off on Artie in class last week, so everyone is supposed to be ignoring her,” said people in their club rooms.

“Why does she even leave her room anymore? I mean, she eats lunch all alone in there anyway, so she might as well spend the rest of the day there too!” laughed the girls in the dining hall.

I heard Inky’s name everywhere I went. They said it like it was an ugly color, a phrase that stained the air it tainted. Every sentence was a whip crack. I needed to head back home, before their words killed me.

“Isabella is annoying,” they said.

“Isabella is scary,”

“Isabella is mean,”

“Isabella is…

“Isabella…

“Isabella…

Drowning in the tumult of abuse, I just wanted to yell-

“I think Inky is trying her best!”

I stopped in my tracks and mirrored myself, dumbfounded by the voice I heard behind me.

“She’s not trying to belittle you or be a bully. The condition for her magic to work is that her drawings have to be just about perfect, so I think she’s trying to help people out the only way she knows how. Maybe she just… doesn’t understand that perfect isn’t always perfect.”

The fella who said it was a bright spot of paint on a very dark easel. Soon enough his friends started messing with him.

“Aww, is Constance in love with Isabella? You wouldn’t stand a chance against her, she’d stab you with your own pen if you used it wrong.”

“Connie and Inky go together like acrylics and water!”

Connie brushed off their remarks. “I just think she’s misunderstood, so I wanna try being her friend. Everyone deserves a friend, right?”

His own friends shrugged as they continued walking.

“I mean, I would hate to have no friends… not to mention, her art is really cool…” Connie said quickly, beginning to follow them. Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks, frowned and looked over in my direction, noticing something off. 

“Is that a cat?” He looked around to see if anyone else was nearby, but the hallway had emptied after the students lost interest in his declaration of friendship. “That’s totally a cat on the wall there, isn’t it?”

I replied without thinking. “I reckon so.” 

He walked over to the notice board that I was sitting on and scratched his head. “What are you doing here, cat?” 

“Tryin’ to find someone just like you.”

Connie’s eyes narrowed. “Woah. I have to be the dumbest guy alive. I can’t believe I really expected you to say something.”

“Well, ain’t that a shame. I furgot y’all can’t understand me. It’s rude to say I can’t talk, though, purrdner.”

“You are really detailed though! I wish I could draw half as well as that.”

At this point it was clear that I had grabbed his attention. Without another word, I flipped my y-axis and started walking right back to where I came from. Connie came along beside me like a lassoed animal, admiring little touches like the stitching in my hat.

“I wonder where we’re going? Do you wander around like this all the time? How have I never seen you before?” he pondered as we went along together. Finally I stopped outside a door. “Are you taking me to whoever drew y- hold on, isn’t this Inky’s dorm? You have the wrong idea, cat, I am not going in there, we’re in two totally different…”

His voice trailed off as I left him behind and wiggled my way back into the lovingly tattooed room. The artist was cross-legged on the bed, scribbling something down in her notebook, writing so furiously that the page threatened to tear with every other sentence. Ever-observant, she caught me the instant I peeked out of the doorframe, chiding me with a stern point of her pen.

“Blot, you silly cat! Where on earth did you go? I was worried.”

I stared intently at the door, whiskers twitching, waiting for Connie to do… something. Inky scratched her head, the same as when she was inspecting an art piece. 

“What’s going on with the door?” she asked, standing up. Suddenly the door shook violently from the force of several excessive knocks, the loose knob that bore many angry Inky openings rattling excitedly with every hit. Inky just about jumped out of her skin, her widened eyes locked onto me in a rare moment of panic. “There’s someone at the door?! That never happens. That never happens.” 

She slowly approached the now-fearsome wooden entryway, hesitating to open it. I could feel my tail flicking with impatience as her tremulous hand inched toward the knob. She turned it and pulled the door an inch backward, allowing a tiny sliver of space to appear between herself and the outside world.

“Who is it?” she said shakily, never having had a visitor before. 

“H-hello Inky! I’m Constance Canvas, from your Application of Paint and Power class! You can call me Connie! It’s nice to meet you! Am I shouting? Sorry.”

Inky was totally at a loss. “How did you know that my nickname is Inky?”

“Oh, I’ve seen the way you sign it on your art showcase portfolios, like the ones we leave in class for people to look at.”

“You look at my portfolios?”

“Of course!… wait no of course not of course, that makes it sound like I look at them all the time and even though I do sometimes it’s not in a weird way, I just really like how detailed your stuff is and I think you’re really talente-“ He shut up as Inky opened the door fully. His eyes grew round when he saw all of us on the walls watching him.

Inky crossed her arms in the doorway, a short but formidable barrier to her sanctuary. “Did you need something from me?”

“Need something? No, I don’t really need anything, I was just following the cat.”

“His name is Blot.”

“Oh! Howdy, Blot, it’s nice to meet you.”

I gave him a nod.

“Do they all have names?” Connie continued, scanning the walls. He didn’t even realize how key-shaped his sentence was.

“Of course!” Inky replied proudly, hands on her hips. The gate had suddenly opened. She led Connie along the perimeter of the room and introduced him to each ink drawing in turn.

“I’m really impressed that you can get this much detail with just black ink. I can almost count the hairs on Scraggles’ body and the veins on his arms. Have you ever thought about using color?”

“I’d like to, but I haven’t practiced much because my magic only works with ink. It wouldn’t be perfect. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Why does it need to be perfect if your magic doesn’t affect it?”

“I… don’t know, actually. I didn’t really think about that. It just doesn’t feel right if it isn’t.”

Connie pointed at the grassy plain on the east wall. “Can I show you something? You’ll have to trust me with your wall, though, and it won’t be… perfect, per se.”

Inky looked around at us, and we all nodded simultaneously. Mrs. Pimmson’s hat fell off again. The dark-haired mage suppressed a smile and turned back to Connie, who was too busy analyzing the wall to notice our exchange.

“Alright, I’ll trust you.”

Connie grinned. “Okay, here goes.” 

He squeezed his fingers into fists for a few seconds and then flattened his palms against the wall. With every relaxed movement of his hands, watercolor paint eddied out of the creases and settled onto the living landscape that Inky had so painstakingly drawn. Formless greens settled onto the plants, and hazy blue-greys expanded into the sky. The gentle, boundless aquarelle flowed dream-like up to the ceiling, giving the illusion of infinite space above. When he was done, the room shimmered like it never had before. The yellow-green blades of grass bowed to the wind, and you could almost feel the breeze come off the wall. Connie stepped back and admired his work. 

“See, watercolors may not be great at staying inside the lines, but maybe that’s what makes them special. Perfect is a decision, not a quality.”

Inky was dumbstruck for a second, as she watched her hand-drawn family flock to the plain to watch a striking pink and orange sunrise.

“You know what,” she said, “it may not be perfect, but for once… this piece really speaks to me.”

Edited and Reviewed by Zoe Carter