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

I look at the floor and whisper, "Yes."

Donnie rolls her eyes. Our relationship with Donnie used to op-erate largely by email, but she's recently begun accompanying us to parties, functions, giving us advice on what to wear, how to speak. She's grooming us for bigger times, and we've been tripping behind her all the way, playing the part of the brilliant, wayward animators, letting her attribute our fuckups to artistic preoccupation— both a kind assessment and a lie. "Just have some coffee when you come out, okay?"

Mel salutes. I feel my face go hot, nod.

Donnie puts her handbag on the vanity and checks her lipstick. "You two wouldn't happen to be hiding in here, now, would you?"

Mel slips the squirrel back in her pocket. Shoots her cuffs, wrings out her shoulders. I see her hands tremble slightly. "Please," she says.

Truth is, all this good luck has made us both a little gun-shy. When Donnie told us we'd won a Hollingsworth, it was like she pulled an atomic bomb from her pocket and flicked it on the ground. The grant is $350,000. We've just spent the past decade throwing ourselves into the blinding headlights of our work, wondering if it was ever going to happen for us, wondering if it wouldn't be the smart thing to quit. Eating meals and drinking coffee at our drafting boards, getting by on a podunk grant here, some freelance work there, the inheritance Mel's aunt left her when she died once saving us from eviction. Increasingly convinced that our lives, as they were, were as good as they were ever going to be.

The Hollingsworth is almost too good. There's the feeling that it's either saved us or ruined us. We walk into the night knowing that, cult status or no, Nashville Combat's on a limited run, and grants don't mean shit unless people actually go out and see this thing. It's hard to escape the feeling that if we don't come up with an amazing idea for our next project, it could all end here. So cautiously, care-fully, we dress up and take the subway to Manhattan. Toddling with pants down into our uncertain future.

Donnie caps her lipstick and turns to us. "Ladies," she says. "They're waiting for you out there. Time to join your party."


I remember that nIght in flashes— whether because I was drunk (possible) or because that's just how I remember everything now (also possible).

In memory, I am a spectator, watching the tops of our heads bob through the banquet hall. Mel leads the way, the only person I've ever seen who walks like the theme from Sanford and Son is playing on a loop in her head, through a crowd of clean-cut patrons and art-ists wearing Chucks with nine-hundred-dollar suits, their dates in silk boutique dresses. Getting our picture taken with Donnie and collec-tive reps and foundation officers. Mel with her mouth open, hair bleached and cowlicked all to hell, me a sad-sacked, big-tittied Haggis McBaggis with unspeakable split ends. Playing off each other when introduced. It's the Vaught and Kisses Show: I'm the straight man, Mel's the wild card, we joust, we get laughs.

I take an occasional look around for Beardsley. Mel glances at me, irritated, knowing who I'm looking for. Mel believing in the night, believing that I should be having a better time.

We're hustled backstage and put in a dark side wing to wait for our walkout. I can see the snub tip of Mel's nose, her long, sensitive fingers reaching out to toy absently with the end. Her hands make her the best draftsman I know, deft at the old-school, minute- by-minute sketches on which our work is built, the kind the old Warner Bros. studios once glorified. Had Mel been born sixty years earlier, and a man, she would have been a star: a prewar, chain-smoking, dame-ogling cartoon auteur. Not to say she's not comfortable in her own skin, but one gets the sense she's forever strumming on a wire in there, constantly trying to escape from some secret seam. It occurs to me, looking at her in the dark, that I may be the only person to see this, the only person able to get close enough to Mel Vaught in the wild to see the quivering underbelly.

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.