Pixie Stix Penmanship

Clare Malhorta '22

ASIAN AMERICAN, KATELYN WANG '23

Pixie Stix Penmanship

Clare Malhorta '22

By the time I turned four, cracks echoed across the basement walls from too many coats of white paint. My parents started keeping a paint roller and a white bucket of Benjamin Moore in the basement for the next time I splashed rainbows across the walls. With a fistfull of crayons, I would scamper up to the wall, stretch up onto my tippy-toes, reach up both hands as high as I could as if to position myself for a clumsy pencil dive, and drag the crayons across the wall with flourish. I attempted silver unicorns, green dragons, Elmo, but I always ended with a haze of scribbles. After my parents mandated constant crayon coloring supervision, I would grab colored pencils, highlighters, Crayola markers, or a number two pencil from the bucket of art supplies in the corner of the playroom and sneak back down to the basement. The walls demanded Aladdin’s magic carpet euphoria. Time-outs and bans on Caillou soon stunted my mural growth. My scribbles, turned black with a mishmash of colors, vanished under a fresh layer of paint.