It had happened entirely because of good intentions.
That’s what Grace said, that’s what she maintained, and that’s what she argued. Jack had just been walking out with the first frosts of the season, all shiny and sharp, and as he slammed the door the very tip of the end of the longest of the frosts had gotten caught – snip-snap! – in the doorway.
And Grace had picked it up because she was a tidy and clean good girl who wanted to help dad, and then she had taken it upstairs and tried to fix it because she was so earnest and responsible and mature, and she had repaired it by jamming the stump onto a screwdriver like a hilt because uhh.
Because she was resourceful!
Yeah! That seemed plausible.
And from there it was just common sense to return the repaired frost to Jack so she’d snuck out of the house and it needed to be tested so of course she’d veered off his trail just a bit and at that point she stopped thinking of excuses because she sincerely doubted either of her parents would let her get that far.
***
She started with a pond. There was a skating rink on it, but nobody was around so there was plenty of time to sit down and doodle.
Frosting things was easy, right? Dad did it all day, so how hard could it be, right? And her frost was broken, but that really just meant it was easier to hold since it had a proper handle now, right? And this was just practice so she didn’t have to get too uptight about it, right?
Right!
And that was why it was okay that she drew nothing but dicks on it. It was educational; you didn’t get better at anything without lots of repetition. And the ones that were shaped funny were deliberately abstract, so that was okay too.
Really, this wouldn’t have happened if she’d had more thorough sex ed. She was actually being an autodidact. This was all completely true and mom and dad couldn’t be angry at her for it. They should be mad at themselves.
***
Grace ran out of surface room on the pond after dick number seven hundred and forty-six, so she moved on. Plenty of practice under her belt, so she was probably definitely qualified to test the frost PROPERLY now. On a window, where it mattered.
And hey, what was a better window than the giant glass hedron protruding from the flank of the provincial museum? It was nothing BUT windows! Pick an angle, it was a window.
So she picked somewhere up top and took a deep breath and placed the frost against it and pushed it right through in a shower of glass.
“Woops.”
She adjusted the angle and tried again.
CRASH tinkle tinkle BANG THUD
“Woops.”
Maybe if she tried it from the other side.
skkkkkreeeeeeeSMASH
“Woops.”
Oh well. She had a LOT of space to practice in, and by attempt sixty-eight she was just scraping the shit out of it so that was a big improvement.
***
By the time Grace filled the last pane of the museum’s hedron, she felt like she’d really improved. So she took it with her as a reference. Honestly it surprised her how good she’d gotten. As a matter of fact, she was so good that it was probably a waste to give the frost back to dad right away when she could help cut down his workload. Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise? He’d be so shocked and pleased and happy and would definitely let her put more marshmallows than usual in her hot chocolate afterwards. Yes, that would absolutely be what happened. Totally.
So she’d start with some of the tricky stuff he hated doing and almost never got around to, to make him the happiest. Like Florida! She couldn’t remember the last time Jack had made it to Florida. He must REALLY hate it there.
Grace wanted to see an alligator.
***
Alligators were less friendly than Grace’s books had led her to believe. For one thing, they didn’t smile at ALL (maybe that was just crocodiles?), and for another they usually didn’t let her frost more than a scale or two before diving into the water and hiding at its bottom until she got bored of waiting and left. They were very anti-social creatures.
Now, the snapping turtles, THOSE were much more relaxed. Some of them let her do patterns on their shells for entire minutes before they tried to bite her, and although her repaired frost now bore a healthy array of nicks and chips and scrapes from terrifying bite force she knew they didn’t really mean anything by it, silly old things.
The humans were much less reasonable. She did one window on one building and everyone started losing their minds, shouting and waving and screaming. Two? You’d have thought the sky was falling.
Fine, be that way. If they didn’t want to look at her art on the windows, she’d just do it somewhere else. The roads were nice and flat! Yes, that would be a great place to draw. Maybe the highways, since they were so wide. She could draw a lot of dicks on those. Her parents would be so proud that she was taking art seriously.
***
The back country roads were much better, really. Sure they weren’t as smooth and well-graded, but they were littered with fewer flaming pileups of wreckage and yelling people. Grace was astounded that humans were so careless about driving. No wonder Jack didn’t own a car if this was what happened to them all the time.
She finished her latest artwork and stepped back to frame it properly, then nodded in satisfaction. Yes, that was a pretty good attempt. She’d been focused too narrowly before, she’d limited herself artistically, constricted her vision, choked her talent, suffocated her imagination. There was more to life than dicks. There was also balls.
Now she just needed a place to really get some practice in. Maybe Jamaica? Dad didn’t go there too often either.
He was going to be SO HAPPY.
Something nippy tickled the back of Grace’s neck, and the sky was suddenly full of faint grey light. Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled, long and lonely and aching.
Oh! Mom was here! She must be about to tell her what a good job she was doing!
“Grace Julianne Frost.”
Oh.
Maybe not.