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She probably draws him about a million times, over and over again in her tiny sketchbook with the cheap colored pencils and the slowly dulling pocket sharpener. Fighting walkers, splattering scarlet blood all across the white page. Riding a horse, with Clem on the back of the saddle right behind him, arms circled about his waist. A lot of those pages end up stuffed between the cracks of the dumpster lid (Clem’s not tall or strong enough to lift it fully on her own) because in her opinion, they’re just not so good. She doesn’t like them, and so she figures neither would Lee.
She draws him a million times. Over and over again. But he isn’t the only one to make an appearance in her little book.
– – –
The family is easy, probably the easiest thing there is to draw in the whole motor inn. Clementine’s had lots of practice drawing families, for school art projects and things like that, but it’s easier to draw people she knows are alive instead of the parents she doesn’t.
Kenny with his mustache and his hat, Katjaa with blonde hair that’s a little too bright because the only shade of yellow Clem has is lemon. And in between them, shorter than either but smiling bigger than both, is Duck. Clem has lots of fun dotting in the freckles all over his round, happy face; she thinks the stick-figure version of him looks very accurate.
(She considers adding a bunch of creepy-crawly spiders in the blank space beneath Duck’s feet, but ends up deciding that might be a little too mean.)
She gifts it to them, eager and proud at breakfast one morning. Kenny and Katjaa aren’t actually eating, Clem notices. Kenny eyes the granola bar his son is pigging out on with a pained expression on his face; Clementine quietly tucks her snack pack into her pocket, and though her stomach whimpers in protest, she resolves to eat it after. She can wait, just a little while longer.
Kenny looks at her like he has no idea what she’s talking about when she holds the page out in her tiny hand. “It’s like a family photo of you guys,” says Clem, slightly anxious. “Well, kind of…”
Kenny still says nothing. Clem tries not to take it personally - Lee doesn’t have to tell her so in hushed whispers just between the two of them, she knows Kenny’s been itching to leave the motel and the food situation definitely isn’t helping matters. Katjaa smiles, tired but kind, and carefully takes the drawing from her before the silence stretches out too long.
“Why, it’s lovely,” she says softly, angling it just so that Duck can see. “Look, Ducky, Clementine drew all three of us.”
Duck frowns. “Why did you make me have chicken pox? ”
“That’s not chicken pox,” Clem giggles. “Those are your freckles. ”
“Oh!” His teeth are crowded with leftover granola bits as he beams, big and wide and white. “Awesome!”
“Yes, it’s very nice.” Katjaa smiles again at her. “We’ll be sure to tack it up in the RV, right on the wall where everyone can see it. Right, Ken?”
Kenny sighs, distracted. “Yeah, yeah, that’s - that’s fine, honey.” He glances down at the paper for just a second, and his mouth twitches a little. “My mustache ain’t that big.”
“I wanna draw!” Duck exclaims, leaping to his feet. “Clem, can I borrow some paper and your pencils?”
“Ok,” Clem replies. “But you have to promise not to be too rough with them, or else they’ll break.”
“I promise!”
“You two stay in sight!” Katjaa calls after them as Duck dashes away, Clem fast in tow. It doesn’t look like it’ll rain, so maybe she’ll get out the chalk, too. Duck always likes playing with the chalk, or at least for as long as he likes playing with anything before he gets distracted again.
Once Kenny’s and Katjaa’s backs are turned once more, Clementine pulls the snack pack out of her pocket. She’s so hungry that the stale breadsticks and fake cheese are gone in mere seconds, and even then her tummy still growls, pathetic. Duck looks like he wants to ask her for a bite. She doesn’t offer any, and s he feels terrible about that but she’s pretty sure not eating would only make her feel worse.
(Years later and she still has it, even after all of them are gone.)
– – –
Doug’s always been nice to Clementine, and she’s glad Lee saved him. Carley was kind too, and pretty, but…Lee made a choice, which is something you have to do sometimes, she knows that now. Even if the choice isn’t exactly a fair one.
(She wonders what she would have done in the same situation, forced to pick between two strangers. She never can seem to come to any sort of conclusion.)
But Doug doesn’t treat Clem like she’s a silly little girl, not in the way some of the others do. He talks to her like she’s just another adult, and Clem likes that because if she can pretend that she is just another adult, maybe things won’t seem as scary as they really are, not anymore. Doug shows Clementine how the bell system he rigged works to warn them of movement nearby, and the faded old Uno pack he sometimes breaks out has seen Clem her fair share of sneaky, smirking wins against a befuddled Lee and a frustrated Kenny.
So Doug is another person that is very easy for her to draw. That yellow shade is still a little too lemon-y, but Clem adds some brown, blends it in a bit against the page the best she can, and maybe this time it looks a little closer to his actual hair color. She makes the big green sweater extra fuzzy (fuzzier than it is in real life) and adds a teeny laser pointer in Doug’s hand, shining its red beam directly into the eyes of an oncoming walker and blinding it.
Doug smiles when she gives it to him. “Wow,” he says. “I look badass.”
“Swear,” admonishes Clem.
Doug raises his eyebrows. “Does ass really count as a curse word?” The grin doesn’t leave his face. “This is super awesome, Clementine. Thank you.”
She nods. “I just thought…I just thought you might wanna keep it.”
Carefully, Doug folds the drawing in half, then into quarters, and finally into neat, creased eighths. “Knew I still carried this around for a reason,” he says, drawing his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and sliding the page inside it. “See, there you are. Now I’ll have it wherever I go.”
Clementine beams. “I like that,” she tells him, rocking back and forth happily on her heels.
(It’s still in his wallet, as far as she knows, the night that he dies. They leave his body on the side of the road, and they leave the drawing with him.)
– – –
Larry doesn’t like Lee, and he doesn’t like Kenny, or Duck, or…much of anyone, really. But he usually isn’t as cranky to Clem as he is with the others, and though she doesn’t know why, it’s enough to inspire her to give him a drawing.
He folds it, just like Doug did, tucking it into the breast pocket of his sweat-stained bowler shirt. “Reminds me of the ones my daughter used to make in school.” His voice isn’t hard, but it is still very gruff.
Above them, Lilly scoffs, adjusting her position on top of the camper van. “You never held on to those,” she accuses. “Why start now?”
“Times change,” says Larry offhandedly. “People change, ain’t you know that, girl?”
“Well,” Clem says, slow and unsure. “Well, I hope that you like it…”
“He loves it.” Lilly’s teeth are gritted hard enough to crack. “Don’t you worry about that, Clementine.”
Clem scurries away before their voices get too loud for her again. She doesn’t draw Larry anymore after that - it doesn’t feel right to.
(She sneaks it out of his pocket when Lee isn’t looking, after…after Kenny drops the salt lick. The paper is weathered and torn between her fingers and she pushes it to Lilly with shaking hands before she can think any more about it.
Lilly glares at her hard like she’s just sprouted some freakish second head, and Clementine lets go of the paper quick as a flash, sobs and runs back over to Lee.)
– – –
It feels more than a little obvious to draw Ben. He’s all alone, and scared, and no one at the inn fully trusts him yet. Lee warns Clem to stay frosty around him, just in case. But all Clementine sees is a boy, and even though he’s a lot bigger than Duck or her, he’s still very, very afraid.
She doesn’t really know how she should do it. Drawing him with his friends who died seems cruel, and she doesn’t know enough about Ben to know what he likes to do, or what he used to like to do.
So she draws him in a big field, sitting under an apple tree, a shiny red delicious in his hand. Clem’s parents once would take her to a field just like that, on the way to Grandpa’s house through all the Georgia farmland. Everybody’s different, but she figures that Ben might find that sort of memory pretty and peaceful, too.
“You’re…Clementine, right?” he asks her unsurely as she approaches him at his spot up against the motel’s grubby brick walls. The grave Lee and Kenny dug for his coach is still fresh and loamy with loose, dark earth.
She nods. “I made this for you,” she says, thrusting the paper forward and into Ben’s hands. “It’s ok if you don’t like it, I won’t get mad.”
He sort of blinks at the drawing, like he isn’t super sure what it is he’s looking at. “Is this…me?”
Clem frowns. She thought that that was obvious. “Uh-huh.”
“Oh.” Ben looks up at her, then back down at the page, then at her again. “Um…thanks. It’s really - good. It’s really good.”
“I said I wouldn’t get mad.” She sticks her hand back out, expectantly. “Give it back if you don’t want it.”
“I - I want it!” Ben’s voice cracks. “I do want it, it’s really good. Thank you, Clementine.”
She nods again. “If you ever wanna draw with me and Duck, I still have a lot of paper left.”
“I don’t know…” Ben chews his lip, like he thinks he’d look stupid for hanging around the little kids. “I’ve never been that great at art.”
“Duck’s awful,” reports Clementine happily. “No one will care!”
Ben’s lips wiggle a little like he wants to smile. “Really?”
“Really,” she says.
And no one does.
(Clem doesn’t know what happened to Ben’s drawing in the end. Maybe she doesn’t want to.)
– – –
“I like to draw everyone.” She adds a finishing touch to her figure’s glasses, before presenting the end product with a slight flourish. “See, that’s you!”
“Hey, it is.” Mark grins. He hasn’t been here long, but he’s funny, and any new face is an excuse to use something new to sketch. “Were you in art class at school or something?”
“Yeah,” Clem chirps, flipping to the next available page in her book for a blank slate. “It was a lot of fun. I liked to paint a lot, but I don’t have any paint right now. So I use my pencils and sometimes the sidewalk chalk.”
Mark’s dirty fingernails tap-tap-tap on top of the wooden picnic table. “I used to take art classes too,” he says, and his voice sounds kinda sad. “Before I joined the Air Force…”
“They didn’t let you draw in the planes?” asks Clem, choosing from her pencils a bright red, her most sickly green. “I rode a plane once. It was long. I drew everything I saw outside the window to pass the time.”
Mark shakes his head, laughing a little. “If I wasn’t flying the plane, I was busy doin’ somethin’ else with it. Didn’t really have a whole lotta time for hobbies.”
“That’s lame.” Clem looks up at him. “You should draw more now. Since you have the time.”
“I - I guess that’s true, isn’t it?” Mark shrugs, and glances back down at the tabletop. “Whoa. Whatcha makin’ now?”
Clementine doesn’t stop what she’s doing. She presses down harder with her muddy brown, dirt and death and decay.
“A walker,” she answers, and when she’s done with it Mark is gone and his picture is left behind, fluttering in the breeze.
Clem stuffs it back into the binding of her sketchbook. Even if he doesn’t want it, she’ll keep it around. She likes the way she shaded in the darkness of his leather jacket, the little shines on the lenses of his glasses.
(Mark pretty much avoids her completely after that. Clementine wonders if he’s drawing on his own, the things he always wanted to. She decides that maybe she doesn’t quite care, and she feels horrible after the farm.)
– – –
Her mom and dad. Sandra. Carley, Glenn, Shawn and Hershel, her friends at school, her Grandpa, her little cousins, her teachers, Mrs. Earnshaw from across the road, Sailor Moon and She-Ra and Bugs Bunny and other cartoon heroes to help come and save the day.
These are the things she draws in between, and she has no one to share them with.
– – –
She actually never gives Lilly one, though she draws her many, many times. She’s a little too scared, a little too chicken-shit (as Duck likes to say) to actually go through with it. Lilly hadn’t been happy when Clem had given a drawing to Larry and so it doesn’t seem likely she’d want one of her own.
But she’s scary, and sharp, and Clementine draws her a lot. Filling in and out of the margins of her notebook, angry and shouting and mean. A few times, she leaves her book face-open on top of the picnic tables, in the hopes that Lilly might wander by, take a curious peek and see herself reflected back in all the pages.
She never does wander by, so eventually, Clem stops trying it, and that’s all there is to that.
(Years later, Clementine stares a woman she once thought she knew hard in the eyes and imagines taking a match to those drawings, each and every one at a slow and burning time.)
– – –
He isn’t the only one to make an appearance in her little book. But in the end, the one she draws the most is still and always Lee.