CLOAK/3.7iv

Best of all, Trishna and her stoner older brother had stopped fighting stereo duels, stopped littering the living room with clothes and food, stopped throwing glasses filled with orange juice against the kitchen wall—and no more weeping or rebellious pungencies issued from behind their bedroom doors. The family's therapist was pleased and kept refilling their prescriptions—two more, he noted, who'd begun to spend their spare time drawing.
Trishna's older brother Sam was making comic books about a character called Blackout, the alcoholic superhero, lost son of a military father fostered in the ethics of the Phillipines, whom insistent noon kept discovering muddy, stained with blood, embraced and praised by naked damsels he had no memory of having rescued from distress. Blackout's exploits were like violent dreams, filled with mangrove swamps and helicopter searchlights. The magic words which spoken nightly made him magical were these: My horoscope said to jot down my ideas today but I did not and so forgot.
Sam's friends began circulating copies of the Blackout books at school, where an art teacher encouraged him to assemble a full portfolio. That spring he was accepted to the state college of art, and his parents were happy to send him, although they might have wished he'd rather major in philosophy at Hampshire, as they had done.