Chapter 13
“You have your keys today?”
Nick is about to lock his door as I’m letting myself back into Mom’s place after a “productive” afternoon at the pool.
“Lesson learned,” I reply, fumbling with the lock. It’s been finicky since I attacked it with the bobby pin.
“Actually,” he says, “I have something for you inside. Can I grab it? Do you have a minute?”
I have nothing but time.
He disappears into his apartment. I wait in the hall, wondering how it would feel to run into Nick and Shawna coming back to his place from a date, while I’m standing in front of my mom’s door, in the giant T-shirt I use as a cover-up, struggling with the lock.
Nick’s door swings open and he walks toward me, slightly breathless, with a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Kira drew this,” he says, handing me a marker drawing of what appears to be a person with big eyes (or maybe those are glasses), a black bob, and a giant gray-and-white fluffy tail. “I think it’s you as a furry.”
When I take my glasses off to get a better look, I’m impressed. She’s accurately translated some of my key attributes in a way that’s recognizable as me. It’s a variant of the way I draw myself. A Lydia Deetz vibe.
Nick leans in slightly so we can both examine it.
“She’s starting to develop a style,” I tell him. “Especially the eyes. They’re very expressive.”
I hold out the drawing to him, but he shakes his head. “Keep it. I mean, I’m not positive it’s you, but it’s the only character she’s ever drawn wearing all black.”
“I’m not really giving her much of a palette to work with,” I say. “But I would love to hang it up; thank you.” I start to open the apartment door.
“Actually…I’m sorry, I don’t want to keep you, but do you have one more minute?”
“I have nearly unlimited minutes,” I say. “Until work.”
“I’m working tonight, too.”
“The rum punch isn’t gonna stir itself.”
“Right,” he says. “Your mom told me about the tiki place. I drive by there every day on my way home, but I’ve never been.”
“Well, anytime you want a flaming cocktail, I’m your girl.”
There’s a slightly awkward moment until he remembers why we’re still standing in the hall. “So, Kira loves reading graphic novels and I was thinking it could be fun for her to try some comic books. If you have any suggestions for something a nine-year-old girl would enjoy, I can look for them—”
“I have some stuff you can borrow, if you want to come inside. I can pull a few things.”
“Nothing valuable, though. Kira has sticky fingers. Literally.”
“Not everything in those boxes is actually worth money.” I finally extract my key from the apartment door. “It’s just a matter of sorting through all of it and looking up values and then selling things, which my dad hasn’t done in, like, fifteen years. Come on in.”
Mom and Perry sit on the couch, intertwined in a way that makes me think they were making out a second ago. They’re watching some prestige drama I don’t recognize. It appears we’ve entered right on the precipice of an explicit sex scene.
“Nick!” Mom sits up, at full attention, hitting pause. “How are you?”
“Maybe let’s not pause it there?” Perry says, reaching for the remote.
“I’m just grabbing some comics for Kira,” I say, crossing in front of them as quickly as possible. “Don’t mind us.”
Houdini gets up from his bed and follows us into the office.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t close the door with another person inside (as if I would invite anyone in here), but I don’t want to hear whatever Mom and Perry are watching while I’m in here with Nick.
“Does that happen a lot?” he whispers. “Walking in on your mom and her partner?”
I release a huge sigh and head for the shelving unit. “This isn’t my preferred living arrangement.”
Nick reaches down to scratch Houdini behind the ears.
“The longest I’ve ever stayed with my parents as an adult is…maybe a couple weeks. I don’t think I could take it.”
Other people have expressed this to me and I’m never sure what to do with that sentiment. Is it a compliment about my tolerance level? Or an insult based on my willingness to accept my mom’s handout?
“I won’t be here for too much longer,” I say. “I’ll be in a grad program next year. That’s the plan. This was never supposed to be a long-term thing.” I tug at one of the long boxes. “Can you help me put this box down on the floor?”
Nick does 90 percent of the lifting and manages to set it down gently without any grunting.
“How many comics do you have?” he asks.
“Maybe five thousand issues? Something like that.”
He lets out a low whistle and grabs the edge of the shelving unit and shakes it, testing the sturdiness.
“Be careful.” I’m fully grimacing, ready to take cover.
“This is…” He sighs, like he can’t even form the words. “You can’t leave this shelf like this. There’s way too much weight at the top. I’ll come back sometime this week and try to…make this less of a death trap.”
He takes his time reading the labels on the long cardboard storage boxes.
“ ‘X-tra X-men?’ ”
“That box is for the solo titles and spinoffs. Iceman, Cable, Sabretooth Volume 2.” I lift the lid off the box and run my fingers across the dividers. When I glance up at him, he’s looking at my face with this soft gaze. “What?”
“After seeing this, I definitely feel very comfortable unpacking the rest of my Star Trek memorabilia.”
“Okay, so we’re both losers in our own ways,” I say.
He gives me a sideways glance and pulls at a box. “ ‘Romance, Horror, Other?’ Good album name.”
“There are comics in the world that aren’t about men wearing spandex,” I say.
“A lot of artists who became famous for superheroes got their start with these.” I rifle through the box and pull out one of the most valuable issues: Cinderella Love #25.
“My dad got a box of them from someone at a garage sale for, like, ten bucks. I think he thought I’d be excited about them because I’m a girl. ”
“And you weren’t?”
“I was always all about the X-Men.” I point at the tattoo of Magneto’s helmet on my thigh.
“It’s too bad more women aren’t into comics,” I say, digging through a few more issues in the box.
“It’s basically fan fiction with cool illustrations.
But the community can be kind of unwelcoming.
” I immediately picture Hal’s boss at the comic store.
“When I’d buy comics with my dad, I always felt like a bit of a novelty. ”
Nick points at my leg and I almost flinch. “Why Magneto’s helmet?”
“He’s my dad’s favorite.” Rather, he was remotely interested in him, so I was obsessed. “Magneto started as this one-note stock villain. He literally ran a gang called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.”
“Subtle.”
“Right? But eventually one of the writers devised this intense backstory. We learn that he’s a Holocaust survivor and that experience colored everything about the way he sees the world and the relationships between mutants and humans.
” I scan Nick’s face for signs of boredom as I deliver my monologue, but I don’t find any.
“And then at some point, he realizes that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who escaped his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, were actually his twin children. He begins to reassess all these beliefs he’s held, now that he’s a father. ”
“Relatable.”
Houdini gets up on his hind legs to beg Nick for more attention while I dig through the back of the box where my dad stuck some of the drawings I gave him.
“He goes back and forth between hero and villain, but he’s never all one thing. That’s what makes him a fascinating character. He has all these complicated relationships with the other mutants.”
“Did you make these?” Nick asks, pulling out a couple of sketches I haven’t seen in years. “They’re really good.”
“Yeah. I was really into art when I was a kid. I’d try to re-create different characters and poses and stuff. These are the ones I gave to my dad. I was probably just a little older than Kira.”
“What are they doing in the back of this box?” he asks. “This is refrigerator gallery material.”
“He’ll come get them at some point,” I say, omitting that it’s been ten years since he packed up everything else and left for Florida. “They’re just in here temporarily for safekeeping.”
“It’s cool that your dad got you into this,” Nick says, handing the drawings back to me.
“He was into the collecting and the reselling. But he doesn’t appreciate comics as an art form.” I open the cover of the book I’m holding. “He doesn’t see the magic.”
“What’s the magic?”
I wait a beat to answer because I’m not sure if Nick is poking fun at me. But he’s looking at me with a curious expression, so I give him my explanation.
“It’s a sequence of images, right? But it’s not like animation, where you’re seeing every single moment of action in this smooth way.
A comic artist decides which moments to draw and which to omit.
Some moments make it into a panel that the reader can see, and some happen in the white space between the panels.
And that part is up to the reader—filling in those gaps.
It’s like this duet with the artist. The artist finds this balance between what’s seen and what’s unseen.
And to me, the unseen part is the magic. ”
“Like reading between the lines.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Sorry I’m rambling. No one ever asks me about comics.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s interesting to hear someone explain the thing they’re passionate ab—”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” My mom opens the door and pokes her head in. “As far as I’m concerned, Kira can have as many of these as she wants.”
“She loves reading,” Nick says, sidestepping my mom’s comment. “And drawing. So these might be perfect for her.”
“Just don’t let her start collecting them,” Mom says under her breath. “Has she met any of the other kids in the building? Most of them are also here on weekends.”
Nick takes a second to interpret this remark and then says, “Her mom and I split custody fifty-fifty. She isn’t only with me on the weekends. We create a schedule every month depending on what’s going on.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mom says, looking only slightly ashamed of making assumptions about other people’s custody arrangements. “It’s so hard to schedule your own social life as a single parent when you’re worrying about childcare.”
To be fair, by the time she started dating again, I was old enough to be the babysitter.
“I don’t usually need anyone to watch Kira because I build my schedule around her,” Nick says. “But if there’s a no-show and I have to work a surprise closing shift, I just take her with me.”
“What if you have a date?” Mom asks, cutting to the core of this entire conversation.
Half of me is cringing with secondhand embarrassment at the way my mom is arranging the pieces on the board for her endgame. The other half is a tiny bit curious to hear how Nick responds to her prodding.
“I don’t think I’d schedule a date for a night when I had Kira,” he replies. “Not that I have much of a social life. Actually, I should get going since I’m working tonight.”
“Let me walk you out,” Mom says, opening the door wider. “I have a question for you.”
I join Perry on the couch so I can monitor what she’s about to say. (Mercifully, they’ve changed the channel to a much-tamer BBC miniseries.)
“Are you interested in meeting someone new?” Mom asks as they walk to the door. “Are you on the apps?”
Perry and I exchange a look.
“It hasn’t really been a priority—”
“Because I have a friend who I think you might really like.”
“Oh—”
“And I’m happy to connect you.”
There are a few excruciating beats of silence before Nick says, “Thanks. That’s really nice of you to think of me. I’ll let you know.”
I’m forcing myself to look at the TV, but I assume my mother beams at this noncommittal answer.
“And if you ever need a babysitter, you have one right next door,” she says. “Sam doesn’t work Monday and Tuesday nights.”
I raise my eyebrows at Perry, who pipes up, “Jen? Shouldn’t you ask Sam first before volunteering her?”
“Well, you can ask Sam yourself,” she says. “If you find yourself with plans on a Monday or Tuesday.”