Sylvie
“I don’t know,” he says.
“You’ve never thought about it?”
Knox takes a minute to choose his words.
“I’ve thought about it. I had a lot of time to think about it.
But for the longest time that’s all it was.
I’d see a girl eating an apple in the park and I’d come up with a name for her.
Like—Daisy,” he says, smiling at me. “Maybe Daisy really likes Catcher in the Rye. She wants to be a veterinarian, and specialize in . . . I don’t know, turtles. Maybe she’ll laugh at my stupid jokes.”
“In my head,” I tell him, “they always laugh at my jokes too.” I don’t tell him I’m as jealous of his hypothetical Daisy as I am of his real Isabela.
“I don’t know if it’s a bad thing. Wanting people to laugh at your jokes.
I guess it could be worse. Like—there was this gross guy we used to travel with.
You’d say something stupid, something sort of funny, and instead of laughing, he’d stare you down.
He did it to the girls especially. It was his way of shifting the power.
Like, ‘I’m not willing to agree with this idea you have about yourself, that you’re fun to be around.
’ It’s a dick move. You want someone who can play along. ”
“I don’t think I’ve laughed at a single one of my stepfather’s jokes,” I tell him.
“And I guess I could pretend otherwise, but yeah, I think it was a power move on my part. Because you feel powerless when your mom brings someone home and is like, hey, this guy is living in our house now and he’s eating the Klondike bars you bought for yourself and you have to listen to him. ”
“Did you? Listen to your stepfather?”
“Sort of? He was, like, playacting at being a stepfather. He’s twenty-five.”
“Elaborate, please.”
“Okay, so I wasn’t going to argue with him unless I had to.
If he was like, ‘Sylvie, did you brush your teeth?’ I’d say yes instead of being like, ‘I am not a hyena, of course I brushed my teeth, where do you get off.’ Because for once, his question made sense.
He was at that moment doing a decent impression of an adult human.
But if he was like, ‘Sylvie, we need to celebrate your mom’s half-birthday by going to New York for the weekend, it doesn’t matter that you have an AP test next week, you need to get your priorities in order,’ then yeah, no, I wasn’t going to listen. Sometimes I got a little . . . mean.”
“Did that happen? The New York thing?”
“Yeah,” I say. “They just . . . went places. Tourist places, mostly. New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They went to Napa wine country, I think. Tulum in the winter. Sometimes I went but mostly I stayed home. It didn’t really ever feel like a vacation, not when I was watching my mom pound margaritas and my stepdad hit on undergrads on spring break. ”
“Yikes.”
“Yikes is right. It was never like, oh Sylvie, let’s plan a summer vacation, we can go to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or some other beautiful place and explore it, or we can go to New York and go to the MoMA—”
“The MoMA?”
“The Museum of Modern Art, I’ve always wanted to go, but my mom just wants to go to these restaurants she’s seen on TikTok and order, like, viral food that tastes awful”—Knox is shaking his head uncomprehendingly, so I start translating while I’m talking—“not like the food has the flu, like the food is, like, banana pudding brushed with real gold flakes and so everyone takes pictures of it and then everyone else wants to take pictures of it, including my mom, so you eat the gold flake pudding and it tastes just like the stuff you get at the Jewel-Osco at home.” I make myself take a breath.
“I realize that all of this is incredibly privileged of me. I didn’t get to go on the right fancy vacations.
Cry about it. I know. Cal and I—” I make myself finish the sentence.
“Cal and I used to fight about it. I think he would’ve loved to go to Mardi Gras, honestly. ”
“I don’t know if you’ll believe this,” he says, “but I think your mom and my mom are maybe a lot more alike than you’d imagine.”
“I thought your mom was like, ‘buy nothing!’ while my mom is like, ‘buy everything!’”
“That’s true. But like, let’s think about it, the spectrum of buying things. You’d think our moms would be occupying different ends. But I don’t think spectrums exist. I think they’re all circles. Like in the way that political beliefs are a circle.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know if there’s a ton of difference between some liberal raising their kids in the woods to make sure they’re only exposed to the right ideas and a conservative doing the same thing.
Bet they both have guns. Bet they stockpile goods, and keep a vegetable garden, and talk about Big Pharma and how modern medicine’s a hoax.
” His mouth twists. “Not that I have experience with that or anything.”
“Or anything.” I’m starting to get a clearer picture here.
“And my mom—I don’t know, here’s another secret for the game, I guess, but my mom loved the thought of things.
She loved the thought of being on the road.
Of, like, living by our wits. Being free to love how you want and however many people you want at the same time.
But sometimes I’d glance at her and she’d be sitting next to some guy she was dating who was also dating three other girls.
All probably named Flower. And I would just see this look in her eyes.
Like she was disappointed. Disappointed down to her bones.
In all these people we were with, maybe, or maybe with herself, or maybe just with that dude—I wanna say his name was Lancelot? ”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was kidding. Lancelot? King Arthur? I mean who knows. Maybe his name was Dave, I don’t really remember.”
“That must have been really weird for you.”
“Yeah.” Knox pauses. “The hardest part was pretending that I didn’t think it was weird. Keeping a straight face. And it wasn’t always that way with my mom. But a lot of the time it was.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry about your stepfather. But do you kind of see what I mean? It’s just different versions of the same thing. They both live in a fantasy.”
“Was he also a spin instructor at the gym?”
“Lancelot? No, I think he said he used to be a lumberjack.”
“That’s a real thing?”
“Probably,” Knox says. “Though I don’t think Lancelot was a real lumberjack. Is spin hard? What do you spin?”
“Exercise bikes. It’s super hard. I went with my mom once and I almost passed out, but they were blasting Kesha so loud that it kept me in this world. Honestly it’s probably the most respect I’ve ever had for my mom, seeing her beast that workout.”
“So we’re talking about men our mothers clearly chose for their brains, and their brains alone.”
“Yep.” I start laughing. “I bet Lancelot and my stepdad look the same with their shirts off.”
“Wow,” Knox says. “I just—wow.”
“It’s a circle, Knox! We have to embrace the similarities! They’re both Ken dolls—Magic Workout Ken, and Fun with Wood Ken—”
“Wood? That sounds so wrong.”
“Fun with Logs Ken?”
“Somehow even worse.” He’s laughing too. “Fun with Alternative Lifestyles Ken.”
“He comes with a little plastic hookah and a book about astrology.”
“He has white boy dreads. When you pull the string, he says, ‘Tell your mom I said hi.’ He has an earring.”
“My stepdad has an earring,” I tell him. “It’s a little diamond stud,” and then Knox is actually gasping for air.
“A stud!”
“A diamond stud.”
“What a stud.”
Knox raises an imaginary glass. “To them,” he says. “The people who made you believe in love.”