Chapter 29
“Can you watch Kira for a few hours?”
I open my eyes. Nick is standing over my pool lounger with his backpack slung over his shoulder. I hear Kira cannonball into the formerly placid pool.
“Right now?”
“You don’t work on Mondays, right?”
“Um—”
“I hate myself for asking and I swear, this is not something I do. My assistant manager has a personal emergency and there’s no one to cover until five.
Kira might even stay at the pool the entire time.
You can keep reading. Or napping. Or, maybe don’t nap while watching her, but I’ll tell her not to bother you.
” I hesitate. “Shit. You have plans. Do you have plans? You know what? Never mind. It’s okay, I’ll just—”
“I was supposed to go with my mom and Perry to measure the wedding gazebo.”
“You should do that. It sounds important.”
Again, Romily’s voice mocks me in my head, and all her stupid data about stepmothering and axels of complication or whatever it was. It will come up. It’s a statistical certainty. But this is a different situation. An emergency. Right?
“You know what? It’s fine. I can watch her.”
“You’re amazing.” He waits until Kira puts her goggles on and goes underwater and then kisses me. “You’re my savior.”
For the next ten minutes, I really do feel amazing.
I am the best girlfriend. Understanding, flexible, responsible.
And then, Kira says, “I’m bo-ored.”
“Do you recognize this room?” I ask.
Kira looks around the office and shakes her head.
“It’s the same as yours. Kinda weird, right? Same layout, totally different stuff.”
“This is your bed?” she asks, immediately jumping onto the daybed in a way that seems likely to collapse it. I try not to let it bother me that she’s still a little damp from the pool and rolling around on my quilt and putting her wet hair on my pillows. “It’s small!”
“I know. But my mom wants to be able to use this room, too, so it’s hard to fit a big bed in here and still have space for everything else.”
Is it my imagination, or does she pity me for living in my mom’s office? Kira takes another look around the room before returning her full attention to her tablet.
“Can I have your Wi-Fi password?”
I hesitate for a moment. Honestly, it probably would be easier to just let her watch YouTube and play games for several hours than try to get creative.
But I’m a responsible adult now. And I’m worried that if we launch directly into zoning out on the tablet, I’ll have nothing to offer when she inevitably gets bored watching videos about making slime.
“Let’s go through the comics first, okay?”
She shrugs. It’s not quite the enthusiastic reaction I expected when Nick told me how much she liked the ones I lent her a couple of weeks ago.
I struggle to get one of the long boxes off the shelving unit. The whole fixture is slanting to the left. Maybe Nick was right about the wall anchors.
Kira immediately starts digging through the box.
“Some of these are worth a lot of money,” I tell her. “So be care—”
“Like how much?”
“It depends on the issue and the condition—if it looks like it’s brand-new or like it’s been read a bunch of times. We want to keep them looking as new as possible, so don’t take any of these out of the plastic bags unless I say it’s okay. Sound good?”
“ ’kay,” she says.
I start by pulling out some kid-friendly things, but Kira doesn’t seem interested in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. With every character I suggest, she asks about their love life.
“This is Kitty Pryde,” I say. “She has a psychic bond with a dragon. And in this book, there’s this amazing arc with her and Colossus—”
“Is that her boyfriend?”
“This one’s kinda fun,” I say, trying to pivot to a book without love interests.
“Scarlet Witch and Vision host Thanksgiving and they invite some fellow mutants and Avengers and everyone shows up in costume except Magneto. He’s just, like, wearing a sweater.
I always thought it was hilarious that this dramatic supervillain shows up in a casual outfit because he’s trying to be a normal father and everyone else is in spandex.
Like, this guy is in his swim trunks at Thanksgiving dinner. ”
“Whose dad is he?” Kira asks, flipping the pages.
“Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are twins. And they found out right before this issue that their dad was Magneto. So that made Thanksgiving a little awkward.”
“Did he do something bad to them?”
“Oh yeah,” I reply. “He was terrible to them for a long time when it seemed like he was totally evil. Later on, we started to learn more about him and why he became a bad guy. And eventually he kind of turned into a good guy,” I say. “He’s my dad’s favorite.”
“The bad guy who was mean to his kids is his favorite?”
I stare at Kira, letting her simple, but deadly potent, choice of words permeate.
I decide to put the comics away and dig out the bin of art supplies I haven’t touched in years. Crayola markers would probably be more kid-friendly, but Kira seems interested in what she calls “real art stuff.”
I pull out my sketch pads in various sizes, feeling the different weights and textures of the papers. My pencil cases, stuffed with drawing implements of various lengths—my favorites sharpened over and over again, down to barely usable nubs: Tombow Mono 100s, Faber-Castell 9000s, Mars Lumographs.
“These pencils don’t have erasers,” Kira says.
“One of my drawing instructors wouldn’t let us use erasers,” I say. “She said erasing lines slows you down. You’re supposed to commit to each line.” We were supposed to look at our mistakes, not hide them.
The perfectionist in me never liked the look of erased lines anyway. Rubbing away the graphite always leaves this blurry ghost of a drawing. Sometimes I’d just start over.
“That’s dumb,” Kira says, confident as usual in her opinion. “I change my mind all the time when I’m drawing.”
I pick up one of the pencils, almost testing to see if it still feels natural to me. If it’s still something that could bring me joy, or too tied to that feeling of failure. The embarrassment of genuinely believing I was talented at this, only to learn that I was “derivative.”
I push the tip of the pencil against a page from one of my old sketchbooks. There’s no divine inspiration. No lightning-flash, aha moment. I have no idea what to draw now.
Kira has no such problem. I watch her sketch away and turn to the box with my drawings.
It’s obvious to me now that while I remember creating a ton of different sketches—animals, landscapes, fashion drawings—none of them is represented here.
I only bothered to give my dad the drawings of subjects I knew would appeal to him: his big truck, the sign that he’d put up at his estate sales, and of course all those sketches of Magneto.
I got so much practice drawing those particular curves and proportions of that helmet.
I bet it’s locked in my muscle memory. Derivative, indeed.
“I drew Kitty Pryde,” Kira says, showing me her paper.
“I like that pink streak in her hair,” I say.
“It’s ’cause she has…those feelings,” Kira says. “It shows up in her hair.”
“What feelings?” I’m impressed at the way Kira is already inventing lore for characters she barely knows.
“She has hot pink feelings.”
“Hot pink feelings?” I repeat. Is this a Gen Alpha saying?
“Yeah. Like…you know.” Kira moves her hand around in a way that provides zero helpful context.
But intuitively, I know that there’s only one subject you can indicate by playing coy with the vaguest possible hand gesture and still have the other person understand.
“Like…boyfriend-girlfriend?” I say, because it seems like the safest term.
“No,” she says. “Because sometimes it can be boyfriend-boyfriend. Or sometimes they’re lesbians. There are a lot of lesbians in this story. So many.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I nod rapidly, silently scolding myself for defaulting to heteronormativity in front of an impressionable child.
Kira continues. “You know how animals mate?” I’m terrified that she has just used the term mate. “And then they have a baby?”
“Uh-huh,” I say cautiously. Tread carefully.
“It’s kinda like that.”
I try to stop my face from re-creating the grimace emoji expression.
“She likes someone?” I pause. I’m sweating, because this conversation seems so dangerous. “Like, like-like?”
Kira rolls her eyes at me and I feel like such a loser. “No, like…hot pink feelings.”
“Oh.” I nod. “Cool. I get it.”
I don’t get it.
“Are you my dad’s girlfriend?” she asks. And I need to be clear about this: despite the question mark, it’s not an inquiry. It’s an accusation.
And I’m frozen. I look down at the comic book in my hand.
Should we have talked about this? Why hasn’t any permutation of Nick, Kira, and me talked about this?
I feel a pang of anger toward Nick for putting me in this position.
I shouldn’t be the one to address this with her!
I don’t know how to explain this to a kid!
I’m sweating just talking about fictional characters.
The longer she stares at me, the more obvious it becomes that there’s something I don’t know how to say. Kids are actually so intuitive. They haven’t built up the layers of bullshit that keep adults from seeing the reality of a situation. And I know that’s what’s happening right now.
“Maybe it’s something we can all talk about—”
“I don’t want my dad to cheat on my mom.”