Chapter Thirteen #2
Reaching into my bra, I pull out one of the tickets and hand it to her. When I look up at Sharon’s face again, her eyes are wide and a little alarmed. She holds the ticket like it’s made of a precious metal.
“It’s warm,” she says when her eyes drop to the rectangular piece of coloured paper.
“Lady Phantom doesn’t exactly have a handbag,” I shrug.
I watch Sharon swallow and then she tucks the ticket into her trouser pocket. She then looks up at me and there’s more alarm. “Wait, did you just give me that ticket so we don’t have to go in together?”
I give her an equally startled look. “No! Of course not. I…” I don’t know why I gave her the ticket.
I haven’t even explained about the suit.
“Look, I can have it back if you want? Because I do want us to go in together.” I step closer to her.
“I just got the weirdest looks from the cool couple in front of us and you probably saved me from trying to kick them into next century. But now you’re here and you’re…
” I don’t seem to be making any sense. “I wanted you to wear a suit so I could give you this.”
I reach into the other side of my bra and pull out the eye mask. It’s also warm. I unravel it and hold it up.
“For me?”
“Yes,” I smile, feeling something like calm return to my mind. “Well, for the Director, obviously.”
Sharon looks down at her clothes and then back at me. “You asked me to dress like this so I could be the Director?”
“What’s a superhero without her trusty sidekick?”
“But I’m… I’m not the same shape as her,” she says after a hesitation that seems to cost her something.
“And I’m a foot smaller than Lady Phantom with A-cups where she has D-cups. We work with what we have.” I shrug.
“Oh. Right.” Her eyes drop to the ground.
“Hey,” I say and I hear the familiar edge in my voice.
“The Director is not a woman of self-doubt and poor self-esteem. She’s a smart, cunning and calculated master of manipulation.
She is key to enabling Lady Phantom to be a modern-day Robin Hood who robs the rich and empowers the poor.
She’s Lady Phantom’s saviour and her ally and, as we may get confirmation tonight, her… ” I drop my voice and my chin, “lover.”
I gesture for Sharon to turn around so I can fix the eye mask on her. After hesitating for the briefest moment, she turns. As my hands go up to the back of her neck, I’m surprised by how soft the short hairs are there. It is like stroking velvet.
When the mask is tied, I place my hands on her shoulders and pivot her back around.
“There,” I say, satisfied. “You look perfect.”
Even behind the mask, I see Sharon’s eyes sparkle, like they’re amber catching the light.
Or maybe it’s because of the mask that her eyes are accentuated, piercing into me in a way that has always aggravated me, like she can see more of me than I want her to.
But it’s different right now. Now I find myself wanting to lean into it.
So much for nuking this silly little attraction I have to Sharon Goldblatt.
As if to shake away those feelings, I turn and nod to the queue and Sharon steps up to stand next to me. I ignore the brief and no doubt insulting look Hippie Bitch gives us and distract Sharon from it too by asking a question.
“How’s Danny?”
“Same as yesterday, mostly. He has some new lesions, on his face.”
I nod, unsurprised. They can appear quickly. “I will tell him about this foundation some of the other guys use. It’s stage make-up and can cover them up really well, if he’s worried.”
Sharon’s eyes stare straight ahead. “I don’t really know how he’s feeling about it all right now.
After he was discharged last time, for weeks he went back to normal.
He still had a nasty cough, but he’s always had that.
Well, at least, he has the last few years.
And he’s a casual smoker so… but when I saw the lesions, the sarcomas for the first time, it was like that illusion he’d created around himself just disappeared.
Like a bubble bursting. And now I feel like he swings from denial to rage to just wanting to sleep all the time. ”
“It’s grief,” I say. “Those are all normal reactions.”
“I just wish he’d talk about it. It’s like… such a big thing to go through, I don’t want him to bottle everything up. I’m scared he’ll explode.”
“Well, if he explodes, at least it will all come out. It won’t be bottled up anymore.”
“But that’s not… healthy.”
I hold eye contact with Sharon and I realise a little too late what kind of a look I’m giving her.
“Fine, okay, yes, I realise none of what is happening to him is healthy. I just want him to have a fighting chance. I want him…”
Words crawl up my throat and want to spill out of me. But they’re not kind words. They’re hard words. And Sharon isn’t ready to hear them. I’m not even sure I’m ready to say them to her.
“You’ve been doing more research into alternative medicine?” I ask instead. It’s not a change of conversation, more a redirection.
“Yeah, I got all these books from the library, about Chinese medicine actually.”
“You did? Why?”
“I’m trying to learn more about yin and yang, to help Danny find some balance between feeling good and bad about his diagnosis. Not that he can feel good about it, more… mentally strong. Is that not how I should interpret it? I mean, you’re Chinese, right?”
“Second-generation, yes. I was born and raised here. I’ve only ever been to China once in my life and I barely remember it. I no longer speak to my family so I don’t exactly feel… connected to my culture.”
“Is that… why you have a more British name?”
“No, that’s because my mother thought it would help me assimilate.
” My stomach lurches as I think about my mum making that decision, about her constantly battling to balance the two cultures she wanted to be part of but I know sometimes felt excluded from both.
I know I often did. Maybe that’s one thing we had, or even still have, in common.
“Oh.” Sharon falls silent, clearly deep in thought. “What is your Chinese name?”