Z O E Y
It was Friday night, so Mr. Young had been surprised I was available for babysitting. He had a work dinner, and Mrs. Young was going with him. They would be home late, probably past midnight, but he said he would give me a ride home, so I didn't have to take the night bus. I had been planning on spending my Friday night in bed, reading until mom got home, at which point we would order pizza and eat it over a movie on the couch. I hadn't told Mr. Young this. I just told him I was available.
They were already gone by the time I made it to their house. Instead of Mr. and Mrs. Young dressed to impress, Tristan was the one who opened the door, apparently on his own way out, if the jacket he was struggling to put on was anything to go by.
"Sam's in the kitchen putting a lightbulb in the microwave," he told me when he managed.
I didn't believe him, "What?"
"He says it's for school."
I stepped inside, "You're lying."
He stepped outside, "I would never lie to you. You should hurry. I'm out."
I opened my mouth, my hand already on the door so I could close it behind him.
"Actually," he stopped me. "I wasn't gonna ask, but it's gonna eat me away if I don't. What the fuck happened to you?"
He was pointing at the bandage on my lip with the hand with the sad face tattoo, but I wasn't in the mood for a back and forth that would probably end with him saying I had it coming, and I also didn't have the time for it, seeing as there was a real possibility that Sam was about to make something explode in the kitchen, so I just shrugged, and said, "I got in a fight."
Tristan reached for a cigarette in the pocket of his jacket with the hand with the fuck tattoo across his fingers, and said, "Right," like he didn't believe me.
"What?" I was surprised he hadn't left already, but I guessed he really couldn't miss a chance to make my day worse.
"You're lying," he said, lighting up his cigarette.
I smiled, "I would never lie to you."
"Why don't you come up with your own â"
"Goodbye, Tristan," I stopped him, closing the door in his face before he could breathe the smoke in mine.
I was still smiling though, a smile that died as soon as I reached the kitchen, jacket, and beanie still on, my tote bag falling off my shoulder. In the microwave, a lightbulb lit up and then exploded, pulling a scream out of both me and Sam, who was hiding behind a chair in his pajamas, notebook and pencil in hand, swim goggles on.
"What is wrong with you, Sam?!"
"Hi!" he said instead of everything, big eyes on me, and a bigger smile on his lips. Then, very fast, like a disclaimer at the end of a tv ad on medication, he said, "It's for school."
I stepped closer to the microwave, "You're crazy."
He followed me, "Crazy amazing."
"No, just crazy," I said, opening the microwave to find a bowl of water with a broken lightbulb in it.
"It worked though," he said, reaching for the bowl. I slapped his hand away and grabbed it myself. Sam went on, "Then it exploded. That's why the lightbulb's broken."
"What were you thinking?" I asked, putting his science project down on the counter where he had his science books, a fat pencil case full of color pencils, and apparently all of his other school supplies. He added the notebook and the pencil he had been holding to it.
"I was thinking water is a pretty good energy conductor and â"
"Sam," I said, very seriously. "You could have hurt yourself."
He pointed at my lip, "What happened to you?"
I shook my head, "Don't change the subject. This is serious. I'm very disappointed."
His face fell. I almost regretted saying it. "I'm sorry."
"Are you?"
He nodded, eyes on the ground, "Yes."
"What are the goggles for?"
"Protection."
I wanted to laugh but didn't. Instead, I took off my beanie, then my jacket, and finally sat down on a kitchen chair, "Right, lets write down your findings then."
"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" he said, already too excited again as he took a seat next to me.
We finished his report half an hour later. Mr. Young had left fish fingers in the oven and mashed potatoes on the stove. Sam asked about my lip again while we ate. I told him I had gotten hit in the face with a football, and he said once, he had been playing with Tristan in the yard, and he had hit his face with a football too, and Tristan's nose had started bleeding so hard they had to go to the hospital. Tristan had stopped playing with him in the yard after that, which Sam thought was fair, and I thought wasn't, but I didn't tell him that.
I did the dishes while Sam brushed his teeth. Then, before bed, he finally showed me his comic book, the one he was writing with his friend Dave. I sat on the edge of his bed and lost my mind a little.
"Now this is crazy amazing! Sam, look at this!" I said, waving the book in his face. It was a whole book, more than a hundred pages of panels drawn by nine-year-old boys with nothing but color pencils, probably a lot of them.
"I know what it looks like." Sam laughed, "Tristan says the shades are all wrong."
"Fuck Tristan," I said, without thinking, only to regret it right away. Sam was smirking when I looked up from the book, "Please pretend I didn't just say that."
Because I was begging, Sam's devilish smirk turned into a reassuring smile, "It's okay. Tristan swears in front of me all the time. Mom does too sometimes. Dad says it's okay as long as I don't do it myself."
"That makes sense," I said, although no one should be swearing in front of a nine-year-old, specially not me, his babysitter. I turned to the book again, "Anyway, this is really impressive."
"It's not finished yet, but you can read it, just not in front of me," he said. When I asked him why, he shrugged, but his cheeks turned red, "I don't know."
"Well," I said, closing the book and laying it on my lap, "I'll let you sleep then, and I'll go read it downstairs while I wait for your parents to get home, and I'll tell you what I thought of it next time we see each other."
He stuck his pinky out and I promised. I started reading it as soon as I fell on the couch. It was just as he had told me the first day I met him, the story of a couple of boys navigating middle school with the help of superpowers. The drawings were made with unsteady hands that left behind smudges and sometimes struggled to keep the whole speech inside the bubbles, a detail I thought was fitting of the way a nine-year-old usually talked.
Tristan was in it too, although his character's name had been changed to Nat, which was like all other names, Tristan spelled backwards, except shortened so as not to abuse of people's suspense of disbelief. No one would actually buy a person was named Natsirt, so Nat it was. Naturally, Nat was Mas' brother. It didn't take me long to understand Sam was writing him as an anti-hero of sorts. He didn't have a superpower, but he did have something. At first it was just a smudge, so small I thought it wasn't supposed to be there. But then it started to grow. Every time Nat showed up on a panel, the smudge would be bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It was growing around him. Sam had made a case of writing that most people didn't see this smudge, but Mas did, and he understood it was what made his brother so angry all the time. There was a whole chapter where Mas tried to get the smudge off, but nothing he did made it go away. It only grew.
I kept on reading. There was a new character in the most recent chapters, a girl named Oez. She was Mas' new babysitter. He hadn't wanted one and so he had made himself invisible when she first came to the house. Except this hadn't worked because, as it turned out, Oez could see him. His superpower didn't work on her. That was the last panel he had drawn. I could cry.
I didn't but I was smiling like an idiot when the front door opened. It was time to go home. I closed the book and got up to go get my things from where I had left them in the kitchen. Then Tristan walked into the living room.
"They're not gonna be home before midnight," he told me, so I sat back down. He took off his jacket and left it on a chair on his way to the kitchen. I hid Sam's book under the magazines on the coffee table and Tristan came back with a box of cereal. Then he collapsed on the couch next to me. "What are you watching?"
I had kept the tv on only for company, so I had to look up at it to get an answer for him. Some nature show was on, I had no idea which one exactly, but apparently Tristan did, because he grabbed the remote and turned the sound up.
"I fucking love this. David's great," he said, sticking his hand inside the box of cereals to bring a handful of cheerios to his mouth.
"Who's David?" I asked. And then, "Are you on drugs right now?"
"Absolutely, I am," he said, smiling. He was actually smiling.
I didn't know if I should be worried, so I asked, "What drugs exactly?"
"I don't know, a lot of them?" I should definitely be worried. On the tv, a lone elephant searched unsuccessfully for water in a desert, and Tristan said, "Fucking devastating."
I smiled to myself, arms crossed over my chest, I didn't know what else to do. Next to me, Tristan kept stuffing his face with cheerios, his eyes glued to the screen, feet up on the coffee table. Every now and then, he would say something like, fucking beautiful, or again, fucking devastating. Mostly, I agreed. For the most part, life was both beautiful and devastating.