“The ringmaster?” I squint at him.
“Nick Martino,” he replies, extending his hand. “Ringmaster is the alias I use at the pool. I’m also known as Kira’s dad.”
Maybe it’s because I’m holding a stack of comics, but I can’t help sifting through my mental catalog of characters for Nick’s two-dimensional, line art doppelgänger. There aren’t that many comics characters with…average body types. Dan Dreiberg, the retired Nite Owl II fromWatchmen? But the face is wrong. Nite Owl II doesn’t have a salt-and-pepper beard.
“Sam Pulaski.” I take his hand and attempt my firmest handshake.
But instead of shaking my hand, he pulls me all the way up to my feet.
“Pulaski,” he repeats thoughtfully, like he’s tracing a memory of my last name.
“Nick just moved into Mrs. Morgan’s apartment,” Mom says. “He offered to fix our bathroom sink.”
“I can hear it dripping from my apartment. I brought my tools,” he says, nodding at a large black toolbox next to his feet. “I bet you need a new O-ring. It’s a simple fix.”
I purse my lips. I don’t like other people being in this room. I don’t like being around those other people in my pajamas, without a bra. And I don’t like our new neighbor using the termO-ringwhile standing a foot away from my bed, where I would probably use a sex toy with that same name.
“Come on in the kitchen, Nick,” Mom says. “I was just about to have a little breakfast. Can I make you some coffee?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he says, but I can hear her footsteps heading for the kitchen. She’s already in Entertaining Mode.
I clear my throat. “Are you a plumber?” I find myself tidying up the room, pulling up my quilt to make the daybed more presentable, kicking a rogue pair of underwear behind the desk chair. He’s watching me do all these things, but I can’t stop. I don’t invite people in this room because it only takes a briefglance around to understand how small my life is right now. Hal calls it the Fortress of Solitude.
“No,” Nick says. “But I’ve fixed plenty of sinks and I have very good hearing. The walls are thin here.” He gives me a look I can’t quite decode. “Doesn’t the constant dripping sound bother you?”
“I probably got so used to it that my brain tunes it out,” I suggest.
I kneel again, gathering the Batman issues into a pile, hoping he’ll join my mom in the kitchen. But he doesn’t move.
“So, are you a Juilliard-trained actor or a government agent who doesn’t give her phone to nine-year-olds? Smart move, by the way.”
“I’m an art historian,” I say, using the present tense. “And you’re the person hammering and drilling on my wall first thing in the morning?”
He shrugs. “The place hasn’t been updated in years. I’m installing some shelving,” he says. “It involves lots of wall anchors.”
“My entire bed was vibrating.” He raises his eyebrows in a way that makes me wish I had phrased that differently, and I quickly return my attention to my Batman piles. I wonder if he was able to heareverythingon the other side of his wall.
He turns to look at my unsightly metal bookshelf. “I think you need wall anchors, too. I can look at it when I’m done with the sink if you—”
“That shelf is just temporary. Don’t worry about it.”
Nick squats down next to me on the carpet, angling his neck to look at some of the covers.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you live in the building?”
“It’s my mom’s apartment,” I say, trying not to sound defensive while having the opposite effect. “I’m basically subletting. Temporarily. Because of the pandemic.”
“Temporarily?” He reaches out to grab the corner ofBatman#635.“For five years?”
My cheeks burn. He turns the book to ninety degrees to read the title and every memory of some condescending man trying to explain comics to me floods my brain. I want to go the rest of my life without hearing another man’s opinion about two things:
How long I’ve lived in my mom’s office.
