“He goes back and forth between hero and villain, but he’snever all one thing. That’s what makes him a fascinating character. He has all these complicated relationships with the other mutants.”
“Did you make these?” Nick asks, pulling out a couple of sketches I haven’t seen in years. “They’re really good.”
“Yeah. I was really into art when I was a kid. I’d try to re-create different characters and poses and stuff. These are the ones I gave to my dad. I was probably just a little older than Kira.”
“What are they doing in the back of this box?” he asks. “This is refrigerator gallery material.”
“He’ll come get them at some point,” I say, omitting that it’s been ten years since he packed up everything else and left for Florida. “They’re just in here temporarily for safekeeping.”
“It’s cool that your dad got you into this,” Nick says, handing the drawings back tome.
“He was into the collecting and the reselling. But he doesn’t appreciate comics as an art form.” I open the cover of the book I’m holding. “He doesn’t see the magic.”
“What’s the magic?”
I wait a beat to answer because I’m not sure if Nick is poking fun at me. But he’s looking at me with a curious expression, so I give him my explanation.
“It’s a sequence of images, right? But it’s not like animation, where you’re seeing every single moment of action in this smooth way. A comic artist decideswhichmoments to draw and which to omit. Some moments make it into a panel that the reader can see, and some happen in the white space between the panels. And that part is up to the reader—filling in those gaps. It’s like this duet with the artist. The artist finds this balance between what’s seen and what’s unseen. And to me, the unseen part is the magic.”
“Like reading between the lines.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Sorry I’m rambling. No one ever asks me about comics.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s interesting to hear someone explain the thing they’re passionate ab—”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” My mom opens the door and pokes her head in. “As far as I’m concerned, Kira can have as many of these as she wants.”
“She loves reading,” Nick says, sidestepping my mom’s comment. “And drawing. So these might be perfect for her.”
“Just don’t let her start collecting them,” Mom says under her breath. “Has she met any of the other kids in the building? Most of them are also here on weekends.”
Nick takes a second to interpret this remark and then says, “Her mom and I split custody fifty-fifty. She isn’t only with me on the weekends. We create a schedule every month depending on what’s going on.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mom says, looking only slightly ashamed of making assumptions about other people’s custody arrangements. “It’s so hard to schedule your own social life as a single parent when you’re worrying about childcare.”
To be fair, by the time she started dating again, I was old enough to be the babysitter.
“I don’t usually need anyone to watch Kira because I build my schedule around her,” Nick says. “But if there’s a no-show and I have to work a surprise closing shift, I just take her with me.”
“What if you have a date?” Mom asks, cutting to the core of this entire conversation.
Half of me is cringing with secondhand embarrassment at the way my mom is arranging the pieces on the board for her endgame. The other half is a tiny bit curious to hear how Nick responds to her prodding.
“I don’t think I’d schedule a date for a night when I had Kira,” he replies. “Not that I have much of a social life. Actually, I should get going since I’m working tonight.”
“Let me walk you out,” Mom says, opening the door wider. “I have a question for you.”
I join Perry on the couch so I can monitor what she’s about to say. (Mercifully, they’ve changed the channel to a much-tamer BBC miniseries.)
“Are you interested in meeting someone new?” Mom asks as they walk to the door. “Are you on the apps?”
Perry and I exchange a look.
“It hasn’t really been a priority—”
“Because I have a friend who I think you might really like.”
“Oh—”
