Cute?
“Are you for real?”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. “I think it’s nice they’re happy. Most people spend their whole lives looking for what they have and never find it. They’re lucky.”
“I’m not saying they’re not lucky. I’m saying they’re gross.”
He shrugs non-committally. I’m kind of surprised. It’s the first time I’ve bothered to give him my opinion on anything. I expected him to back down and agree with me right away.
“Want to see something cool?”
Something tells me he’s using the term ‘cool’ loosely, but I’ll bite. It’s at least ten hours before either of our parents get home from work. It’s going to be a long day.
He takes me upstairs. We hang right at the top of the landing. There’s a gallery wall en route to our parents’ bedroom that can’t be seen from downstairs. There are eight perfectly spaced framed pictures of childlike drawings. The colors are vibrant. I can imagine poster paint being laid out on a large plastic sheet, complete with a red paint brush for the red paint and a yellow one for the yellow, so the colors don’t mix. Each picture is signed by a childish attempt to write the name Luke. A wrong way around L on one, a simple Lu on another and the word Blue on two more.
Curiosity gets the better of me. “Why’d you sign your picturesBlue?”
“When I was little I thought people were saying Blue when they called me Lu. Thought it was my name. I liked it better. I was bummed when I found out it wasn’t what they were saying.” I give him a cursory hint of teeth. “Check these out,” he says pointing further down the hall.
There are eight more pictures on the wall. Some in full color, the rest in black and white. It’s an homage to my cartoon drawing phase complete with clunky early dialogue and rudimentary figures, all the way to one of the last things I drew; an angry half-man half-feline creature, splattering the page with rage and saliva. I drew it on a receipt from a restaurant my dad took me to the last time he came out before the pandemic kicked off.
“This one’s my favorite.” He’s standing in front of the first character I serialized. The highly unoriginally named, Super Jessie. “Your dad says you were only eleven when you drew this. Can’t believe it. It’ssogood.”
I give a minor grunt.
“Always wondered what his superpower was. Your dad said he couldn’t remember.”
Super Jessie’s superpower was the ability to make people happy. He could make anyone laugh. I shake my head, embarrassed at how silly that is. “He didn’t have a superpower. He was a wannabe.”
As we walk back downstairs, I pause at the photographs displayed on the landing. There are photos of Luke and I, hung side-by-side, at all the expected milestones; learning to walk, first day of school, last day of school. That’s not what stops me, though. There’s a photo of my mom and I at the wedding. We’re talking to each other; it doesn’t look like we knew we were being photographed. I must have said something amusing because she was smiling, and I don’t remember her smiling a lot that day. Seeing her here makes me feel strange. I wasn’t expecting it. There are no photos of my dad in her house. I move on quickly, trying not to think about how it makes me feel to see her here, or be reminded of how I felt when I caught her cutting my dad out of our family photos on one of our first nights in the new place in Sydney. Next to the picture of her is a photograph of Luke as a baby, swaddled in the arms of a man I don’t know.
“Was that your dad?”
“Yeah. That was my dad. I always feel weird seeing him. He died before I turned one. I don’t have any memories of him. It’s strange to think he should have been such a big part of my life and instead all he is a man in photographs and stories other people have told me.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. Luke’s disposition is so determinedly sunny, it’s hard to believe that anything bad has ever happened to him.
“Your dad is the only dad I’ve ever known,” he says lightly. He turns his gaze and fixes me with an overly intimate smile. “Thanks for sharing him with me.”
“Are those the new sunglasses?”
Well, they’re sunglasses and they’re on my face. You do the math, Einstein.
“Yep.”
He looks at me and blinks twice. “Wow.” He lets his mouth drop open. “That’s all I can say.”
Wow?
Fucking wow?
Is he for real?
Someone needs to talk to this guy. Someone needs to sit him down and give him the low down on what’s appropriate to say to other guys and what’s not. Someone needs to do it soon.
He throws himself back on a lounger beside me and starts prattling on about Chase and Gould and someone called Izzy. I’m getting the feeling I’m going to find out who they are with or without my consent.
“Might get a little shut eye.” Lying in the sun is making me sleepy. I slept way better last night, but it still took a while for me to fall asleep due to a particular step asshole’s unrelenting pursuit of self-pleasure.
