The Almost Sisters(37)
I said, “Your mom is probably buying you a ticket right this second. Tomorrow at the latest, maybe even tonight, we’ll be headed for the airport. You better get packed, okay?”
“This completely sucks,” Lavender said. She made no move to rise and get her suitcase out either. Instead she pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and chewed it. I clocked the look on her face. Guilt. She’d done something, and she wanted to confess.
Downstairs, the doorbell was chiming again. I needed to help Frank reassure the town, get some food into my pregnant body before I passed out, check on Birchie. I stayed where I was, though. Whatever this was, it was eating at her.
“Just tell me,” I said, gently as I could. “What did you do?”
I hoped to God it wasn’t Hugh-related. We’d only been here a few days, but they had been difficult, and I knew firsthand that the loss of a father could lead to fast, damaging sexual decisions. Her own MIA dad’s bad choices had taught me this, when he and I were not much older than she was now.
Lavender flushed and said, “We didn’t do much.”
“You and Hugh?” I said.
She nodded.
“I think you should blurt it out,” I said. “Fast, like taking off a Band-Aid. Yank!”
“I told Hugh about your baby,” she said in a rush. “Don’t worry, he won’t tell anyone.”
“Lavender!” I said.
This was so far from the confession I expected that it was in another universe. My personal universe, actually, one where she had zero business meddling. Worse, Lavender was already spilling to the neighbor boy, and she was headed home. My secret would not survive long in sharkier, more Rachel-filled waters. Rachel would go tattle on me more to Mom and Keith, and I would spontaneously combust from all the stress.
“Hugh’s solid,” Lavender said, so dismissively that telling Hugh couldn’t be what she was feeling guilty about. “But we’re both so sad, for the baby.”
“Why on earth?” I said, but softly, because we were in it now. Telling Hugh my secret mattered to me, but this was the part that mattered to her.
She wouldn’t look at me. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her. “Because the baby won’t have a dad. He won’t have one at all, even to start.”
“Oh, honey, that’s the last thing you need to be worrying about,” I said. Of course my kid’s fatherless state was going to resonate with these kids. The last time Lav had seen her own father, he’d been charging out the door with a Whole Foods bag full of underpants and oxfords. Hugh’s family was in equal disarray.
“Was the baby’s dad . . . Did he seem like a mean person?” Lavender asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think this might be more about your own dad and not the baby?” She shrugged, inscrutable. Thirteen was so much harder to read than simple, sugar-hearted twelve. “Have you talked to your dad at all? Maybe texted him?”
“Mom told me not to,” Lavender said, waving the question away. “Aunt Leia, just answer me. What if I have to go to the airport in like five seconds? I need to know—when you met the baby’s father, did he seem like he was nice?”
I took a deep breath and resigned myself to the conversation. Thirteen was urgent, and it came with tunnel vision. This mattered to Lavender so much that she was talking about Digby’s dad instead of human bones or her own parents. I had to take it seriously, but I wasn’t sure I had an honest answer. By the time I’d started drinking with the Batman, I’d been emotionally shipwrecked. I wasn’t in any state to assess the character of my not-yet-existent-baby’s father. I’d been bitch-slapped almost twenty years into my past.
A shame, because the day had started out so wonderfully. I’d packed a five-hundred-seat auditorium at FanCon. They’d had to turn people away because of fire codes. At the end, when Dark Horse announced that a V in V prequel was in the works, that whole host of glorious nerds had risen to their feet to give me a standing ovation, foot stomping and hollering.
After, as I walked around the show floor, people kept sidling up and shyly asking for my autograph. I saw at least twenty women and two men who had come dressed up as Violence. It was surreal, passing cosplay version after version of the killer I’d invented, each one with a pulse and purple hair. Short and tall, fat and thin, young and old, all toting pretend knives and rocking thigh boots. My favorite one had smeared deep rust red around her mouth, and when she grinned at me, I saw the same color in the creases of her pointy prosthetic teeth. I even saw a Violet in a sweetsy yellow sundress with a taxidermied songbird clipped to her shoulder.
This kind of thing only happened at cons. Nerd fame wasn’t like real famous. I never got recognized at Harris Teeter, and non-nerds lost interest in my job the second they realized I wasn’t in tight with Robert Downey Jr. or the Batfleck. My own family didn’t subscribe to the series I penciled and inked; Mom liked cozy mysteries and books with Chicken Soup in the title. She found Violence frankly disturbing, and Keith read only nonfiction. Rachel had never so much as cracked the cover of my graphic novel. She told her East Beach friends I was “a working artist,” leaving out the embarrassing comic-books part. But at FanCon I was a rock star, and it felt pretty good.
The booths were starting to close, and I stepped out of the convention hall to get a Starbucks in my hotel lobby. That was when I saw him. Derek, my ex-boyfriend from my art-school days. He was by the exit, passing out pale pink cake pops from a bouquet. To his family. His wife and his children.