The Almost Sisters(38)
The wife looked like me, short and thick, pale skin, dark hair. Well, she looked like me if I were ten pounds heavier, I thought, and regretted it immediately. I didn’t want to be that brand of bitchy. She was holding a little baby dressed up as Hulk, laughing, trying to eat her cake pop with the baby reaching for it. He ignored the one clutched in his own fat starfish hand. They had two tweeny-looking girls as well, one dressed as Scarlet Witch, one as some anime-style princess thing I didn’t know. The girls were gabbling in tandem to Derek about some nerdgasm-worthy something they had seen at the con.
Fourteen years ago Derek had offered me this life, this exact one I was seeing.
Or he had tried to. I hadn’t let him get the ring box out of his pocket. Hadn’t let him ask the question.
He didn’t know that earlier that week I’d gotten a long, ecstatic call from Rachel, asking me to be her maid of honor. Telling me about her ring. Jake, my former best friend, who had once called all games “sportsball,” had used the Jumbotron at Pitt Field to ask her.
I’d looked at Derek, the ring box a tattling lump in the pocket of his ill-fitting suit coat. We were twenty-one years old, and he’d been flushed with the pride of legally ordering champagne that he could not afford.
Before he could get the box out, I had told him, “I think we should call it, yeah? Graduation’s right around the corner, and I’m moving back to Norfolk. I mean, we always knew this thing had a timer on it, didn’t we?”
I went to a friend’s place while he got his stuff out of my apartment, leaving him to divide up our shared comic books. He snarfled all the Doom Patrol, which I took as proof that I’d been right to break it off. He knew exactly how much Robotman meant to me.
Now, looking at his life with a lobby and a crowd of milling nerds and the gulf of many years between us, I was sick. I was purely sick and reeling with an understanding that was way too late. He was a nice guy. He had loved me. I had maybe loved him, too, and I had walked. I had walked away from Derek, and later on from Jonathan, and from Kev, and finally, three years ago, from Jax. I’d had no good reason, just the broken and untrusting piece that JJ had created in my center.
I put my skinny vanilla latte in the trash and walked across the lobby and into the hotel bar. There I had myself some tequila. And some Batman.
The Batman had approached me, actually.
“Excuse the fan-boy freak-out, but you’re Leia Birch. I love your stuff,” the Batman said, a world of admiration in the words. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I liked his wide smile and the glint of his dark eyes inside the mask. I wanted to drink enough to stop thinking that I lived alone with eighty-seven mint-in-package Wonder Women and a cat named Sergeant Stripes. I wouldn’t even let him in the house. I hadn’t cared whether the Batman was nice or not. In the moment Batman was being nice to me. It was not enough, but it was something.
I had no idea how to explain this to Lavender, or even how much I should explain.
“I didn’t ask him for any references,” I said at last. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for here, kid.”
She shrugged. “I’m not looking for anything. Well, no, I am. We are. Hugh and I, we went looking for your Batman on the interwebs. But then I thought, what if he wasn’t nice?”
“Lav!” I said, rocked to the core by so much na?veté. Put this kid in a yellow sundress and there was page two Violet—bunnies, birds, and all. “I told you, there isn’t any way to find him. Please don’t worry, okay? My kid is going to have lots of family. He’ll have you, and Rachel, and . . .” I paused, not sure about Jake’s standing. I skipped his name and went straight to, “Your awesome grandparents will be his, too.”
But Lavender had checked out of the conversation. She pulled my computer back into her lap while I was talking, swiping her fingers around on the touch pad.
As soon as I shut up, she said, “I’m trying to tell you. Hugh went through your Facebook feed. We figured that the Batman must have liked your page.”
I shook my head at her. “That’s crazy.”
My real Facebook page was under my legal name, Leia Birch Briggs, but professionally I had always used Leia Birch, as a tribute to Birchie. As myself I had maybe a hundred friends. My Pro Pages for Leia Birch and Violence in Violet were huge, though. Leia Birch had more than twenty thousand likes, and V in V had almost fifty thousand. There was no way Lav and her little boyfriend had looked through all those, assuming that the Batman even Facebooked.
“Hugh sorted them by sex,” Lav said, still clicking at the keys. “Did you know that more than half your fans are women? Plus, you told me he was black, and there’s so many white-boy nerds, you don’t even know. Then we ditched anyone who looked old or like a kid or super gross. That got us down to nine. We started looking through old profile pics, and one of them cosplays. Guess what character he dresses like?”
She didn’t say it. I didn’t need her to.
As she spoke, she turned the laptop toward me. There he was. Digby’s dad.
He wasn’t quite as cute as I remembered him, but I’d had tequila goggles on that night. Still, he was grinning the cocky grin that had first gotten my attention, and it lit up the oversize eyes that made his sharp-jawed face sweeter than it had seemed inside the cowl. His forgotten nose turned out to be a good one, wide and straight and sized to fit his face.