She understood why Piper liked the seniors. Boys her own age had voices that were deeper suddenly, but they still ate sour straws for breakfast and pushed each other for no apparent reason. Older boys, boys her mother called “young men,” were focused on getting into your pants, knew how to get there, and knew what to do once they were there, which was good when you had only the vaguest idea yourself. Sometimes that meant you ended up doing things you hadn’t anticipated, but Piper said a lot of those things were amazing. She also said it turned out you knew how to give a basic blow job all along, it just came naturally. Ava frowned into her pillow, while feeling the increasingly familiar tug of arousal when she thought about sex.
She was fourteen, and she wished she had a boyfriend she could fool around with. The senior boy had a friend who’d apparently seen Ava’s pictures on Piper’s feed and thought she was cute, but now that she and Piper weren’t talking anyway it hardly mattered. She couldn’t approach Piper and say, “Hey, I know we aren’t friends right now because I called you on some shit and you told everyone I hit on you, but I’m getting increasingly horny so I was wondering if your boyfriend could hook me up with someone who would deflower me without spreading it over the Internet?”
She pulled the sheet up over her head and groaned.
Thirty.
The children kept coming in and out, of course, as they will. They genuinely don’t give a shit about what the adults in the room are up to until it gets in their way, at which point they’ll whine about it.
Theo was trying to get Charlie to go outside and play with him, which was causing the usual Gen-X parent cognitive dissonance: I want my kids to have the awesome free-range childhood I enjoyed and develop independence and grit, but I also want them to feel ‘seen’ by me, and not just benignly neglected. However, my fucking life is falling apart here and I might suddenly lose it and run around the kitchen stabbing appliances with a fork, so maybe now’s not the best time to play Frisbee.
“Now’s not the best time, Theo, sorry. I’m having a conversation with Michael.”
Theo shrugged and wandered outside, ending up on a swing, but not swinging. Charlie and Michael watched him go.
“So, he’s not taking it very well?” Michael kept his eyes on Theo, who had started swinging, but only to the extent of his own lower legs, back and forth.
Charlie shrugged, an echo of his son. “I don’t think so. It’s been a fucking shit show, these last two weeks. If I didn’t despise Anne so much I’d be giving her a medal for all the crap she’s been taking care of without me. I had no idea how much mind-numbing, repetitive detail went into just keeping them alive. I’ve upped the cleaners to three times a week.”
Michael smiled a small smile. “Grocery run getting you down?”
“It was fine for the first week. I decided I would run the whole thing like a Swiss Army Hospital . . .”
“I thought the Swiss didn’t have an army?”
“They don’t?”
“I don’t think so. I could be wrong.”
“Well, like some super-efficient type of organization, then, which doesn’t sound as good, but I defer to your greater knowledge of international defense. I had the kids up early, I made full cooked breakfasts, I bought a thing that lets you write their names in pancake batter, I did laundry at night, I folded clothes and put them away . . .”
Michael made a “wow” sound.
“Right? Anyway, after a week I had a total nervous breakdown in the bathtub after they’d gone to sleep. Sitting there with a beer in my hand, crying into the bubbles as quietly as possible, totally fucked in every possible direction. I am barely clinging to sanity. I really don’t know what to do.”
Kate came in. She had a Barbie-type doll in one hand, the hair of which was cut short, not very stylishly, and a roll of tape in the other. She came over and dumped both on the table. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out all the hair from the doll.
“I need you to put this back on again.” She looked at her Dad. “I got the tape and everything.”
Charlie looked at her, seeing Anne in her face, but loving her regardless. “Uh . . . I’m not sure that’s going to work, honey.”
Kate frowned. “Yes. Just help me tape it on.”
“It won’t look the same as it did before.”
“That’s OK. Tape it.”
“You’ll be able to see the tape. And it might keep coming off.”
“Tape it, Daddy.” Your injection of reality is not needed here, old man. I have a vision and I am here to see it executed.
Charlie sighed, shared a quick glance with Michael, who tried to look supportive, and pulled out a long piece of tape. It kept curling. Michael reached over and held one end, and told Kate to hold the other. They held it taut and Charlie carefully applied the hair to the tape, chunk by chunk. It
