Overlooked(84)

But I've been unpacking and trying to set up my house so I'm a little behind. I always keep a two- to three-week stockpile of videos, but the move has dwindled that down to one week.

After another hour of editing, adding my trademark swirls and flourishes onto the screen, it's time to switch tasks. I make a quick chicken caesar salad, and sit down at my computer to play on social media.

It's my favorite part of what I do. Sure there are some ugly trolls who have nothing nice to say, but most people are super fun to interact with. I've ‘met' people from all over the country and world, and have improved thousands of people's sex lives. I love what I do.

While I chew, I look over at my to-be-reviewed pile. Next up is a feather, which I'm tying in with the boob video. It promises not to lose its shape or break. We'll see. Also on the pile are all sorts of vibrators and sex toys, lingerie and less direct sex items like books. There are even services like flower delivery. It's a bit of everything, really.

They always send two of everything, one for me to try out and one to film. Except I don't have anyone to try them out with anymore.

At least I have a stack of vibrators.

My doorbell rings, snapping me out of a conversation on Facebook about the pros and cons of quickie sex. I review so many products that I'm used to deliveries at all hours.

Leaving my empty salad plate in my fake bedroom-office, I skip down the stairs and open the door.

A child smiles up at me. She's not a child-child. Middle-school age, I'd guess. Her shirt says ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers,' and I immediately know she's cool. She's slim, with long mousy brown hair and a sparkle in her incredibly dark eyes. Her nose is peppered with freckles.

"Hi, I'm Piper. Your new neighbor." She speaks with more confidence than ninety-nine percent of adults I've met.

"Well, hello Piper. I'm Avery."

"I saw your light on and wanted to introduce myself."

"It's nice to meet you. I haven't met your parents yet."

"I know."

"Where's your mom?"

Piper shrugs, "Africa."

"Oh. Where's your dad?"

"Out."

"Just out?"

"Yeah." Piper pushes past me and beelines straight to my brand new navy sofa and drops her notebook on the coffee table. "So, I need help with my homework. Do you know how to find the positions of shapes on a graph?"

"Uh, not really," I say, still gripping my door handle.

Piper completely ignores me, her face staring intently at her notebook. Confused and resigned, I close the door and sit on the leather armchair that I've had since my first apartment. It's one of the few things I took after breaking up with Nathan.

"Doesn't your dad help you with your homework?" I lean forward, in a non-threatening way.

"He does if I ask, but I forgot about it and it's due tomorrow." Piper looks at me as she answers, as if she needs to speak slowly to me so I understand.

"You should write stuff in a calendar," I say.

She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and says, "That would only work if I remembered to look at it."

That sounded like something my sixty-year-old mother would say.

"How old are you?"

"Thirteen. Is this twenty questions or something?"

"We did just meet, and now you're sitting here demanding I do geometry."

"Exactly, let's get cracking. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish. Here's the worksheet."

Piper passes me a single piece of paper. Thank God it's only one sheet. Of math problems. Part of me wonders if this surreal situation is really happening. I'm sitting here with a thirteen-year-old who just barged into my house and demanded I do math homework. And I didn't kick her out.

She's simply too charming.

My iPad is on the end table, but I don't want to use it to help us work out the questions in front of her in case something inappropriate comes up on the screen. This child must never, ever find out who I am or what I do for a living.

"What do you have to do?" I ask while scanning the questions for some sort of clue.

"What's your wifi password? I'll Google it on my phone," she says. Demands, really. I obey and give her the password.

We work together on the task. Once we figure out the first couple, the rest of the questions don't take long.

With the last question answered, Piper sets her pencil on the table and says, "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?"

I can't help but laugh.

"I guess not," I say, and it comes out as more of an encouragement than I'd intended.

"Let's watch TV. Do you have Netflix?"

"Obviously," I say, and immediately wonder why I'm so defensive.

"Are you married?"

"What happened to Netflix?"

"Just asking. But I'll take that as a no. Do you have a boyfriend or are you single?"

"No, I don't have a boyfriend. Do you?"

"I already told you I'm thirteen, right? Do many people my age have boyfriends?"

"Oh, right."

"Do many people in eighth grade have boyfriends?"

I was hoping she'd forget she asked me.

"I have no idea." I don't, actually.

"Figures," she says, tilting her head, and I want to tell her who I am and what I do. I wouldn't, of course, she's too young. Even though she seems more grown up than I am.

"When I was in middle school, none of my friends had boyfriends. Or if they did, they were friends who happened to be boys."

"But that was a long, long time ago."

"I'm not old, I'll have you know. I'm only thirty one."

"That means you were thirteen years old eighteen years ago. Eighteen years. That's almost twice as long as I've been alive!"

I fall silent. It doesn't seem like eighteen years ago. Is eighteen years a lot of time or not? How different are kids now, or aren't they?

"Would you rather have one thousand dollars or save a random one thousand people in World War II?" Piper suddenly asks.

I shake off my contemplation about how quickly time flies and focus on her new, random question.

"The people. One thousand people are worth a lot more than a thousand dollars."

"But you can't pick which people, so you might be saving Hitler and his friends. You just don't know," she says, her palms facing up.

"Oh," I say, and reconsider the question.

"I said the money, because you can take the money and help people with it."

"I'm not sure a thousand bucks is going to go very far."

"But if World War II just ended, then it would be a lot of money."

There's no way I'm winning this argument. I smile and say, "Yes, you're right. If World War II just ended, I'd take the money."

Piper looks satisfied with my answer. Maybe because she's made me agree with her.

Someone pounds on my front door. The doorbell would've been sufficient. I glance at the clock, it's just past seven thirty.

"That's my dad," Piper says and scrambles to her feet.

Piper and I make it to the door at the same time. My hand reaches the doorknob first, but hers lands on top of mine and she doesn't take it away.

We open the door, and the man I saw earlier in his backyard stands on my front step, a scowl ruining his otherwise gorgeous face.

He has the same deep dark eyes as Piper, the light catches them and sparkles off them in the same way. His jawline is as strong as his arms, and he's got a day's worth of stubble.

I smile, extend my hand and say, "Hi, I'm Avery, your new next door neighbor."

He grunts at me and grabs Piper's hand. Nice. She clearly doesn't get her social skills from him.

"It was lovely spending time with you, Avery. We'll have to do it again sometime," Piper says. I swear she's fifty. No, seventy.

"Anytime," I say, waving at her.





Knox

"Oh my God, Dad. Dad, she's so cool. Her name is Avery and she just moved here from Cincinnati."

"You're not supposed to leave the house when I go out."

I'm around for Piper as much as I can, I even built a fully functioning garage in my yard and moved a lot of my tools here so I can work from home and be here when she gets home from school. But on one or two evenings a week, I have to go out. Not that Piper cares. She's more grown up than most adults I know.

"I needed help with my homework."

"No, you didn't. Don't lie." The kid breezes through school, her biggest complaint is how boring it is.

"Fine. I wanted to meet our new neighbor. Besides I texted you where I was. You're so anti-social. You should've gone over and welcomed her to the neighborhood by now."

"Don't tell me what to do," I say, but can't help smiling. If there's one person in the world who can make me smile, it's Piper. She's the only person who can make me smile. It makes everything I do for her worthwhile.

"Oh my God, Dad … "

"Stop saying, ‘oh my God,'" I say as I open our front door.

We sit in our living room, on the denim couch Piper picked out. Piper talks and talks, relaying everything about her evening, but that's nothing new. The kid talks non-stop. But right now there's one thing I can't get one thing out of my head.

My new neighbor is definitely the YouTube video woman my buddy Marcus showed me earlier tonight. The one who talks about sex, and how a man is supposed to please a woman.

Marcus said she's the most famous person who has ever lived in town.

I'd never heard of her.

Maybe Marcus needs to look on the internet for sex tips, but I sure as hell don't.

It explains why I noticed a webcam pointing at me out of her upstairs window earlier. She'd damn well better not plan on using me in one of her videos.