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?