Overlooked(1)(174)
“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.
“Dad? Dad!” Piper shouts, drawing my attention.
“Yeah?” I start listening to her again.
“Avery’s so awesome, we should totally have her over for dinner.”
“I’m not sure about that. I don’t even think you should be going over there.”
Do I want my thirteen year old hanging out with a woman who posts videos about sex online?
“What? Why? She’s so much cooler than Mrs Coupland.”
“Of course you’d say that.”
Mrs Coupland was our old neighbor. An eighty-year-old widow who happily watched Piper for me when I had to work in the evenings. When her daughter convinced Mrs Coupland to move in with her, and they sold the house to Miss I-know-everything-about-sex, I lost my free babysitter. At least the move happened near the end of eighth grade.