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.
“Holy shit. Batman,” I said, like a potty-mouth version of Robin. I stood up, and the throw pillow I’d hugged to Digby fell onto the floor. My gaze flew from Batman’s profile picture to Lav’s face. “Please, please, tell me you didn’t let him know about the baby?”
“No! God no,” Lavender said, and I could breathe again. For almost a full half second. Right up until she added, “We only messaged him once. And then I realized that I should have asked you first if he was nice. Aunt Leia? Was he nice?”
“What did you say?” I asked her, my voice so raw and angry that she flinched. “What did your message say?”
“Just hello,” she told me, defensive. “All we said was hello.”
I took two steps closer. On the screen I could see that an icon at the bottom of my Facebook page was blinking.
The Batman had already messaged back.
9
I dreamed my abdomen was made out of curved glass, like half of a huge fishbowl jutting out in front of me. Rachel wanted to see the baby, so I lifted my shirt and we peered in. Digby looked like those cartoon sea monkeys from the old ads in the backs of my childhood comic books. He was cute and smiling, with three deely boppers on his head and flippery feet. He waved his tail fin at us in a friendly hello. I waved back, but Rachel said, “That’s Aquaman’s! How did you forget which Super Friend you fu—”
I woke up with a start. It was dark in the room, but a faint light at the window told me it was close to dawn. I sat up, scrubbing at my face, Rachel’s oh-so-disapproving dream voice echoing stupidly around in my head—as if my stepsister had any clue who was in Super Friends!
I wrapped my arms around my real, much smaller, opaque belly. Digby was awake and whirring around, half mine, half mystery. I didn’t need a psychologist to puzzle out the meaning of my dream. Had someone told me yesterday that anything could push the bones sideways in my subconscious? Well, I would have laughed. But Lavender had managed, and it had sparked the worst fight we’d ever had. I’d been appalled; she’d been truculent and unapologetic. I’d told her to pack her clothes and stay off my technology on pain of death, but her dabbling could not be undone.
Digby had been my secret. My accidental family. Mine. His father had been unfindable, an accepted absence. He was the end, Digby the beginning. There was no next for Batman. I’d told myself so, over and over, every time he’d crossed my mind. Now a pair of teenagers had found him almost instantly. It hadn’t even been that hard.
If I’d wanted to find the Batman, then I would have. It was that simple. I hadn’t tried, and that was pretty damning. I wondered if it was partly, even a little, because Batman was black. Had I bought into the stereotypes about black men and fatherhood and assumed he wouldn’t mind not knowing? I didn’t think so. God, I hoped not. But maybe, on a subconscious level, it was there. The thought made me extra guilty that I still hadn’t read his message.
Lavender had contacted him through my public page, thank God, so he still knew me only as Leia Birch, artist, and he wasn’t showing up in my Messenger or Facebook apps. They were only connected to my private account. My laptop was currently hidden down in Birchie’s sewing room, but only to keep Lav off it. It wasn’t like that was where they kept the Facebook. I could log in to my public page from my phone’s browser or my Cintiq Companion, a monstrously expensive touch-screen tablet with a better processor than most computers. It ran all of my drawing software. I hadn’t doodled myself into a real idea yet, so I hadn’t unpacked it.
I needed to pick a machine and go read his response. He could not be unfound, after all. But when I thought about reopening that window, looking through it into his world, I couldn’t picture it. He would have a whole, full, real life, and when I tried to imagine myself entering it, even virtually, my usually color-filled head filled up with blank, white space.
I got my sketch pad and took it over to the desk by the window, thinking I would draw some Violences. I knew from long experience that hand sketching was more than a good way to jump-start work. It was an inroad to my subconscious. My head didn’t know how to deal with Batman, but my hands might. And if I accidentally drew my way into the V in V prequel I was supposed to be writing in the process? Even better.