I leaned in to kiss her. Because of the whole half-blind thing, my aim was a little off. But she was nice enough to correct my miscalculation in a rather satisfying manner.
“I may start pulling an Adam Driver,” I warned her. “Wear a mask just for the fun of it. I mean, to prove that I’m badass and evil. That’s a Star Wars reference, by the way, not a Girls reference.”
“I got that one,” Lily said. And I thought, Voila! Now you’re not thinking about my injury anymore!
Before she could start drowning me in Apology Soup, I led her into the kitchen, where Leeza was over the griddle and my father was over the Wall Street Journal.
“Great minds think alike!” Leeza exclaimed when she saw the muffins.
“More like every goddamned thing nowadays is gingerbread for Christmas,” my father added. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad it’s not pumpkin, for Christ’s sake. But still. Gingerbread’s hardly an original thought. If you ask me, I blame Starbucks.”
“Nobody’s asking you, dear,” Leeza said lightly, taking out the muffins and putting them on a serving tray.
Within a few minutes, the pancakes were ready. Leeza had even made them in the shapes of ginger people. (It seemed strange to me to gender cookies.) What then followed was something that Lily was deeply unfamiliar with—familial silence. Every now and then one of us—even my father—would compliment the pancakes. But otherwise…nothing. Lily kept staring at my bandages, horrified. My father wouldn’t stop reading his paper. Leeza smiled vaguely, as if there were invisible elves telling her gossip.
I imagined this was what every meal with Leeza and my dad was like. When it had been my dad and my mom, silence had meant a truce. Here, it was a default void.
Please may we not become like this, I wanted to say to Lily.
And maybe she got that, because when I looked back at her, she rolled her eyes.
I tried to roll my eyes back, forgetting for a second what a bad idea that was. The result was a not-so-gentle ice-pick-to-my-retina feeling.
I must have yelped, because both Lily and Leeza immediately asked if I was okay. Dad just looked annoyed.
“A-okay,” I assured them. “But I just remembered—I need to change my bandage.”
“I’ll help you,” Lily and Leeza said at the same time.
I can do it, I thought.
Then I thought, But actually, I’d rather do it with Lily.
“Thanks, Leeza,” I said. “But I don’t think I need that many hands to help out. I’m going to let Lily take this one.”
We went to my room, where I got the gauze and tape from my backpack. Then we went into the bathroom, because even though I didn’t particularly want to see it, I knew we should probably have a mirror handy. I took off my eye patch and then started to unravel what the doctor had done. But Lily stopped me, said, “Here, sit down. Let me.”
I closed my eyes. I felt her peel the tape from my skin, as carefully as she could. I felt the gauze over my eye loosening, and loosening, and then finally falling away. Lily gasped a little at what she saw—the stitches, the bruising—but instead of saying anything, she kept working. We were silent now, yes, but it was a silence of concentration, of focus. Not just on her part, as she slowly put me back together. I was also feeling her fingers as they touched the side of my head. I was hearing her breathe. I was attuned to the most basic pulse of the moment. The gauze was put in place, kept in place. The eye patch went back on top, protecting the protection. A pat on my back—All done, all good.
I opened my eye.
“I hope I did that right,” Lily said.
“If it were me, I probably would’ve wrapped up the wrong eye.”
“There was some…glitter. Kind of embedded in the side of your face. I didn’t know whether to take it out or leave it. I figure the doctor will do that next time?”
“Just adds to my street cred,” I assured her. “Already balladeers are crafting legends about the boy known as Glitter Pirate and his way with the blades.”
“I’m so—”
“Don’t say it! It was no more your fault than it was Andrew Carnegie’s fault for funding so many libraries, which led a century later to so many librarians on ice skates who were unprepared for glitter explosions. Anyway, I had a great time until the, you know, hospitalization. The Rawkettes knocked my socks off—which was no small feat, considering how laced up I was.”
At this moment, Leeza called out, “Everything okay in there?”
Considering my father’s comments about Lily’s bad influence, I wanted to yell out something about champagne and a sponge bath—but I wasn’t sure there’d be a way to explain the joke to Lily without hurting her feelings. So instead I yelled out, “All’s well!” and then murmured to Lily, “We must get out of this apartment as quickly as humanly possible. In fact, forget human constraints—let’s make like cheetahs. Or gazelles.”
“Are you sure?” Lily asked, looking me in the eye.
“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”
“I don’t know. They made you pancakes.”