Chapter 5
It took forty minutes. Luis was working with an unusual set of requirements and he took them seriously. The dinosaur required freehand artistry and a smaller trimmer for detail work and Mateo providing ongoing creative direction from a position of significant authority. The lightning bolt was clean. The heart, which Sophie had expanded in scope from the original pitch, occupied more real estate on my chin than initially anticipated. By the time Luis stepped back and held up the hand mirror so I could see the result, I was looking at a face I did not entirely recognize, which was, I supposed, the point.
Ava had moved closer without me noticing. She was standing a few feet to my left now, closer to the center of the room than she had been when the afternoon started, and she was looking at me with the green eyes that checked the math before trusting the answer.
"People will stare at you," she said.
She meant it as a warning. She meant it as something she knew about from the inside, the specific experience of moving through a world that looks at what is different on your head and cannot help itself. She was nine years old and she was trying to protect me from something she had been absorbing in silence for three weeks, since the hat went on and stopped coming off.
I turned toward her in the small chair, which still had not forgiven me for existing in it.
"Then I'll tell them who made me special," I said.
The room went quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when something true lands in them.
May you like
Ava reached up with one hand and touched the edge of her pink hat. Not to pull it down further. Not to check that it was still there. Something different. The way you touch something when you are considering the possibility that it does not have to be permanent.
She did not take it off that afternoon. I want to be honest about that, because the story does not owe anyone a faster resolution than the one it actually had. She touched the edge, and she thought about it, and she left the room still wearing it. But she had moved from the craft table to the center of the room and she had spoken to me directly and she had tried to protect a large stranger from something she understood better than he did, and that was its own kind of motion.
