“...and we’re at Rae and Jerry’s until the movie at ten. Mortimer has to be in bed by nine, his favorite movies are on top of the DVD player. We’ll be home before one, help yourself to anything in the fridge.” She smiled perfectly at me and clicked her heels down the walk to her anxiously waiting husband and zoomed away.

“Help yourself to anything in the fridge, eh?” Even though it was the first time I’d ever babysat, I swear to God I’d heard that phrase before. A standardized parting line of the parent to the babysitter, maybe? Like a tradition? Maybe babysitting fourteen-year-olds heard it every Friday night all across America. Maybe Mrs. Mosman was just way too generous. Who knows, not me. I was a child of divorce, I didn’t know what happily married couples did.

Eh, whatever. The clock said seven-ten and I could hear the TV blaring away in the family room. It sounded like Raffi. I walked in and found the little five-year-old glued to the box, transfixed on the bearded guitar man. The asshole in me really wanted to grab the remote away and switch over to King of the Hill, but at fourteen years old I was more passive than asshole, so Raffi it was. I took a closer look at the kid. His smiling face was lovingly responsive to Raffi’s every move, and when the man started to play what I guessed was Mortimer’s favorite song he gave a little squeal and clapped his hands. I started to feel a little guilty for even considering changing the channel.

“Hi Mortimer!”

“Hi.”

“You want something to eat? You hungry?”

“MACARONI AND CHEESE!!”

“Okay sounds great, I’ll go make us some. Do you want to keep watching here?”

“Yeah.”

My fifteen minutes of Mortimer fame were over and he was back to Raffi, who was singing about bananas. How do you compete with that? I headed for the kitchen.

Macaroni and cheese. The staple food of any suburban kid and definitely the one mastered by children of divorce everywhere. I think I learned to make it by myself when I was six. I rummaged around in the cabinets for it in the Mosman’s enormous kitchen and sure enough, I found a cupboard holding a dozen boxes of the stuff, and they were Kraft, no less. Kraft. None of the no-name four-for-a-dollar cheap shit for this family, they went all out and bought name-brand Kraft macaroni and cheese. That’s a class symbol right there.

“Hi Simon. Are you making us dinner?” I almost jumped. It was Karla, the nine-year-old daughter that I was also babysitting for and had forgotten about. The Mosman’s had told me she was mostly quiet and kept to herself. When I met her before her parents left she didn’t seem shy per se, just not interested in what was going on around her.

“Yes Karla, I’m making some macaroni and cheese for all of us. Do you want any?”

“Yes please.” She hopped on one of the stools by the long island in the center of the kitchen and watched me boil the water. Given that being watched intently by a nine-year-old girl is pretty fucking creepy, I tried to appear overly nonchalant. “Man, you guys are in for a treat.” I tossed off. “I make a great pot of macaroni and cheese, you’re going to go bananas over it. No one makes this stuff like I do.”

Now the sad thing here is I was only half-joking. At fourteen years old, you seem to think you can make amazing macaroni and cheese, and, without having tasted anybody else’s, you believe wholeheartedly that your macaroni and cheese making talent is superior. A weird attempt at forging identity? Who knows, countless memories of standing in your mom’s cramped kitchen, making a lonely dinner for one while she’s at work have gotta count for something. Or maybe it’s just that at fourteen years old, it’s all too tempting to make up pointless skills you don’t really have. Either way, it was probably lost on nine-year-old Karla, who, thank God, had stopped staring at me and had started reading a book.

I don’t really remember my parents splitting up. It was a little before I turned four and I was more concerned with reading Garfield books and building big towers of wooden blocks. We lived in this house by a river that ran through the city, and one day my mother moved to a downtown apartment complex and I followed her without really questioning. A few days went by before I asked, “Mommy, where’s Daddy?” I’m not really sure if I understood her answer, but in either case divorce became part of my vocabulary pretty early.

Given that I loved my parents, I accepted it as the natural order of things. Couples who were still married quickly became suspect in my four-year-old eyes, with my paternal grandparents as prime targets. “Grandma and Grandpa, why don’t you get divorced?” I questioned around the dinner table one night. I was informed that Grandpa would die if Grandma wasn’t around to make his food and take care of him, and would I like more potatoes. This was confusing to me, (Not because I didn’t like potatoes, but because my father’s apartment was where I had shepherd’s pie for dinner and sausages for breakfast, while my mother’s diet consisted of macaroni and cheese and Life cereal) but Grandma and Grandpa were nice to me, and more importantly bought me things, so I didn’t question their foreign concept of staying married to each other.

I found out I liked being around Mommy a little better. She never lost her temper unlike my unemployed father, and while he was trying to get me to eat vegetables, she was trying to graduate from medical school and rented me Gumby videos. Mommy, unlike Daddy, also had a car, a brown smoke-belching beast named Edna. Edna was a heavenly luxury in the Canadian winters when faced with the alternative of walking ten blocks through snowstorms to a bus stop. On the other hand, Daddy took me to the Laundromat and let me push the buttons to make the machines start, and if I was really lucky gave me some quarters to play video games, which I would run out of immediately, because four year olds aren’t very good at video games. Daddy would walk to the adjoining bar and get a drink and I would spend the remainder of the time crawling on the floor trying to locate enough dropped pennies to turn into one more quarter for one more game. This was nothing short of endearing to the young women working at the bar and it probably got my father laid on numerous occasions. They usually gave me a quarter or two anyways, helping my dad get sex and me play video games.

This isn’t to say I resent my dad or that I hated him, far from it. He was/is a great man and did/does a lot for me, particularly when it came to admitting he was wrong. An exchange with him, also at four years old:

Dad: You know son, I know everything.

Me: Everything?

Dad: Everything.

Me: thinks for a few seconds Do you know everything about doors?

Dad: Well…okay…maybe not everything…

We had a give-and-take relationship.

Nine o’clock. Fucking finally. I finished washing the dishes (And when I say washing I mean putting them in the dishwasher after an hour of avoiding it) and called out to Mortimer that it was his bedtime, sincerely trying hard to disguise the joy in my voice.

“Mortimer! It’s beddy time!” (Our relationship, after two temper tantrums, had gone steadily downhill)

“Really?! Already?!” (Yes, and no one’s happier than me you little shit, let’s go)

“Yes Mortimer, time to go!” (Crossing my fingers. Obedience? Please?)

“I don’t wanna go to bed!!” (Guess not)

“I know Mortimer, but your parents said you have to be in bed by nine, so let’s go, c’mon, I’ll tuck you in, do it or I’ll tell your parents you’ve been giving me attitude.” (How much am I getting paid again?)

“...fine. Get my jammies.” (Six dollars an hour. Never mind.)

I put Mortimer to bed, shut the door, and crossed the hall to Karla’s room and put my ear to it. No sound. I knocked and went in, she was reading in bed.

“Are you doing alright Karla?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“Mortimer’s asleep, if you need me I’ll be downstairs, okay?”

“Okay.”

I shut the door, and stood by Mortimer’s door for a few more seconds then slowly opened it. Sound asleep. I shook my insomniac head with jealousy. At fourteen years old, I had, of course, forgotten that when I was five I was asleep the second my head touched the pillow too.

I walked downstairs and turned on the TV at a lulling volume so it would barely be heard from the upstairs bedrooms and give the illusion that I was actually there. Quietly, I crossed through the kitchen, into the laundry room, crept up a flight of stairs, and, knocking first even though I knew she wasn’t there, opened the door.

At first I was taken aback by how normal the room seemed, though I hadn’t really known what I was expecting. Flashing lights? Ferris wheels? Booby traps? Nope, just a bed, a dresser, and a desk upon which sat a stereo and a small television. It took a while to comprehend how intimately decorated her walls were. Taped everywhere were pictures of friends, posters of bands, random scratches of paper with what looked like lyrics or poetry written on them. Did she write those? I already loved her handwriting, messy but still understandable. I knew a few of the people in the pictures but most of them were strangers to me. Who were they? Close friends? People she’d met for a weekend? Lovers? I pictured her with a wild lifestyle, going out every night and doing fantastic things, what I couldn’t imagine. She seemed too good to go drink her face off at a kegger like everybody else. A flyer for a local food bank lay on her desk, and immediately I concluded she had to be a saint as well, giving and loving with a heart of gold in spite of her exciting nightlife. Overwhelmed by this new dazzling information, I sat, then laid down on her bed. It only registered a few seconds later. I was lying in her bed. Her bed.

Adrienne Mosman. Fifteen years old, a sophomore, and in my geometry class. I’d fallen for her the first day of school. She wore an old zippered black sweatshirt patched with the names of punk bands I’d only started to hear of, and many more I hadn’t. She took the seat next to mine, smiled, made a crack about the teacher’s haircut, and asked me my name. To a shy only child from Canada, she might as well have proposed marriage. Five weeks later, I hadn’t really found words to communicate with her yet, but I was still convinced that we were destined, which is why I lunged at the opportunity to baby sit for her parents, and which is why it was such a huge highlight, at fourteen years old, to be lying in Adrienne Mosman’s bed. So close to sleeping in her bed. I was stuck, it was euphoric. I did not want to leave.

Inspired by every little boy’s wish to become a big strong animal, in addition to a voracious reading habit of Calvin and Hobbes books, I attempted to build a transmogrifier when I was five. I, given my lengthy span on earth, was through with being a human and had decided it was much smarter to be a tiger instead. I attempted transmogrification first with my mother’s family at Grandma’s house, crawling under my upside-down cardboard box despite my senile grandmother’s protests that she liked me as a boy and didn’t want me to be a tiger. (I did not understand, as she usually kept a minimum of six cats in her house and therefore thought she would welcome another feline addition to the family) Once under the box, I instructed my mother to turn the arrow from “Human” to “Tiger”. After she did so, I burst out of the box growling to find…I was still a boy. I was devastated. I began to cry as amused relatives tried to be supportive by telling me they liked me better as a human being, but my shattered five-year-old heart would have none of it. I was a failure.

Quickly I realized my main problem was that, unlike Calvin, I had no button on my transmogrifier that could be pushed to transform me into a tiger. I brought the problem before my father one night, believing wholeheartedly, (as all little boys think their daddy can fix everything) that he would be able to help me with this awful problem of not being able to turn into a tiger. He seemed to understand and back I went under my cardboard box. Beginning to talk in his deep rich smoker’s voice, he began to walk me through a world of possibilities and beings, advising me to think about what I wanted to transform into. His soft lilting voice soon put me to sleep, and I woke up pretty pissed off as, after all, I was still not a tiger. I came to the reasonable five-year-old conclusion that transmogrification was stupid anyways, so were tigers, and threw away my cardboard box, though I still kept my Calvin and Hobbes books.

Speaking of, Calvin and Hobbes were companions on the level of my study-a-holic mother and my working/looking-for-work father, along with the characters of Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary. Being an only child with two on-the-go parents was equal to a lot of sitting around in everywhere besides home, and my books were the only things that followed me. I read in my father’s work places, my mother’s back hospital rooms, and most of all, the car. Both parental units constantly showered me with new books the minute I was able to read, likely because a) It fed their wishes to make me an intellectual from an early age and b) It got me to shut up and sit still. And as such I read and read and read. And read some more. It earned me strange reputations at daycare, (the quintessential second home of the working parents’ child) as I became known as the kid who sat in the corner of the room and read a lot while everyone else was playing with toys that I thought were dumb. When it was outside time, I couldn’t bring my books so I became known instead as the kid who sat in the corner of the play structure and watched people while everyone else was playing games that I thought were actually pretty cool but nobody asked me to play and I never had the nerve to invite myself. I thought everyone else thought I was weird because I sat in the corner of the room and read books.

I must’ve laid in her bed for at least half an hour. It was warm. And comforting. She had a purple and black down comforter over black sheets, and I felt like I was endlessly sinking into the frame. Her pillow was deep and soft, and smelled foreign, exotic. For a few minutes I laid on my side and breathed in and out of her pillow, concentrating on the smell. I tried different sleeping positions, imagining what it would be like to sleep in this bed with her. How would my arms be placed? One over her stomach, the other under her side? Or would that be uncomfortable for her? I didn’t know. Maybe the other arm would be up to my side, away from her entirely? The mystery and draw and excitement of actually sleeping with a girl was at least on the same level as sex to me.

After what seemed like hours, I got up and looked around some more. Her closet door had a large drawing on it of an intimately detailed girl’s face whose mouth was sewn shut. I was drawn to it. I slowly moved across the room and, after studying the drawing for a long time, opened the door. Her clothes. More than I expected. Surprisingly, she had much more than her casual school-day wardrobe would suggest. There were elaborate formal sweaters to modest button-up blouses, nice khakis to shiny leather pants. But what had I expected? Where were all these clothes from I wondered, and what were they used for? Did she take them out into the night? Did her parents hand them to her in hope she’d wear them? Maybe her grandparents. Maybe she trotted them out when she went into nursing homes to serve soup to the elderly (I had no reason to believe she did such a thing but it seemed reasonable to assume). Her clothes were just as much of an exciting mystery as her bed. Her socks. I remembered her socks, they looked different every day. One day they were bright blue with yellow stars, another day they had green and black stripes, and another day they had pictures of tigers eating cake on long yellow fabric. I smiled at the thought of them and rooted around in the closet. Sure enough, I found the socks and there were the tigers, exactly how I had remembered them. I felt a warm chill. These tigers, for some reason, served to remind me of how I really did know her, that I was not in a stranger’s room, that Adrienne Westwood, the girl whose garments I was going through, was real, and I knew her, knew her well, because of the cake-eating tigers on her long yellow socks.

I was drawn to the bed, I laid down on it again. I reached out and felt the sheets, ran my hands across the smooth fabric. What had she done in this bed? How many men had laid in this bed with her, similiar to how I was lying now? None? It seemed impossible, she seemed too experienced for none. How long had she had this bed, since she was little? Had she read Roald Dahl in this bed at five years old too, like me? How many times had she cried in this bed? Is this where she first touched herself? The thought ran electricity down my spine. Was I staring at the same ceiling that she did when she first sent her fingers snaking down her front to explore the pleasures of her flesh? How long ago was that? How long ago had she done it last? How did she lie when she did it? I didn’t know. My only guides there were the Internet videos I had covertly downloaded to gape at with amazement at two in the morning while my mother and stepfather were blissfully sleeping and unaware of the sexual education I was getting thanks to the teachers of Kazaa, Limewire, and Bearshare.

I got kicked out of my first daycare when I was two and a half. Apparently I pulled down my pants in the middle of the day and yelled, “Look at my big penis!”

Daycare life frequently came into conflict with the teachings of my father, who from my early ages was never shy about using language like “fuck”, “shithead”, (A pet name for one of his girlfriends) “cocksucker”, and, “Goddammit son, stop pissing sitting down like your mother tells you, stand up and pee like a man”. I didn’t actually get kicked out just for mooning my two-year-old peers, supposedly it was when my old man learned about my escapade and responded by laughing on the floor that got me the boot. I never got kicked out of daycare again, but other mishaps occurred. At my next daycare I got in a fight with some other guy and we had to be pulled apart. The grown-ups looked at me first and gently said, “Alright Simon...use your words.” I looked him in the face and said, “Asshole!” The jerk deserved it, I’m sure.

“Simon?”

Shit.

I was caught. Her parents had come home early and found me lying in their daughter’s bed. Having gone through her clothes no less. They would call my parents. They would throw me out on my ear, severing my only constant non-school link with Adrienne. Horror struck me a second time. They’ll tell Adrienne! They’ll tell her that the nice boy they hired to babysit was really a creepy stalker and rummaging around in her room and lying in her bed! She would never even look at me again. I’d have to transfer math classes. Transfer schools...

It turned out it was only Karla.

“Simon? Are you okay?”

I was still in shock as I realized, breathless, that it was indeed a nine-year-old girl who was in the doorway of Adrienne’s room. The clock read ten-thirty and her parents would not be home for at least another two hours. I shook my head and mentally switched to babysitter mode.

“Karla, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

She shook her head. “No. I was going to get a drink of water and I didn’t know where you were so I tried to find you. The TV was on but you weren’t watching it.”

All of a sudden, without knowing why, I felt very guilty. She was silent for a while and then spoke again.

“I come up here a lot. It helps me feel better.”

I have to confess, such an out of the blue hint of emotion made me do a double take. “Feel better about what?” I asked.

She hesitated for a second. “When Mom and Dad aren’t doing so well...and they...have problems...I don’t like to be in the other part of the house.” She played with the sheets for a while. “So I come up here. With Adrienne. When she’s here...she makes me feel better. When she’s not here...I lie in her bed and sometimes I sleep in it. Mom and Dad usually don’t notice because they have to both tuck in Mortimer but they don’t have to tuck in me...” She hesitated again, longer. “And when Dad’s had a lot to drink neither of them notice anything.” She looked at the sheets again. “Adrienne hates it too. And she understands. Nobody else does.” She looked at me with curious eyes that looked ten times more haunting than when I first saw her. “What were you doing up here?”

“I...uh...I...I have math with Adrienne and I wanted to look at her textbook.” I said lamely. “I forgot mine at home.”

“Oh. Okay.” I don’t know if that pathetic of an excuse convinced her nine-year-old mind, but whether she did or not she didn’t ask any more questions. I stood up awkwardly and went to the door. “Well, I guess I better get back downstairs.”

“Okay.” She slid off the bed and trotted to the stairs leading down to the laundry room. We walked down together and she stopped at the foot and looked at me.

“Simon?”

“Yeah.”

“Please...don’t say anything to Mom and Dad...about what I said to you.”

I felt a lump in my throat and thought about my divorced parents who never had to see each other every day. My divorced parents who worked hard, were good to me and rarely spoke a harsh word not intended with love.

“Of course Karla.”

“Promise?”

I thought of my dad, when I was five years old, telling me he would take me out to eat. I made him promise and he told me of course son, a promise is a promise.

“I promise. And a promise is a promise.”

“Okay. Good.” She dashed off through the house and up to her room.

Put in my place by a nine year old. I watched TV for the next two hours but all I could do was think about what Karla had said and how different the Mosman’s were from what they really seemed. When Mommy and Daddy came through the front door carrying smiles and the distinct smell of scotch, I could hardly look either of them in the eye as they paid me and bid me a good night as I started the twenty minute walk back to my house. I let myself in and past my mom’s bedroom where she was no doubt soundly sleeping. Being a latch-key kid, all of a sudden, didn’t seem so bad.

It was just before I turned six when I learned that Mommy had gotten a job in a little town an hour and a half away and we would be moving there in three months.

My first reaction was, of course, to cry my face off. I loved my mother, but I loved my father too and I did not want to leave him. Both parents tried to console me and say that I would take the bus up often and come to see him on weekends, but I was unconvinced. I was being taken away from my father. My world had ended. I was scared and going away to a strange new place where surely people would laugh at me and call me names. And my dad wouldn’t be there.

When we arrived in the strange new town, I was soon set up to go to the first grade as well as a new daycare for after-school as my mother worked her long hours at the hospital. I hated it. The kids at school, like the kids at daycare before me, thought I was really weird. They had all gone to kindergarten together and I was foreign, alien. None of them wore glasses (I’d had to get them the day before my sixth birthday) and all of their parents were still married. I didn’t understand them. Daycare was no better, and once again I took out my books and turned inward.

When Monday rolled around I slid into my geometry seat at 8:58 in the morning, as per usual. I waited for her to come and sure enough, at 9:01 Adrienne slunk in beside me. She looked really tired. Up all night counseling Karla? Shielding her from her parents? Maybe she had gone out...maybe the reason she was out so much wasn’t to find the world outside as much as it was getting away from her world inside. I didn’t know, and part of me ached to forget it all.

She smiled at me. “So how was babysitting my little brother and sister on Friday? A real blast, I’m sure?”

I smiled back. “Yeah it was fine. Just great. Thanks for asking me to do it.”

She laughed. “Sure man, no problem.” And with that she promptly put her head on her desk and started sleeping. Mr. Lundquist, our ever-vigilant teacher, soon spied her slumbering frame and gave a rap on her desk. “Adrienne? Stay with us, hm?” She lurched up. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, Mr. L.”

The sight of her sleeping mixed with the memory of lying on her bed sparked a dumb kind of courage in me.

“Hey Adrienne. I really liked your room. It’s really nice.” I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth. I might as well have tattooed a stegosaurus on my forehead and colored my teeth yellow. She gave me a strange look and I felt like crawling into a hole, but then she smiled again.

“Oh, did Karla take you up there? Yeah, she likes my room a lot too. I’m glad you liked it, I think it’s kind of boring.”

“Nah, I liked it, especially the handwritten stuff on the walls.”

She laughed again and I think even blushed a little. “Oh that stuff, yeah I write when I’m feeling moody. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, yeah I do.”

Which was the extent of our communication for the rest of the day, but compounded with the substantial mindfuck I had surrounding her persona, it served a strange reminder of how human she was, with all the imperfections and oddities pertaining to the title. It was enough communication to satisfy a fourteen-year-old kid for the rest of the day, though I still wondered about her family. Letting myself into our duplex at three-thirty that afternoon didn’t seem so bad anymore.