Mikey sat beside me with my hat on, trying
to look cool, and succeeding because fedoras are an inherently cool hat.
“What?” I
said in response to Nikki’s look.
She slowly
shook her head. “I made no judgement.”
“Not out
loud.”
A small
smile turned up one side of her mouth. “I concede the point. Fedoras are cool.”
I didn’t
trust that look, but I carried on.
“So, sisters, huh?” I said.
He nodded, causing the hat to fall
over his eyes, momentarily.
“Never had a sister. For me it was a
brother. She do something to make you mad?”
A shrug, which also somehow made the
hat fall over his eyes again.
“Yeah, I get that. Sometimes just
existing is enough. But why the doll?”
He didn’t look at me, instead just
focusing on the back of the seat in front of him, his mouth a hard line that
cracked, briefly. “She carries that stupid thing everywhere and shoves it in my
face.”
I chuckled slightly at that. “Kinda
reminds me of my brother.”
The kid still didn’t make eye
contact with me, but that didn’t bother me.
“I was on the other end, though. I
had a hat, a lot like this one. Not as nice as this one since my mom made it
for me, but it was my first hat, and I loved it. I thought I was so cool, like
Indiana Jones or Sam Spade.”
The kid didn’t give any recognition
of the names, which didn’t surprise me.
“So I played at being an archaeologist
on an adventure or a detective on the case every time I put the hat on,
shooting Nazis, swinging on my bullwhip over chasms. And I guess I annoyed my
brother. He was always the bad guy since I had the hat. Only the hero gets to
wear the hat, y’know? Finally, he had enough and stomped on the hat and ripped
it into pieces right in front of me.”
“What’d you do?” Mikey asked.
“Oh, I was mad. Sure, I went to Ma
and Dad, and they punished him, but it wasn’t enough for me. It was war. It was
a blood feud. I stopped talking to him. Any chance I got I would wreck his toy
cars when no one was looking—so I wouldn’t get in trouble. It lasted for
months, even after Ma made me a new hat. It didn’t matter because he had
wrecked the old one.”
“Are you still mad at him?” Mikey’s
voice had grown softer, as had his face, genuine concern that his sister might
feel the same way about him.
“I was ready to be hate him for the
rest of my life, but six months later, he said he was sorry and gave me a new
hat, one that he bought from a store. It also wasn’t as nice as this one,” I
rapped the brim with a knuckle, “but it was one he bought. He saved up his
money and bought it for me.”
“Did you ever fight after that?”
“Oh, sure, all the time. That’s what
brothers and sisters do. But it was never a feud like that ever again. After a
day or so one of us would apologize and we’d go back to being brothers. But you
know what?”
“What?”
“For those six months when I was mad
at him, I was lonely. I was just mad at him all the time. I was mad at him for
ruining my hat and I was mad at him for making me mad at him. I was mad at him
for not being there to play with. I just kept getting madder at him, and then
I’d stomp on his cars.”
Mikey laughed at that.
“Yeah, now it’s all funny, but then
I was just mad at him. I wished he hadn’t waited so long to apologize. I wish I
had realized I was making him mad with my hat. I am glad that, together, we
used fire crackers to blow up one of his old model cars.”
“You led
quite a destructive youth, Matthew.”
“Doll,” I
laid the 30s accent on thick, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Indeed. I
shall have to come by more often for you to regale me.”