She comes down a couple minutes later, still in the ratty white shirt she wears to paint. She smiles before hugging me, and it’s not one of those half smiles I’ve grown used to. There’s nothing worse than seeing her sad and defeated. Her body is tense, and when she finally relaxes, the pale green tote bag I got her for her birthday last year slips down her shoulder. She’s drawn a lot on the tote; sometimes there are tiny cities, other times it’s an imagining of a song lyric she loved.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi,” she says back, tiptoeing to kiss me. Her green eyes are watery. They remind me of a rain forest painting she gave up on a few months ago.
“What’s wrong? My armpits stink, right?”
“Totally, but that’s not it. Painting is stressing me out like whoa. You’re rescuing me just in time.” She punches me in the shoulder, the aggressive way she chooses to flirt.
“What were you painting?”
“A Japanese swallow angelfish walking out of the ocean.”
“Huh. I was expecting something cooler. More magical with hippogriffs.”
“I don’t like being predictable, dumb-idiot.” She’s been calling me that since our first kiss a couple days after we started dating. I’m pretty sure it’s because I might’ve accidentally bumped heads with her twice like the biggest amateur in the history of inexperienced kissers. “You in the mood to go see a movie?”
“How about a Trade Date instead?”
A Trade Date is not a date where you trade your date for someone else. A Trade Date—Genevieve made it up—is when I choose a spot to go to that will interest her, and she does the same for me. And it’s called a Trade Date, obviously, because we’re trading favorite pastimes with each other, and not each other.
“I could settle on that, I suppose.”
We play Rock, Paper, Scissors. Loser has to choose first and my scissors cut the hell out of her paper. I could’ve just volunteered to go first because I already know where I want to take her, but I’m not 100 percent sure yet of the words I want to say, and I could use the extra time to make sure I get them right. She brings me to my favorite comic bookstore on 144th St.
“I guess you’re done being unpredictable,” I say.
comic book asylum
We’ve Got Issues
The front door is painted to resemble an old phone booth, like the kind Clark Kent dashes into when he needs to change into Superman. While his monogamous relationship with that particular phone booth outside the Daily Planet never made much sense to me, I’m as close to super as I’ve felt in a while. I haven’t been here in months.
Comic Book Asylum is geek heaven. The cashier in the Captain America shirt is restocking seven-dollar pens shaped like Thor’s hammer. Pricey busts of Wolverine and the Hulk and Iron Man gloriously line a shelf modeled after the fireplace in Wayne Manor. I’m surprised some forty-year-old virgin isn’t having a seizure over the Marvel and DC clashing going on here. There’s even a closet full of classic capes you can either buy or rent for an in-store photo shoot. But my favorite spot is the clearance cart with the dollar comics, since, well, they’re carrying dollar comics and that’s a hard price to beat.
They even have action figures Eric and I would’ve played with when we were younger, like a combo pack of Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus. Or a set of the Fantastic Four, though we would’ve probably lost the Invisible Woman—Get it?—since my favorite was the Human Torch and his was Mister Fantastic. I even had a soft spot for the bad guys, like Green Goblin and Magneto, because Eric always preferred the heroes and that made it more fun.
Genevieve continues to choose this place on Trade Dates because she knows it makes me happiest, although the community pool where I took swimming lessons used to be a close second before I almost drowned. (Long story.) She wanders off and looks through their posters, and I cut straight for the clearance cart. I rifle through the comics for something badass that might inspire me to work on my own comic some more. I left off on a suspenseful panel of Sun Warden—my hero, whose origin story involves him swallowing an alien sun as a child to guard it. Right now he only has enough time to save one person from falling off a celestial tower into a dragon’s mouth, and he’s torn between his girlfriend and best friend. There’s no doubt Superman would save Lois Lane, but I wonder if Batman would save Robin over his girlfriend of the week. (The Dark Knight gets around, man.)
Some guys are talking about the latest Avengers movie, so I quickly choose two comics and rush over to the counter so I won’t have to Hulk out if they spoil anything. I never got to see the movie when it came out in December because nobody wanted to go. We were all in a funk over Kenneth.
“Hey, Stanley.”
“Aaron! Long time no see.”
“Yeah, I had a bit of an episode going on.”
“Sounds mysterious. Leaping over tall buildings with a mask on, maybe?”
I take a second to answer. “Family stuff.”
I hand him my gift card and he swipes it for the two-dollar charge. He swipes one more time before telling me, “Zero balance, dude.”
“No, I have a few dollars left.”
“I’m afraid you’re poorer than Bruce Wayne with a frozen bank account,” he says. He should be ashamed of himself—not because that’s a rude thing to say to a customer, but because he’s been recycling that same weak joke for months now. No shit I would be poorer than Bruce Wayne on his poorest day.