Overlooked

by Lulu Pratt

  While I chew, I look over at my to-be-reviewed pile. Next up is a feather, which I’m tying in with the boob video. It promises not to lose its shape or break. We’ll see. Also on the pile are all sorts of vibrators and sex toys, lingerie and less direct sex items like books. There are even services like flower delivery. It’s a bit of everything, really.

  They always send two of everything, one for me to try out and one to film. Except I don’t have anyone to try them out with anymore.

  At least I have a stack of vibrators.

  My doorbell rings, snapping me out of a conversation on Facebook about the pros and cons of quickie sex. I review so many products that I’m used to deliveries at all hours.

  Leaving my empty salad plate in my fake bedroom-office, I skip down the stairs and open the door.

  A child smiles up at me. She’s not a child-child. Middle-school age, I’d guess. Her shirt says ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers,’ and I immediately know she’s cool. She’s slim, with long mousy brown hair and a sparkle in her incredibly dark eyes. Her nose is peppered with freckles.

  “Hi, I’m Piper. Your new neighbor.” She speaks with more confidence than ninety-nine percent of adults I’ve met.

  “Well, hello Piper. I’m Avery.”

  “I saw your light on and wanted to introduce myself.”

  “It’s nice to meet you. I haven’t met your parents yet.”

  “I know.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  Piper shrugs, “Africa.”

  “Oh. Where’s your dad?”

  “Out.”

  “Just out?”

  “Yeah.” Piper pushes past me and beelines straight to my brand new navy sofa and drops her notebook on the coffee table. “So, I need help with my homework. Do you know how to find the positions of shapes on a graph?”

  “Uh, not really,” I say, still gripping my door handle.

  Piper completely ignores me, her face staring intently at her notebook. Confused and resigned, I close the door and sit on the leather armchair that I’ve had since my first apartment. It’s one of the few things I took after breaking up with Nathan.

  “Doesn’t your dad help you with your homework?” I lean forward, in a non-threatening way.

  “He does if I ask, but I forgot about it and it’s due tomorrow.” Piper looks at me as she answers, as if she needs to speak slowly to me so I understand.

  “You should write stuff in a calendar,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and says, “That would only work if I remembered to look at it.”

  That sounded like something my sixty-year-old mother would say.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen. Is this twenty questions or something?”

  “We did just meet, and now you’re sitting here demanding I do geometry.”

  “Exactly, let’s get cracking. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish. Here’s the worksheet.”

  Piper passes me a single piece of paper. Thank God it’s only one sheet. Of math problems. Part of me wonders if this surreal situation is really happening. I’m sitting here with a thirteen-year-old who just barged into my house and demanded I do math homework. And I didn’t kick her out.

  She’s simply too charming.

  My iPad is on the end table, but I don’t want to use it to help us work out the questions in front of her in case something inappropriate comes up on the screen. This child must never, ever find out who I am or what I do for a living.

  “What do you have to do?” I ask while scanning the questions for some sort of clue.

  “What’s your wifi password? I’ll Google it on my phone,” she says. Demands, really. I obey and give her the password.

  We work together on the task. Once we figure out the first couple, the rest of the questions don’t take long.

  With the last question answered, Piper sets her pencil on the table and says, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  I can’t help but laugh.

  “I guess not,” I say, and it comes out as more of an encouragement than I’d intended.

  “Let’s watch TV. Do you have Netflix?”

  “Obviously,” I say, and immediately wonder why I’m so defensive.

  “Are you married?”

  “What happened to Netflix?”

  “Just asking. But I’ll take that as a no. Do you have a boyfriend or are you single?”

  “No, I don’t have a boyfriend. Do you?”

  “I already told you I’m thirteen, right? Do many people my age have boyfriends?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Do many people in eighth grade have boyfriends?”

  I was hoping she’d forget she asked me.

  “I have no idea.” I don’t, actually.

  “Figures,” she says, tilting her head, and I want to tell her who I am and what I do. I wouldn’t, of course, she’s too young. Even though she seems more grown up than I am.

  “When I was in middle school, none of my friends had boyfriends. Or if they did, they were friends who happened to be boys.”

  “But that was a long, long time ago.”

  “I’m not old, I’ll have you know. I’m only thirty one.”

  “That means you were thirteen years old eighteen years ago. Eighteen years. That’s almost twice as long as I’ve been alive!”

  I fall silent. It doesn’t seem like eighteen years ago. Is eighteen years a lot of time or not? How different are kids now, or aren’t they?

  “Would you rather have one thousand dollars or save a random one thousand people in World War II?” Piper suddenly asks.

  I shake off my contemplation about how quickly time flies and focus on her new, random question.

  “The people. One thousand people are worth a lot more than a thousand dollars.”

  “But you can’t pick which people, so you might be saving Hitler and his friends. You just don’t know,” she says, her palms facing up.

  “Oh,” I say, and reconsider the question.

  “I said the money, because you can take the money and help people with it.”

  “I’m not sure a thousand bucks is going to go very far.”

  “But if World War II just ended, then it would be a lot of money.”

  There’s no way I’m winning this argument. I smile and say, “Yes, you’re right. If World War II just ended, I’d take the money.”

  Piper looks satisfied with my answer. Maybe because she’s made me agree with her.

  Someone pounds on my front door. The doorbell would’ve been sufficient. I glance at the clock, it’s just past seven thirty.

  “That’s my dad,” Piper says and scrambles to her feet.

  Piper and I make it to the door at the same time. My hand reaches the doorknob first, but hers lands on top of mine and she doesn’t take it away.

  We open the door, and the man I saw earlier in his backyard stands on my front step, a scowl ruining his otherwise gorgeous face.

  He has the same deep dark eyes as Piper, the light catches them and sparkles off them in the same way. His jawline is as strong as his arms, and he’s got a day’s worth of stubble.

  I smile, extend my hand and say, “Hi, I’m Avery, your new next door neighbor.”

  He grunts at me and grabs Piper’s hand. Nice. She clearly doesn’t get her social skills from him.

  “It was lovely spending time with you, Avery. We’ll have to do it again sometime,” Piper says. I swear she’s fifty. No, seventy.

  “Anytime,” I say, waving at her.

  Knox

  “Oh my God, Dad. Dad, she’s so cool. Her name is Avery and she just moved here from Cincinnati.”

  “You’re not supposed to leave the house when I go out.”

  I’m around for Piper as much as I can, I even built a fully functioning garage in my yard and moved a lot of my tools here so I can work from home and be here when she gets home from school. But on one or two evenings a week, I have to go out. Not that Piper cares. She’s more
grown up than most adults I know.

  “I needed help with my homework.”

  “No, you didn’t. Don’t lie.” The kid breezes through school, her biggest complaint is how boring it is.

  “Fine. I wanted to meet our new neighbor. Besides I texted you where I was. You’re so anti-social. You should’ve gone over and welcomed her to the neighborhood by now.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I say, but can’t help smiling. If there’s one person in the world who can make me smile, it’s Piper. She’s the only person who can make me smile. It makes everything I do for her worthwhile.

  “Oh my God, Dad…”

  “Stop saying, ‘oh my God,’” I say as I open our front door.

  We sit in our living room, on the denim couch Piper picked out. Piper talks and talks, relaying everything about her evening, but that’s nothing new. The kid talks nonstop. But right now there’s one thing I can’t get one thing out of my head.

  My new neighbor is definitely the YouTube video woman my buddy Marcus showed me earlier tonight. The one who talks about sex, and how a man is supposed to please a woman.

  Marcus said she’s the most famous person who has ever lived in town.

  I’d never heard of her.

  Maybe Marcus needs to look on the internet for sex tips, but I sure as hell don’t.

  It explains why I noticed a webcam pointing at me out of her upstairs window earlier. She’d damn well better not plan on using me in one of her videos.

  “Dad? Dad!” Piper shouts, drawing my attention.

  “Yeah?” I start listening to her again.

  “Avery’s so awesome, we should totally have her over for dinner.”

  “I’m not sure about that. I don’t even think you should be going over there.”

  Do I want my thirteen year old hanging out with a woman who posts videos about sex online?

  “What? Why? She’s so much cooler than Mrs Coupland.”

  “Of course you’d say that.”

  Mrs Coupland was our old neighbor. An eighty-year-old widow who happily watched Piper for me when I had to work in the evenings. When her daughter convinced Mrs Coupland to move in with her, and they sold the house to Miss I-know-everything-about-sex, I lost my free babysitter. At least the move happened near the end of eighth grade.

  “She’s really pretty, you know,” Piper says.

  I noticed. “So what?”

  She shrugs, “Nothing.”

  “Want to watch Law & Order?” It’s her favorite show. I’ve come to hate it less since she started making me watch it.

  “Yes, but can we watch the original?”

  We watch one episode, and Piper yells and talks to the screen through the whole thing. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. Which should be a good job for her, given how much she likes to argue.

  “Okay, bedtime, kid. Go brush your teeth.”

  “Night, Dad. I love you,” she says as she bounds up the stairs.

  “Love you too, sweetheart.”

  Piper doesn’t want me to read her a bedtime story and tuck her in anymore. She says she’s too old for that. It seems like my little girl is gone. And I’m supposed to be okay with that.

  When she’s upstairs in bed, I clean the kitchen. Our supper mess was left because I had to go out. I rinse and load the dishes, and put the rest of the stew in the fridge for tomorrow.

  I made the stew from scratch. I make as much from scratch as I can, always one-pot wonders because it’s all I have time for or know to do, plus they last for three meals. Chuck shit in a pot, put in a different type of flavoring and let it simmer. Though, in the summer I barbeque Piper and I nice steaks.

  Exhausted, I lie on the couch and stretch out my legs. I flick through the channels for a while, before giving up on finding anything to watch and settling on some movie that’s halfway through. It had a car chase with shit blowing up when I flicked past, and that was good enough for me.

  A ’71 Dodge Charger rips onto the screen in another car chase and makes me think of work. Marcus just bought one online for us to restore, I haven’t seen it yet and hope there isn’t too much wrong with the interior. He promised there isn’t, but I don’t trust the fucker.

  Normally I vet all the purchases, but sometimes with Piper, I don’t get the chance. When you buy things at auction you have to be able to move fast.

  Marcus does all the bodywork and I rebuild the engines. Though we’re both skilled enough to do both jobs. We buy classic cars online, fix them up and flip them for a tidy profit.

  It works for me because it’s on my own time, and I’m able to rebuild an entire engine in my garage at home so I can be here with Piper. I even get her to help me. Not many kids her age know what a carburetor is, let alone how to repair one.

  Marcus swore this Charger is solid, but last time he bought a car without me, the entire inside looked like it’d been lived in by a family of racoons for years.

  Fucking Marcus.

  The man who apparently needs sex tips.

  Curiosity gets the better of me, and I grab my iPad. It doesn’t take me long to find her YouTube videos, which she’s called Getting Avery’s Girls off. Give me a fucking break.

  I click on one titled How to Eat Her Out in the Shower. I half expect her to be naked in the shower and demonstrating, but she’s fully dressed in what looks like a bedroom.

  Avery’s dark flowing hair and makeup are perfect. She must be one of these annoying women who take forever to get ready. Though there’s no denying she’s easy on the eyes. And her voice. She might be fully clothed in her videos, but her voice is rich and expressive enough that it’s pure sex.

  She’s confident and radiant as she speaks about how to get between a chick’s legs without making her slip. At least she had the sense to say the guy needs to be strong enough to hold her up.

  I sure as hell don’t know any women who’d be able to stand after I got through with them. There’s no way they wouldn’t fall down in the shower. And it’d be a long time before they could stand up and walk out of it.

  Watching a few more videos, I’m mesmerized by my new neighbor. I go through An Intro to Clits, Clamping Nipples, and Pulling Her Hair before I realize I’m getting hard.

  There’s no way I’m even going there.

  Not with my next door neighbor. I keep my fuck toys and my real life far apart. And I definitely won’t do anything with anyone Piper knows.

  When I became a single father at twenty two, I swore I wouldn’t date women, only fuck them, until Piper was all grown up.

  I close the app, and put the news on TV.

  Avery

  I’m sitting at my desk in my fake bedroom, getting my thoughts together on what I’m going to say about the video I’m about to shoot.

  Today, I’m pimping a product, massage oil. It’s a tossup for what type of products I do most, massage oil or vibrators. This one is simply called Love Massage and comes with an instruction pamphlet on how to give a back rub.

  The company sent me two samples, as always. One to try out and one to pimp.

  Nathan, my ex-boyfriend, would’ve loved this. He always loved getting – though not giving – massages.

  Oh well, fuck him.

  My best friend Darla’s photo pops up on my screen. She’s also a YouTuber. We each started vlogging at the same time, on a whim and a dare.

  I hit accept and FaceTime opens. Darla’s crazy curls fill my monitor, her face a pale dot in the sea of red hair.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I say.

  “Same old. Please tell me you’ve left your house and met someone.”

  Darla can always be counted on to dive straight to whatever’s on her mind.

  “Nice to talk to you too.”

  “Whatever, lady, don’t try and avoid the subject. It wouldn’t have to bring it up if you’d answer the questions in my texts.”

  “I’ve found a yoga class,” I insist. I haven’t yet, but I will.

  “Great. When do
you start?”

  I know she’s only worried about me meeting people in my new town.

  “I haven’t had time yet, I have to get my house organized, then I’ll start.”

  “Sounds like an excuse to me.”

  “A valid one.”

  “Fine. But don’t think I’m dropping this,” Darla says, pointing at her webcam for effect.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway, you’re only an hour away, come visit if you’re so worried I’m a Lonely Loretta.”

  “I am. Not this weekend, but next weekend I’m coming to see you. Don’t say you’re busy, Avery, or you have plans, because I know you don’t.”

  My mood lifts a bit and an easy smile spreads across my face. “Good. Come, definitely. And bring a paintbrush. I need to get rid of the dusty rose in my bedroom.” I put all my effort into my fake bedroom. My real bedroom still looks like it belongs to a little old lady.

  “Sure, I can paint. How hard can it be? I’ll bring vodka too. We can get drunk and bitch about Nathan.”

  “I’m over Nathan.”

  “I know, but he just got engaged.”

  My face drops, the smile vanishes. “But I only moved out six months ago.”

  “Obviously it’s a rebound relationship. She’ll figure out how pathetic he is.”

  We talk more, and after five minutes she has me laughing again even though my heart is still heavy with the news of Nathan getting married.

  This sucks.

  My entire life is talking about sex. But I haven’t had any in over six months.

  I thought buying my own house would motivate me, but all I can think of is making the mortgage payments.

  My heart just isn’t in this anymore.

  Not that that matters. I now make too much money from this venture to walk away from it. It’s taken me several years to build my following, I would never throw it away. It just means I have to get better at faking it.

  I can fake it. I am a woman, after all.

  It’s just my videos seem more and more like lip service, and less and less like something I believe in.

  The massage oil video and editing takes a couple of hours. I spend the rest of the day working through my task list.