3. Little Sister
Dawn’s after-school plans – homework, TV, long and detailed phone call / bitch session to Cassie about her sister’s new job – took a slight detour when she bounced out of the school doors to find Connor sitting alone on the steps, scribbling in his ubiquitous notebook.
Check her out with the ten dollar words.
“Is your dad picking you up?”
He looked up long enough to nod a greeting. “He’s in LA. Says he’s working on a case. My aunt’s coming to get me.”
“Right, can’t let the seventeen-year-old stay home alone. Your dad is so my mom.”
“Your mom doesn’t talk in code,” Connor said. “Like, ‘I’m working on a big case’. ‘I’m screwing my new girlfriend and I don’t want her to know I have a teenage kid, cuz then she’ll know I’m not really thirty-four.’”
Dawn privately thought Connor’s dad was pretty hot for an old person, not that she’d ever say so.
She took a seat beside him, sneaking a peek over his shoulder. One page was covered in calculus in his neat writing, the other in a pencil sketch of Batman crouched on top of a building, staring broodily down at Gotham. She watched in admiration as her friend filled in details of the buildings and the shadows, every so often pausing to add a line to the integration on the other side.
“I wish I could do that,” Dawn said. “The drawing, I mean. Not the math.”
“Angel draws,” he said, still focussed on his picture-slash-homework, which made her doubt all those studies about boys not being able to multitask. “I was looking through some boxes in the basement and I found these sketch-books with drawings of people. Faces. They were good.”
She pushed a strand of long hair away from her face. “Cool.”
But Connor was doing that thing where he looked confused and sad, like a puppy someone had kicked, and just like always it made her ache inside. “I just always thought my mother liked to draw. That I got it from her.”
Oh, so that was it. Connor didn’t talk about his parents much, but she knew the basics. She knew his mother had died giving birth to him, and that his family never much talked about her. Most of what Connor knew about her was guesswork and wishful thinking, and it must hurt to have a part of that torn down.
“Maybe both your parents were great at art,” she suggested. “So you’re super-great at it.”
He tilted his head, looking up at the sky, and she wondered if it was okay to think a boy was pretty rather than handsome. “Angel’s talented, and he must have loved it once or he wouldn’t have all the books. And maybe at my age he wanted to be an artist, only he wound up running a law firm instead.”
“Lots of people like to draw but never want it as a career,” she pointed out. “Your dad loves his job. Remember how ‘yay, law!’ he got when we had Careers Day last year?”
“I guess.” He closed his book and tucked it away in his backpack. Dawn watched from the corners of her eyes and tried not to be way obvious that every now and then she went oogly over his hands, the long fingers that were so clever with a pen or pencil; and that she just sometimes, she wondered what else they’d be good at.
But those were bad, wrong thoughts. Jeez, he was one of her best friends, practically the brother she’d never had. Andrew didn’t count, seeing as how he was closer to being her other sister than either Cassie or Amanda.
Besides, Connor had never looked at her that way ever, not even when she went through that weird skanky week earlier in the year and hit on RJ in the Bronze. If the silver skintight dress that Amanda and Cassie had both denounced as last season’s hookerwear hadn’t gotten a flicker of attention from Connor, then he was never going to look at regular old Dawnie.
She sighed. Her life would be so much less complicated if Connor was more like Andrew. Of course, then the guidance counsellor would have two senior boys drooling over him, and he had enough to handle with Andrew’s fake problems. Not that she could blame Andrew. She’d had a crush on Mr. Harris herself, before Connor had moved to town and taken over her fantasy dating life.
“You okay?” That was the oogliest-making expression in Connor’s repertoire, the one where frowning a little, totally fixated on her and her problems. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, improvising as fast as she could. “It’s just weird Buffy living with us. Like, she came for the weekend sometimes, and I used to spend the summer in LA with her and dad, but it’s weird, y’know? It’s like being a kid again, before mom and dad got divorced, only dad’s not there and Buffy’s grown-up and a teacher and it’s…”
“Weird?”
“Totally.” She scuffed her shoes against the steps, tugging at the frayed threads on her jeans. “And I kind of hoped Ms. Maclay would be back. She and Ms. Rosenberg were my favourite teachers ever, and now they’re both gone. Just because Warren’s a jerk and Kennedy’s a big ho.”
She expected Connor to jump in defending Kennedy. All the guys in their grade did, for no reason that Dawn could see other than her boobs. Instead he said, “Your sister seems okay.”
“For somebody raised by howler monkeys,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Are you guys working on a new comic? You were all conspire-y during Civics.”
“It’s just an idea,” he said, shifting a little on the stone steps, “a girl who hunts vampires.”
Much with the coolness, especially since the girls Connor drew looked like girls and not Barbarella McSlutbomb. “What’s her name?”
For some strange reason he looked panicky, but then a car horn blare and he jumped to his feet. “See you tomorrow,” he called back as he got into the car. The hood was down, and Connor’s aunt was somehow managing to look devastating and gorgeous when she was doing nothing but sitting behind a wheel. Dawn had met Lilah once or twice, and she was always torn between jealousy and awkwardness and the spectre of hero worship.
The convertible tore away from the sidewalk, neither of its occupants looking her way.
Dawn sighed, gathering up her books. Maybe she could buy some ice-cream on the way home.