Lewis had been allowed to wear his cape to California. Encouraged, even. Lewis had been encouraged to wear his cape to California. This was suspicious because his fathers hated his cape. His dad said it wasn’t sanitary because he wore it every day. His other dad said starting seventh grade next year would be easier if he didn’t go in costume. When Lewis said it wasn’t a costume but a manifestation of his soul, his dad said maybe he could manifest his soul at home. His other dad said middle-schoolers didn’t have souls anyway.
One of his dads had grown up with popularity and tons of friends and a family who adored him. His other dad had not had a family like that or friends like that or friends at all. So Lewis was really the perfect average of them, just like if he’d gotten half his DNA from one parent and half from the other like most kids. He wasn’t as adored and celebrated and well-adjusted as his one dad, but he was way more adored and celebrated and well-adjusted than the other.
Lewis was not clueless. He knew it was embarrassing to wear a cape at age twelve. He knew wearing a cape to seventh grade was not going to help his social standing.
But.
But he was not easily embarrassed, a quality which anyone would admire. But his social standing was already lower-middle, not great, but not the basement, and he had two friends, which was enough for anyone. But in movies and TV shows, the geeky weird kid who dresses funny is always secretly the cool one.
One reason he’d been allowed—encouraged—to wear his cape was because early in the pandemic he’d used his sewing machine to make a cape with a mask! So it was good for all the airports and airplanes and taxis a last-minute cross-country trip required.
But the real reason his dads had let him wear it was because he might be called upon to save a life, the life of India Allwood’s other biological child, his actual half-sibling, who might need the marrow from his actual bones, and if that wasn’t being a superhero, honestly what was?
His dads did not believe in keeping information from him, so he’d always known he was adopted, even before he realized neither of his dads was a mom. He’d also always known his birth mother was India Allwood, but then she got famous so Lewis had an opportunity most adopted kids never got, which was to watch his birth mother use a no. 2 pencil to blind a clairvoyant lizard demon in high-definition. He still had questions, but not as many as he would have had otherwise.
It was weird, though, to go your whole life never knowing anyone you were biologically related to and then be all of a sudden standing with two of them explaining that a third was off “doing battle with the studio execs,” which was not really an explanation because he had no idea what it meant. Two adults and three kids all staring at you would make anyone feel weird, so feeling weird didn’t make him a weirdo (in this case), and being a normal person in a famous person’s house was weird in a normal way, which sounded weird but actually wasn’t.
His dad hugged the man who was his biological father and sounded like he might cry. “Davis!”
His other dad also hugged him and also sounded like he might cry. “It’s so good to see you.”
“You guys too,” the man said from inside the hug while also looking confused and surprised and concerned and at Lewis. Mostly this last one.
After they stopped hugging, his dad held his hand out to the woman and said, “Andrew Silverman, pleased to meet you.”
His other dad also held his hand out to the woman and said, “Andrew Silverman, pleased to meet you.”
They never didn’t think this was funny.
She shook both of their hands, one at a time. “Camille Eaney,” she said.
“And you must be Bex,” his dad said to the girl who was Lewis’s half sister. “It’s nice to meet you too.” He half shook her hand, half grasped it, and Bex looked like she thought that was weird.
“We’re so glad to be here.” His other dad also shook-grasped Bex’s hand. “And so glad you’re…” —his eyes went wide and Lewis thought he was going to say “alive” which even Lewis knew was not the right thing to say— “… here too,” his dad finished, and though that was a less wrong thing to say it also wasn’t right. Lewis saw what he meant, though. She looked not just regular alive but extremely alive, whereas his dads had been expecting—he knew because they’d prepared him—a girl who was weak, sickly, in bed, in a hospital, and possibly practically dead.
Bex wasn’t even a little bit dead.
He could tell this, even though he could not look at her. He knew she was a girl, a teenager, only four years older than he was, but she looked like an adult woman, not in that she looked old but in that she had … well, boobs. His dads wanted him to say “breasts,” but Lewis was weird enough already, and anyway his dads weren’t really experts on boobs and boob terminology. Lately, Lewis had been starting to suspect that he was probably not gay because, for instance, he didn’t think boys who were gay would be afraid to look at Bex because they knew if they did they would not only stare, they would stare at her boobs. Soon he would have to tell his fathers that he probably was not gay, and even though he knew they would be okay with it, the fact was that being not-gay was one thing, but being not-gay for your sister, even if she was only half a sister, even if you’d never met her before, was a whole different thing altogether.
“Hi,” he said to the floor.
“Hi,” she said.
He glanced at her quickly, then away again, and thought she did look a little pale and not very much like him. When people looked at Lewis, the first word they thought was “weird.” The second was “confusing.” They thought maybe he was a white kid who was really tan, or a Black kid with light skin, or maybe he was Hispanic or Latino or South Asian or Native American or Native-Some-Other-Country or Middle Eastern, or once a new kid at school had moved from Hawaii and thought Lewis was from there too. When Lewis explained he was actually one-quarter Black and three-quarters white, the new student wasn’t interested in him anymore and immediately got brainwashed by the cool kids and said Lewis looked like a black-and-white cookie, which he did not. So maybe Bex looked pale because she was sick, or maybe she looked pale just because she was paler than he was.
He didn’t think either of them looked much like his birth mother—their birth mother—but it was hard to tell because he’d only ever seen her on TV where she wore a lot of makeup and sometimes horns and armor. Still, as far as looking like Bex went, he probably didn’t. Among other things, he didn’t have boobs.
Whereas even with only quick glances, he could tell that his dad did look like him. Not his real dad or his other real dad. Yet another dad. He looked worried or maybe a little bit afraid, but definitely, he also looked like him, like Lewis, even though Lewis took only tiny peeks so no one, especially this dad, would accuse him of staring.
It was hard, though, because Lewis wanted the opposite. He wanted to stare at Davis for a long time. He wanted to watch him somewhere no one could see him, and Davis himself could not see him, like if Davis was under arrest and had to sit in one of those rooms with a one-way mirror so Lewis could just look and look and look for a few hours until they determined that a mistake had been made and let Davis go. Lewis knew it was bad to wish someone was under arrest, especially if he was a Black man, especially if he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he also knew you shouldn’t stare—staring was one of the things that made other kids call you weird—and he had twelve years’ worth of staring at Davis to do.
“Nice to meet you, Lewis,” his biological dad said.
“You too,” Lewis said, even though it was not exactly the truth. It was not nice to meet him. It was weird to meet him. It was overwhelming to meet him. But Davis looked like he thought so too, so maybe that was the normal way to respond to this moment.
Or maybe Davis was also weird and it was hereditary.
Lewis felt guilty about being more excited to meet his birth mother, whenever she got back from her meeting, than he was to meet his birth father and birth sister, though he also felt this was kind of understandable. For one thing, neither of them was Val Halla. For another, he already had a lot of dads and did not need more. Lastly, it was not his fault or even necessarily a bad thing that he couldn’t look at Bex’s boobs.
“Does this mean I’m going to be tall?” he said.
Everyone looked at him.
“I’m sorry?” said Davis Shaw.
“Because you are?”
He couldn’t call him Dad because it was confusing enough already. Plus, his dads were his dads in at least hundreds and possibly thousands of ways, whereas Davis was his dad only in one way. His dads had chosen to be his dads and had worked very hard to become his dads, whereas Davis had not chosen to become his dad and then, after that, had worked at least a little hard not to be his dad.
“I’m not…” his not-dad said, and trailed off. Then he finished, “… that tall.”
“How tall are you?”
“Five eleven.”
“That seems tall. Can you dunk?”
“A basketball?” said Davis.
“Or really anything,” said Lewis, “but into a regulation-height basketball hoop.”
Davis shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint you.” Then he winced.
“I’m not disappointed,” Lewis reassured him. “Did you grow late?”
“What do you mean?”
“How old were you when you reached your current height? I’m twelve.”
“I don’t think I was this tall when I was twelve,” Davis said. “I remember a winter formal where I was embarrassed to ask the girl I liked to slow-dance because she was taller than me.”
“Was she a giant?”
“I … don’t think so.”
“That’s something you would probably remember,” said Lewis. “So probably it’s that you were short rather than you were tall and she was a giant.”
“Mom is short,” the kid named Jack put in suddenly.
“Size is relative,” said the sister, Fig.
But before Fig could explain what that meant, Bex spoke up. Finally.
“Ahem,” she said. She did not cough or clear her throat. She actually said, Ahem. “Speaking of relatives.”
Everyone waited to see what speaking of relatives would lead to, but it didn’t lead to anything. She rolled her eyes. “We’ve been waiting for you, Lewis.” Like he was late. Like they hadn’t dropped everything and rushed all around and taken a last-minute flight practically the second his dad hung up the phone.
But Lewis knew that when you were sick, all you wanted was to feel better as quickly as possible. “Sorry,” he said.
“We have much to discuss.” She turned around and kind of bounced off down the hall like she lived there. Jack and Fig looked at each other, then scrambled after her. So Lewis tossed his cape out behind him like Thor and headed down the hallway too. He knew what happened when you didn’t do what the other kids did and they thought you were weird, and he suspected it didn’t matter one bit whether you were related to them or not.