“Don’t expect this when you come to my place next Sunday for the Group C presentations,” Harlow, a hard-edged stop-animation genius, groused at all of us.
Wallis pretty much spoke for all of us when he answered, “Girl, if we get out of your place without you feeding us spiders, Imma consider that a win.”
Nobody expected Harlow, with her love of all things dark and creepy, to be a perfect host. Or even a decent one.
Everybody except Elizabeth Ann Margaret laughed at Wallis’s joke.
“Is your husband still here?” she asked, eyeing the stairs just beyond the living room. “We haven’t seen him since he showed up out of the blue that one time. You should have invited him to help us eat all of this.”
“I’ll bring him a plate later,” I answered noncommittally. I was deeply aware of Asher openly staring at us, now that the subject of my husband had come up.
“Is he the one who arranged all of this?” Elizabeth Ann Margaret asked. “The last time we came to your house for a group project, it was just chips and dip.”
Wow. Nosy much? “Yes, actually. It was a surprise. I would’ve just ordered pizza and two Costco trays, like Rebecca said. But he likes to go all out.”
“How generous, if a bit wasteful,” Elizabeth Ann Margaret said with a little moue of concern. “I hope you have plans to deliver whatever we don’t eat to the homeless after we’re done here.”
Before I could answer, her eyes went back to the stairs. “You really should tell him to come down here so that we can thank him. I value gratitude above everything, and this just feels really impolite.”
“I’ll let him know you appreciated it,” I answered before turning my back on her to ask Harlow about how her stop-motion cannibal bunny rabbits piece was coming along.
The first few Group B presentations went well. Everyone asked all the hard questions, which was a generous thing to do at a soft presentation.
We’d all seen thesis showcases where someone got hammered with a hard question and completely fell apart. It was better to have something like that happen here with your fellow grad students than when you were presenting in front of the entire animation school, undergrads included.
You think that would’ve been the end of the Victor subject. But at break time, Elizabeth Ann Margaret started quizzing me again.
“I know you’ve mentioned spending time in Japan when you were in high school. Is your husband Japanese? He doesn’t look Japanese. I thought they had a thing about tattoos.”
“No, he’s Chinese.” My cheeks burned. And I could feel Asher’s eyes on me again.
“ABC?” Wei-Chuan, a visual effects animator, who was also Chinese, asked. She came over to stand with us.
ABC stood for American-born Chinese. Victor had often used those three-letter signs to describe Phantom. Also, to make excuses for him.
“No, he’s from China. From Hong Kong,” I answered Wei-Chuan.
“It’s unusual for a couple from your two backgrounds to get together, much less marry, right?” Elizabeth Ann Margaret demanded, her tone a lot less respectful than Wei-Chuan’s.
She had no idea. But I had to ask, “Is there a reason you’re so interested in my husband?”
“Just curious,” Elizabeth Ann Margaret answered, her eyes once again drifting toward the stairs. “I mean, he showed up at RhIDS that one day, and that one day only—almost like you told him to. It just seems a little strange that he would go through all this effort for your soft thesis presentation but wouldn’t even show up for it. I mean, is your insanely hot husband even planning on coming to your thesis showcase? Or is he going to be out of town again?”
She didn’t make mocking quotation marks around the words “out of town,” but she might well have. Everyone listening, including me, could see that Elizabeth Ann Margaret was working a theory that Victor was some kind of actor or male model. Someone I’d hired to play the part of my husband to prove Elizabeth Ann Margaret wrong.
“I’m not sure,” I answered between clenched teeth. “But I don’t need a husband there to validate my work.”
“Maybe not, but you’d think any real spouse would want to be there,” Elizabeth Ann Margaret answered. “Or at least put in an appearance at the party he really put way more effort into than he should have.”
“He’s not one for parties,” I answered, even though I realized I was playing right into the narrative Elizabeth Ann Margaret was trying to sell that I’d made him up.
“Is that on account of him being deaf?” Asher asked, coming over to join us with a plate piled high with vegetables from the Costco tray.
“I saw you two speaking in sign language when he picked you up the other day,” he said. He was technically addressing me. But he was looking straight at Elizabeth Ann Margaret to let her know that someone had seen Victor again after that one classroom kiss.
