Henry let himself into Leonard’s apartment. The complete silence told him that Leonard wasn’t home. His brother always had some sensory input going, music or TV or radio or something.

“Christina?” he called out. His niece might be here; she was as much a fan of silence as Leonard was an opponent. She wouldn’t have her airport-quality plugs and cans on, if Leonard wasn’t here to fill the house with noise.

“In here,” she said.

Their two bedroom apartment was cleanly divided into spaces that accommodated their distinctive styles. Henry walked down the narrow hallway from the front door, where the walls groaned with framed cartoons and magazine covers. Two thirds of the living room was crammed with furniture, bric-a-brac, plants, and as many framed pictures as could be made to fit. Hoarder-level stacks of magazines left no room on the coffee table for more than one cup of coffee.

The other third of the living room was a corner walled off with cubicle dividers. Within that space, there was nothing but a desk, a powerful computer, a huge monitor, and an Aeron chair, on which Christina sat like the future tech CEO she would probably be in about ten years’ time.

* * *

Christina's dad, Leonard, was a cartoonist, and lived the precarious financial life of most freelance artists. Today was submission day at The New Yorker, when anyone and everyone could just walk in, line up, and meet the cartoon editor and show him their work. It was the most democratic and accessible creative opportunity in Manhattan.

On a good day, a couple of Leonard’s cartoons would make it to the second round, and the editor in chief would comb through them for the final selections. A thousand bucks for a single piece of work wasn’t bad, if you ignored how many other pieces paid $0 before you got that one sale.

On a bad day, some of those who didn’t make the first cut would often go out and drink away the money they didn’t make. Sometimes the one who made a sale would spring for the drinks, in which case a good time was had by all.

Christina was an old-fashioned latchkey kid, riding the subway to and from school, making her own after school snack, and capable of microwaving something out of the freezer before her dad came home.

She was twelve years old, and the apple of Henry’s eye, probably because she’d never been the sort of child other people liked. He was always unmoved if not repulsed by adorable moppets, and the darndestly cute things they said.

Christina had always been special, one of those children who look “slow” when they’re toddlers, because they were thoroughly embedded in their own worlds, and had yet to find the way to connect those worlds with the “real” one. For some of them, the bridge comes when they discover chess, or math, or in Christina’s case, computer programming.

It had been hard enough in public school, being a “weirdo” who had little or no use for other children. There’d been several diagnoses of Asperger’s, or ADD, or ADHD, and lots of vague threats directed at Leonard by bureaucratic busybodies in the public school system about what a Bad Father he was if he didn’t medicate his restless, exasperating child and make life easier for the teachers. Leonard, and Henry, believed that the only thing that made Chris “agitated” was the excruciating boredom of a curriculum designed for the lowest common denominator, and there would be no damping down that restlessness with pills.

Two years ago, school became harder still, when Christopher, as named then, after much thought and research, had realized that she was a girl, born in a boy’s body. Once she decided to live as a girl, preparing for an inevitable hormonal and surgical transition later on, well… That was it for public school.

Even as a toddler, she’d been different, and not just in the matter of gender. When confronted with the cavalcade of cuteness that small children are expected to adore – Barney, the Wiggles, people getting slimed at the Nickelodeon awards – she reacted with blank boredom. When other children were watching Transformers or Frozen over and over, she’d immersed herself in the oeuvre of Tim Burton, identifying in her proto-girlhood not with Elsa or Barbie or American Girl but with Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice.

“Can I ask...” Henry had said, curious as ever about everything. “Why Christina? So many trans kids choose names like…”

She grinned. “Chelsea, or Caitlin?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, ever practical. “Chris is a perfectly serviceable name. Everyone calls me Chris now, so why make more hay out of all this? I’m a woman inside, that doesn’t mean I’m a princess. So I don’t need a princess name.”

Leonard had nearly torn his long, wavy, symphony-conductor hair out over it all.

“We went to the Rainbow School, and they loved her, but they’re out of scholarships this year.” He groaned. “And every day in a normal public school, she has to deal with…”

Henry knew what she had to deal with there, since she was not only transgender but, perhaps worse, a “weirdo” who liked to hang out at Obscura Antiques & Oddities and chat with the staff about taxidermy and skeletal articulation.

The cause of her damnation to ordinary public school rather than a slot in Stuyvesant High, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science, was her low standardized test scores, upon which all depended in the admissions process. Christina remained stubbornly focused on what interested her, and ignored everything that didn’t. Which meant terrible scores on those parts of the standardized tests.

“Do they have a slot at the Rainbow School?”

Leonard waved away this irrelevant fact. “Yeah, but it’s twenty-five grand a semester….”

“I’ve got it.”

Leonard looked at his brother. He knew Henry was “Hamilton,” and could give two shits about it. Their mother had been notorious in the 1980s for her nude performance art pieces, in which she covered herself in light sweet crude oil and masturbated to videos of Ronald Reagan. She had raised her children with the attitude to sex that you’d expect from someone who’d helped make the NEA the enemy of bluenoses everywhere.

“Are you really that successful? Or, is Hamilton?”

“Absolutely,” Henry lied, beaming his full Neal Caffrey smile at his brother, even as his stomach churned with acid reflux.

Until that point, “Hamilton” had been very successful, giving Henry an untaxable income of around ten grand in a good month. Netting a hundred and twenty grand a year in Manhattan wasn’t too bad, when your rent was $2,500 a month. But Henry’s mouth went dry when he thought about the 120k, minus 30k for rent, minus 50k for Christina’s school, his health insurance premiums, and then of course there would be school supplies and field trips and…

Leonard’s ability to chip in on that 50k a year would be approximately none. Cartoonist being about as lucrative a job as, say, novelist, Leonard had to have a real job as well, which didn’t pay much better.

His drawing skills had landed him a job as an “artisanal icing artist,” with nobody blinking at the absurdity of any job title that called someone an “artisanal artist.” It was at one of those emporiums where, to Henry’s never-ending bafflement, people were content to stand in line for hours for a cupcake, or a cronut, or whatever whimsical food thing you had to have at least once. Because otherwise you’d be a social pariah when you were the only one in your social circle who didn’t Instagram yourself standing in line, attaining the food thing, eating the food thing, and agreeing how totally great and worth the wait the food thing was.

Leonard drew cartoons till around midnight, then went to work to decorate cupcakes, getting home around the time Christina got up, in time to get her off to school. To make sure Christina wasn’t left alone all night, a semi-homeless magazine intern slept on the couch as a de facto babysitter. On Leonard’s nights off, she’d crash at a friend’s house or go to a bar and get lucky.

There was hope for better things. Leonard had recently became a script doctor for graphic novels. Suddenly, every graphic artist wanted to create the next Deadpool, but so many writers and artists were so deadly serious about their super-dark storylines that if they wanted a lighter touch, they needed… well, help from a man who makes his living adding one liners to pictures.

But still. Like so many people Henry knew, it took lots of little incomes to make one livable one.

That first year on the job, Henry had enjoyed his Hamilton money. He didn’t blink at the cost of Broadway shows, gladly gave the maximum “suggested donation” at museums, ate well, bought new hardbacks at list price at small bookstores, and, the perk most envied by his friends, he spent all of January that year in Palm Springs, far from the sleet and slush and ice.

But when he looked at his niece, there was no question in his mind that it was worth it, to be back on the knife’s edge again. He would commit bloody murder if he had to for that kid. And knowing that he didn’t even have to murder anyone, just give up his plush lifestyle instead? Well, that was a no brainer.

It troubled him, lying to his brother, and his niece. Pretending that he was still living the life of Reilly. He always wore his most expensive casual clothes to see them; it helped to touch his cashmere sweater lightly when scoffing that the tuition was no more than a bag of shells to the well-off Hamilton.

* * *

“How’s it going?” Henry asked his niece.

She tucked her long blond hair behind her ear as she turned around to give Henry the genuine smile she reserved for only two people in her life.

“Good. Dad’s out drinking with the other also-rans.”

“Ooh,” he said, feeling his brother’s pain. “No sale today?”

“Nope. That’s three weeks in a row.”

“We’re going to have to do something to boost his confidence.”

She nodded, tilting her head at the computer. “I’m working on it. What’s that?” Christina asked, noticing the envelope Henry had clutched in his hand.

“Huh? Oh.” He tossed it lightly onto Leonard’s desk. “Just a thing from school. The usual bureaucratic bullshit. Hey. Do you want to go to the park and get some ice cream?”

She looked at her computer for a moment, thinking, deciding. “Why yes, Uncle Henry. Yes I do.”

* * *

Henry sat on the bench and watched Christina feed the ducks, one hand sticky from the two ice cream bars she’d gobbled down.

He smiled. She was happy. She was safe. And he wouldn’t let anything change that.

Well then, he told himself sternly. You’ll just have to work harder. You’ll have to take more clients.

And most of all, you’re going to have to make sure that the education of Mr. Colin O’Neill lasts a very, very long time.