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"Of course. Of course you'd pull some dumb stunt like this right now."
"I didn't pull anything," Pit protests, phone wedged between his cheek and shoulder. With one hand he struggles to grip heavy paper grocery bags, and with the other he walks his bike through the suburbs on his typical route home, its bent front wheel flopping pathetically against the sidewalk with every rotation. "I'm not the one who put it there."
"You seriously expect me to believe that there was a banana peel just sitting there perfectly in the middle of the fucking bike lane?"
Pit still cringes whenever Pittoo curses, especially over the phone since Mom's the one paying the bill and all. "There was!"
"How didn't you see it?"
For a second Pit thinks of coming up with some dumb lie— maybe he was looking somewhere else or got pollen in his eye, or maybe he saw a girl from school— but that'll make him seem like an irresponsible biker. "... I saw it," Pit admits. "I saw the peel."
"What?"
"I kinda... wanted to see what would happen." He doesn't realize till he says it how much more of an irresponsible biker he's just made himself out to be.
"Jeeesus Christ..." Pittoo exhales harshly over the line. "What did you think would— you know what? No. No, I'm not doing this. You are going to be home with the shit I asked for by the time Ren gets here, or you're gonna be killed until you're dead."
"I don't get why it's so important— why don't you just use Mom's hairspray?"
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
"Hairspray's hairspray! You'll look great for the concert either way."
Pittoo groans like this is the worst thing that he's ever been told. "How far away even are you?"
"Oh, only like a quarter mile. I'm about to pass the preschool." Hidden back in a glen of sycamores and oaks is the preschool Pit and Pittoo used to go to when they'd first moved here, ivy climbing the faded white exterior of the quaint red-shingled building, signage with cute cartoon animals hanging from a tall post in its old worn picket fence.
".. Why in the fuck are you wasting time calling me?"
"Got bored on the walk," says Pit.
“Oh,” Pittoo yells, furious, “my God!”
“Calm down! I'll be there soon! Jeez, no need to be such a—“
“Chicken!” goes a baby’s voice, and Pit stops and doesn’t listen when Pittoo starts berating him again. There’s a wooden park bench in front of Nook Haven Methodist Preschool, and there’s a little girl in a blue and yellow striped dress all alone pointing straight at Pit with a round little hand.
He thinks for a second. Obviously she’s not out of place— the preschool is right behind her— but there’s literally no one else around in sight. He looks both ways and looks towards the preschool and looks down the street. The girl is still pointing at him.
“— And if you really think I’m about to wear my mom's hairspray to this concert you can literally go kill yourse—“
“I gotta go, there’s a baby here,” Pit cuts him off. “I’ll be home soon.”
“... What the fuck does that mea—“
Pit hangs up, shoves his phone in his front pocket and stands in front of the kid on the bench. She adjusts the angle of her pointer finger accordingly, blinking her big eyes a couple times. In her other arm she holds a stuffed animal of a blue and white cat in a sweater vest. It looks homemade— red button eyes and everything— and sort of worn out and dirty. And her dress looks more like an oversized t-shirt than a dress.
“H… hello,” Pit says to the baby.
She repeats herself with a softer, “Chicken,” and he realizes she’s pointing to the picture of Big Bird on his t-shirt.
He laughs, surprisingly relieved that she wasn’t mocking him. “It’s not a chicken, it’s Big Bird.” She puts her hand down and stares at him blankly. This baby’s got such thick gorgeous eyelashes that they look like black curtains whenever she closes her eyes even just to blink. “Have you seen Sesame Street? Do kids still watch that, or...?” He hears babies like Youtube more than TV nowadays, which is weird to think about.
“I watch bugs,” she responds promptly.
He tries to decipher it. “... Oh, like Bugs Bunny?”
In return, she looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Bugs. Lookit.” She adjusts the cat doll so that it’s sitting upright like a person, gives it a little pat on the head, hops off the bench and crouches underneath it, poking at a little crack in the concrete. “They're not bunnies," she grins at his mistake. "That's so silly that you call them bunnies."
Pit looks around again after that. If her teacher or mom or something came out and saw their kid with some strange teenager, they’d probably understandably freak out. “Is your mom here?” he asks.
“No, it’s me,” the baby says, shaking her head at him before looking under the bench again. “Misses Reese said school is done so I’m waiting till Puppy gets here so she can walk home with me.” Her voice sounds quite young and the vowels in her words are all soft. “Lookit them. Here.”
Maybe it’s a little-kid-thing to call your mom “Puppy.” His curiosity outweighs his hesitancy, so he puts his grocery bags down on the bench and crouches down to see whatever’s underneath it. It turns out to be a line of shiny little black ants carrying crumbs from under the bench into the ivy bushes behind them. He looks over, and she’s staring at them like she’s hypnotized. So she just likes watching literal bugs. That’s so sweet of her! Babies really are such sweet little things, Pit thinks to himself. Little proto-people finding amusement and wonder and joy in so many mundane things— ants, for example.
But then she reaches her hand out and start to lower it towards the line of crawling ants, trying to place her index finger in the middle of the ant-traffic. “What are you doing?”
She stares at the ants intently. “I go put some in my pocket.”
Oh, gross. “Hey, c’mon, don’t do that,” he encourages, but her finger just edges closer and closer to the ground. He quickly tries to think of a way to stop her from getting ants all over her hands without hurting her feelings. “... You don’t wanna bug them, right?” Her hand stops, and Pit goes, “Am I right? Eh?”
She looks at him, smiles, and lets out a single, “Ha!” instead of a real laugh as she picks herself up and hops back onto the bench. Great— Pit realizes that this kid might be kinda weird, but no one who enjoys his puns could possibly be of poor character.. “I’m six,” she tells him, unprompted. “My favorite animal is raccoon ‘cause they have little hands and black burgaler masks.”
She looks a little young to be six. How old are preschoolers supposed to be, anyway? He can’t remember. “Cool. What’s your name?”
“I’m six!” she says again like it was a silly question.
“No, no, that’s how old you are. I wanna know your name.” Again, she looks at him like he’s stupid. “Like, my name’s Pit! What’s yours?”
She forces out another weird little canned laugh. “That’s not a name!”
“Well... yeah, it’s not common, but that’s what everybody calls me.” He’s legitimately getting embarrassed. He can’t believe the mockery of a literal baby is actually getting to him. “I-it’s actually a nickname from my mom—”
“That’s not a name, that’s the crunchy part in peaches,” she insists. She keeps kicking her legs and swinging her feet since they don’t reach the ground when she sits on the edge of the bench. Her tights are stripey too.
“Oh, that too, I guess, but—” he thinks for a second about what she just said. “... Do you… eat the giant seed in the middle of the peach?”
She nods, red shoes still kicking out at the air. “Crunnnnnchy," she sing-songs.
Pit wants to say something, but he’s so thrown by the notion that this kid eats peach pits that he can’t think of a response. So he just looks at her while she stares out across the street. “... Nice day we’re having,” he says, seeing if this baby knows how to engage in polite conversation. It is a nice day, to be fair; it’s only about 4PM, and the sun’s letting in nicely through the sycamores, and the breeze makes the patches of light shift on the sidewalk. The windchimes hanging over the door of the church ring faintly behind them.
It only takes a couple moments of silence before the baby starts energetically mumbling a little song to herself, doing some hand motions to go with it. It definitely sounds like the type of nursery rhyme they’d teach kids at a daycare. She stares out at cars and people who walk their dogs past with a sort of blank look as she sings and makes little flapping motions with her hands. He can make out a couple verses about a dog who's a hippie, something about bells, and a mole digging a hole. Other than that it just sounds like she’s just singing gibberish. If it’s taking her parents this long to come get her, Pit might as well keep her company so that nothing happens to her.
“Is it okay if I wait here with you?” he asks, as he doesn’t want to intrude. If she says no, he’ll just stand behind the bench or something.
Her face scrunches up. “Hmmm,” she goes, looking up to the side and putting her hand on her chin. She must have learned from cartoons that that’s what you do when you’re thinking really hard. When he was little, Pit used to grab lightbulbs out of a cupboard in the computer room to hold over his head in order to show whenever he felt he'd had a really good idea.
“Okay,” she finally decides. She holds her hand up high above her head, and he gives her a high-five, which seems to be what she wanted. She laughs genuinely this time. He’s pretty shocked at how talkative she’s being; whenever he got separated from his mom or brother in public as a kid, Pit would always freak out and get super shy. This girl either hasn’t learned about stranger danger yet, is purposefully rebelling, or maybe she's just genuinely an outgoing and sociable toddler.
“Thanks,” he says cheerfully, taking a seat next to her. “I’m coming home from the grocery store right now.”
“Oh?” she asks, her interest piqued. Her eyes flit down to the paper grocery bags, and in an instant, her little hands dart out to grab one and rummage through it.
“Hey— that’s mine!” Pit almost freaks out, and he lurches forward to pry it away from her, but then he remembers that all that’s in there is some food for lunches and a bottle of mango-scented hairspray, and that historically, babies get very mad when you take things away from them. He reprimands her in his best impression of an authority figure: "Don't stick your hands into anybody's stuff without asking first, okay? It's disrespectful.”
She looks guilty for about 10 seconds. Then, she pulls out an apple, and her eyes light up. She’s about to take a bite, but then she seems to remember something, and she stops in her tracks and stares at Pit blankly like before.
“... What’s up?”
She stares some more. Then she opens her mouth and pantomimes taking a bite out of the apple without actually eating it.
“... Oh, okay, yeah, you can have it,” says Pit, and she smiles wide and takes a big chomp out of it. Now that she’s got something to do, Pit decides that it's time to contact Pittoo and tell him why he’ll be late. He turns the other way so that he can take out his old Pantech Impact without her seeing— she’ll probably ask if he has games on it— and he slides open the keyboard to text Pittoo, “yoooooo i found babie on a parkbench so ima be a lil l8 cuz were chillen here til her mom get here :P ”
Almost immediately, Pittoo texts back, “Don’t bullshit me. If you’re taking longer just to piss me off, then just own it instead of feeding me some weird bullshit excuse”. Jeez, why is he being such a piece of work today? He has been talking about this concert for quite a while now, though. Since he has advanced math in the neighboring high school, Pittoo has a couple older friends, like Ren, a cool junior who'd offered to take him to the city to see Lil Uzi Vert tonight. Ren is, like, really cool. Rumors spread even to the middle school about the transfer student who'd asked ten different girls to the Valentine's Day dance without them finding out till the day before. On the thirteenth they all beat him up in the quad. Pittoo sold the video he took of it to Worldstar. Now Ren's technically a microcelebrity.
Pit actually gets sort of angry at the fact that Pittoo doesn’t believe him, so he opens up the camera on his phone and asks the baby, “Hey, do you wanna take a picture together?”
The baby puts her hands out in front of her and shakes them affirmatively since her mouth is full. He turns and shuffles in a little closer to her and puts up a peace sign. She sees his hand, looks down at her own, and pushes down fingers until it looks almost the same as his, having trouble keeping them straight. He ends up sending Pittoo a selfie of him holding a peace sign and the baby hooking her fingers in a weird little claw. Looking at it, he realizes that she has three distinct ponytails sticking out of her hair with everything around it smoothed and gelled down. It’s pretty elaborate.
“Looks good,” he tells the baby as he shoves his phone in his pocket. Then he realizes the entire apple he’d given her is gone. “Hey, where’d that apple go?"
“All gone,” she says, some still in her mouth.
“What about the core?”
“All gone.” Jesus Christ— don’t the seeds have cyanide in them?
“Uh— you didn’t eat the stuff inside, though, right?” Oh, god, this baby’s gonna get sick and it’s all his fault— they’re gonna think he poisoned her, for god’s sake—
But then she shakes her head and sticks out her tongue to reveal five or six dark red apple seeds. “S-spit those out!” he panics, holding his hand in front of her mouth. As soon as she spits into his palm, he realizes he could’ve just told her to spit them onto the ground. Not his finest moment.
He’s still very relieved that this freaky little baby didn’t get poisoned on his watch, so he just says, “There ya go. Those are bad for you. Don't eat them."
“I don’t eat them!” she says giddily, and before he can react, she scoops al the wet seeds back out of his hand. She stands, pulls up her long shirt to reveal an abundance of pockets sewn onto her stripy leggings, then produces a decent-sized plastic trowel out of one of them. She tucks away one of the apple seeds in a smaller pocket by her knee. “I’m the gardener.”
Pit blinks as she toddles out behind the bench to the ivy bushes and starts to dig a little hole in the dirt. “... Oh,” he says, wiping his spitty hand off on his jeans. “That’s a cool little shovel.”
“It’s a big shovel,” she says begrudgingly, tipping her free hand and placing the remaining seeds one by one into the little hollow she’d created. She finds a worm amidst the little weeds she’d dug up; she picks it up between her index finger and thumb, inspects it, starts to lower it down to her pocket, then suddenly thinks otherwise and places it gingerly back down in the undergrowth. “I got little shovels at home but puppy won’t lemme bring more to school. I got a axe too but she said no.”
“You have an axe?”
She nonchalantly explains, “For cutting trees.” For his own good, Pit does not ask her to elaborate. She shakily starts to cover the seeds back up with dirt, patting it down into a little mound with her hands and the bottom of the trowel. Then she wipes her hands on her dress, looks back at Pit and says, “Can I have water please?”
“Man, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any water.” The baby’s eyes get wide and shocked as if he’d told her the worst news in the world. “But— uh,” he frantically pulls the second bag towards him, ripping the cardboard box open, “I have Capri-Suns!” The name doesn’t seem to ring a bell, but once he hands her a pouch, she recognizes it and she breaks out into a sunny grin. “It’s the Pacific Cooler kind. That’s my favorite.”
She has a hard time punching the straw through the little hole, but she holds it out to him with a satisfied, “Did it!” as soon as she accomplishes it. Then she promptly walks back to where she’d planted the seeds and squeezes out a good half of the Capri-Sun onto it. Huh. He probably should’ve seen that coming.
When she comes back to the bench, she seems very pleased with herself. For a second she just sits there and stares at Pit. Then her hand shoots back into one of her pockets and she pulls out a pink plastic toy flip phone. She flips it open, holds it against her ear, looks at him and says, “Ring ring."
At first Pit just chuckles and nods because it’s quite funny that she’s pretending to make a phone call. It makes her brow scrunch up a little to see him laughing at her. “Ring ring, hello,” she emphasizes, tapping her phone impatiently with a tiny fingernail.
“Hello— ohh,” Pit gets it, reaching into his back pocket and holding his phone to his face. “Hello!”
“Hi, it's me, the mayor. How are the kids?”
Pit chokes on a laugh. “I don’t have any kids.”
His answer surprises her. She looks at him confusedly, putting her hand over the bottom of her phone as if to cover its microphone so he won’t hear her. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Are you married?”
“Nope.”
She looks disappointed, somehow. “Do you have friends? Hold on—“ she goes back to the phone and says, “I gotta go, I love you,” then flips it shut, shoves it in her pocket and looks at him again— “Who's you're friends?”
He thinks for a second. “Well, I mostly hang out with my boys Link Jr., Rock, Ness, and Lucas.”
It takes her a moment to process the information. “... That’s not a lot of friends,” she decides. “I have like a million friends.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of friends.” She nods proudly. “Hey, do you wanna be friends with me?”
The question takes her off-guard. She hums and studies him some more as if sizing him up. Her eyes stick on his t-shirt. “... What’s your name?” she asks like it’ll help her decide.
“I already told you my name. I’m Pit, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a silly name.” She yawns very softly. “I'll just call you Chicken Man.”
Okay, this baby is officially delightful. “Fair enough,” Pit tells her, and she reaches up to pat him approvingly on the arm.
She takes one last sip of her Capri-Sun before shoving the empty pouch into yet another pocket. Then she says, “I’m tired,” and she scoots closer to Pit and rests her weight on his side. He doesn’t really know what to do. On one hand, this is a random baby who's getting super physically close with a stranger. On the other hand, if babies get tired and don’t get sleep, they freak out. “I’m going to nap. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” Pit says, deciding to let her calm down.
He tries to stay still after that, but it turns out she’s not quite ready to go to sleep. “Wait, no, no, go like this,” she commands, tugging his arm and holding her palm out flat in front of her. “I give you something.”
Pit simply mimics her wordlessly, watching her rummage through another pocket for a second. Then she gently places a tiny, perfectly round piece of gravel in the middle of his hand. She smiles at him, puts her stuffed cat in her lap, then sighs and lays back against his side, shutting her big fluttery eyes.
He sits in silence for the next couple minutes rolling the pebble around in his hand, extremely pleased with the weird little encounter and happy to have a keepsake to remember the afternoon by. Until the pebble unfurls and starts to crawl up towards his wrist, at least. By then he’s noticed that it’s a live rolly polly and not a pebble. He slowly leans down to release it on the concrete without moving her too much, then sits back up, closes his eyes, and enjoys the breeze. His phone buzzes, but he doesn’t check it.
“HolyshhhhhhhSycamore!” shouts a high voice from down the street, and he jolts awake. "Oh thank God thank God thank God...!"
When he opens his eyes, he finds a blonde girl bolting towards them, the little bell in her scrunchie jingling wildly. Oh, no way— it's another one of Pittoo's high school friends! She's come over to study before. She called Mom "ma'am" trying to be respectful and it ticked her off for days.
The baby doesn’t stir even with all the jingling. “Pit! Hi! Have you been watching her this whole time?” She’s out of breath, fixing her pencil skirt.
Pit’s a bit confused, but he’s glad to see a familiar face. “Heya, Isabelle! Yeah I've been sitting with this baby for like 10 minutes— Is— is she yours? Like, your sister or something?” It’s sort of a stretch since this baby appears to be Asian and Isabelle is definitely not Asian, but maybe one of them is adopted.
“Oh, I babysit her! This is little Sycamore. We call her Sycs.” Wow, so Pit really is stupid. “The preschool got out like a half hour early today and I had no idea—“ her eyes go wide— “Oh, shoot, did she put worms on you or anything?”
Pit laughs hard, shaking his head. “No, I’m just here ‘cause I walked past and didn’t wanna leave her alone. She did give me a rolly polly, though.”
Isabelle sighs, obviously relieved. “I’m glad she didn’t do anything weird,” she half-whispers to avoid being heard. “I love her to bits, but God, she's a handful.”
“Oh, you don’t have to whisper, I think she’s asleep.” She’s still limp against his side with her eyes shut.
“She’s faking so I’ll carry her home. Isn’t that right, Sycs?” she asks, and the baby laughs with her eyes still closed.
“Hi, Puppy,” says Sycs. She starts fake-snoring right afterwards to cover her tracks.
“Sorry I’m late. Did you have a good day?”
“Today was good! I planted a tree.”
“Oh, nice! Let's walk back home now, shall we?”
“No, I’m asleep,” she claims. “Sorry.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks for looking after her, Pit, you’re a lifesaver,” she beams. Then she turns to Sycs and says, “Up we go!” Isabelle promptly lifts her up off the bench and throws her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Make sure not to drop Rover, okay? I sewed him just for you, so you have to take special care of him. Jeez, you’re heavy...”
“It’s ‘cause I’m a big kid!” she says proudly, and she looks up to stare at the church while they walk away towards the corner.
“Hmm.. actually, you know what I think it is? l think it's all the heavy stuff in your pockets. What do you have in there today?”
She seems delighted to be asked. “My shovel, a ladybug, a apple seed, some rolly pollies— no no no I gave one to my friend so there’s only one now—“ her head jerks up right before they turn the corner, and she waves to him and shouts, “I’m your friend, Chicken Man!” before staring off again. “A juice but I drank it all, my bug net, my money, my phone—“
As they turn the corner, Isabelle asks, “Did you take my phone again, or is it your pink phone?”
“My pink phone! And a strawberry candy, and a rock, a rubber band…” He hears them without seeing them for a few moments, but then the little voice fades, and they disappear into the breezy afternoon.
He sits there for a second thinking about the little preschooler. Then he checks his phone. A text from Pittoo reads, “I am literally going to kill you"
Oh, yeah, right. The hairspray. It isn't even the kind he asked for— they didn't have it, so Pit just chose the one that smelled the best. He texts Pittoo, "if u kill me ull get sent back 2 juvy jajaja" before sliding the phone back in his pocket. He picks up the grocery bags in one hand, sets his bike upright with the other, then begins the pleasant walk home.