The girl with the woman who glowed like a Lite Brite took the photograph under the carpet. Phillip was disappointed; he'd liked looking at it, pressing the tip of his pointer finger over each face. But he knew she needed to have it. Someone said "Cheese" to the picture people, and they smiled, but it wasn't from the inside, like Nina said smiles should be. The girl had a smile on the inside, but it never made it out. It looked like soapy bubbles in her chest. He thought maybe if he popped one it would explode and sprinkle onto her. He chased a bubble into her pocket with his favorite toy car. It didn't work, so he left the car. It would help her later. "Some good things take time," Nina said to him.
Richard was a grid, all straight lines criss-crossing. When Nina unplugged the cable, the TV made loud salt-and-pepper clouds on the screen. Richard looked like that. He kept everything so clean and so neat, square corners lined up with table edges and wall seams. But inside, he was messy clouds of salt and pepper. Phillip saw the way he arranged his outsides to not match his insides.
A lot of people did that. He saw their designs scribbled like the dry erase markers Nina let him use on the kitchen windows. But the things they said and the things did didn't match what they were. The man Nina was marrying, Steven, looked like tangled knots, always changing shapes, always tangled. But he wore pressed suits and kept his hair glued together with shiny stuff from a can. He smiled at Phillip, and his teeth stuck in straight lines. He brought Phillip a hat and a stuffed horse and blue rain boots and a remote control Hummer truck and a soccer ball. But every time Steven stretched his arms forward with a present, Phillip watched the knots pull tighter. Phillip held his breath and waited to see what would happen next.
A week ago, the two of them, Nina and Steven, pulled up to the curb in front of Richard's townhouse. Phillip's suitcase sat on the seat beside him. Steven squeezed the steering wheel and bent forward, squinting under the visor. "This is where he lives?"
"Phillip, don't forget your hat," Nina said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
"You've got to be kidding me," whispered Steven. The knots pulled so tight, Phillip was sure they would break at last.
Nina opened Phillip's car door and unclicked his seatbelt. The vinyl strap zipped into place. "Out you go."
Phillip held Nina's hand and hopped over the curb and into the grass.
"Are you coming?" she asked over her shoulder.
The window was up except for a skinny crack at the top, and Steven's face was frozen. A thin section of hair had broken loose from the gooey shine and stood up on the top of his head. He closed his mouth and pulled it into a tight line.
"He's like a spooked horse," Nina muttered.
