#wornico

After the first welcoming visits no one had come by. One of their neighbors, Mrs. Hathaway, had said something about how wrong it was for two grown men of ‘their kind’ to move in and spoil the neighborhood. Nina had to disagree though. They were intriguing.

At dawn - though sometimes it happened at dusk - they would go into their backyard, visible from her second-story window next door, and spar. They would use their fists first, then wooden swords. Nicolas was infinitely better with the sword, that much was obvious, so Worick would haul out a dummy more often than not and watch as Nicolas assaulted it with a gleeful expression. And so, three weeks after they moved in and piqued Nina’s interest, she borrowed some books on ASL from her school’s library.

Two weeks after that, as she walked home from the bus stop, she found Worick outside, his hands dyed blue and smudges on his cheeks as he carefully painted the door. Her feet carried her up their walk, movement unbidden, though she didn’t try to stop it. She just let her feet still a foot or two behind the blond. “Mr. Arcangelo?”

He glanced up, eyes wary at first before he flashed her a radiant grin and rocked back onto his heels. “Hey! Nina, right? Dr. Theo’s kid? How are you?”

“I’m well. And you?”

“Pretty good, though painting this door is a pain in the ass. Nico wants it though - said it’d be less boring.”

“He’s right.” She smiled and hitched her backpack higher. “Can I help? My Dad won’t be home for a while, and I don’t have a lot of homework, so… Can I?”

“Sure! Nic was supposed to help me, but he snuck out and went on a walk probably. Here. Oh, and call me Worick, and the same for Nic. The ‘Mr. Arcangelo’ shit just isn’t for me.”

“Okay.”

He passed her a paintbrush, which she carefully dipped into the paint and spread on the door. Worick chattered as they worked - so much that he almost masked the sound of quiet footsteps until Nina glanced over her shoulder and spotted Nicolas at the base of the driveway, his hands stuffed into his pockets and eyes on them. She waved with a blue-flecked hand, and he lifted one in return as he slowly trudged up. “Mr. Ar-... Worick, Nico’s back.”

But Worick’s head had already risen, as had his hand in a lazy wave - and there was no doubt that he had another huge grin on his face. “Nico! ‘Bout damn time you got back!”

The short man grumbled at him and signed something, waited, then sighed something else. It was all too fast for Nina’s miniscule comprehension of the language. Oh. What if they use a different form of sign language?

And then Nicolas glanced at her, eyes heavy as he studied her for a moment and then shrugged. “If you want something to drink, we’ve got stuff,” Nicolas grumbled, voice low and rough.

Nina smiled and raised her hands, a little uncertain, as she signed “Yes, please”. The two men stared at her for a minute before Nicolas nodded and stepped around Worick and into the house. Inside it was clean, almost sparse.

She lost sight of Nicolas, and Worick smiled as things clinked and thumped. “You picked up a few things?”

Nina smiled shyly and picked at some of the paint on her fingers. “Yeah. I’m using books from our library. I’ve only been learning for two weeks, but I’m going to keep trying!” Worick’s smile only broadened and he glanced up as Nicolas strode back, a pitcher of lemonade in his hand and three cups in the other. They settled on the front porch, Nicolas on the walk, and poured glasses of cold lemonade to the sound of cicadas and cars rolling by.

When Nina went home she raced through her homework and spread the ASL book wide, practicing and memorizing and drawing out the shapes until she felt like she could sign them in her sleep - the basics anyway. And then she signed some more.

And so life in the suburbs went on.

Stay-home moms jogged down the street with dogs on leashes. Her father went to the hospital. She and the other kids went to the neighborhood. She poured over one ASL book, then another. She wasn’t quite brave enough to go over to the house with the blue door, so vibrant and different amongst the other houses, but she waved when she saw Worick or Nicolas outside, and they did the same. For two months there was peace. And then, on the first day of summer, she woke up and peered out her window to see the side of Worick and Nico’s house marred, the white stained by a harsh red “FREAK” sprayed on it.

She slipped on her shoes and pants and a jacket and crept out in the early-morning light, a bucket of soapy water in one hand and a sponge clutched tight and the other. Nicolas found her out there when the pink Disney watch on her wrist proclaimed it was fifteen minutes until seven, still scrubbing frantically, though she only noticed when he gently clasped her wrist and halted her. She looked up at him with teary eyes, red smeared across the siding, the words not even erased, and her fingers slackened on the sponge. “Nico…”

“It doesn’t matter,” he rumbled. “Wanted to paint over it anyway.”

She sniffed and wiped at her eyes, but nodded. He led her inside and disappeared for a moment, though he reappeared a minute later with Worick beside him, sans the eyepatch to reveal an eye with a scar across the eyelids. They both ducked into the kitchen, though Nicolas appeared first with two mugs. Hot chocolate.

“It’s summer,” Nina murmured, but she signed thanks and took it anyway. It warmed her cold chest, loosened the tense set of her shoulder and she sagged into the puffy armchair as Nico sat across from her. He was more focused on the newspaper he’d been holding - he must have grabbed it before he’d found her. It gave her a chance to look around.

The house really was sparse, with few personal effects: a few paintings; a sword; books; a handful of pictures. Those were of Nicolas and Worick mostly, some of Worick kissing a disgruntled Nicolas’s cheek or hugging him or them in suits at what looked like a fancy function. But there was a dark-skinned girl with long black hair in some of them, squeezed tight between them with a shy smile on her lips. I wonder who she is.

“That’s Alex, our friend,” Worick said as he walked out, three plates craftily arranged in his hands. He set them on the coffee table and pushed one towards her before he sank on the couch beside Nicolas, their bodies pressed close. “Thanks for trying to clean that, Nina.”

“I was just trying to help. People shouldn’t be mean to you.” She couldn’t sign the words, but Nicolas seemed to understand because when Worick glanced over he signed something and Worick nodded. They both looked at her, Worick with a huge grin and Nicolas with something that bordered on a smile.

“If your father doesn’t mind and you want, you can help us paint.”

“He won’t!” They had the paint, a pale buttery yellow, by ten and when they finished at the end of the week Nicolas pressed fifty dollars into her yellow-stained palms and sent her back to her house, eyes carefully turned away from her lips as he nudged her in the direction until she reluctantly left.

After that, going over was easier, and so was learning sign language. Worick and Nicolas were more than happy to practice with her, and Nicolas was gentle with his corrections, patient - something that Worick told her he rarely did while they baked cookies one fall afternoon when she was eleven.

By that time her father had, more or less, honorarily dubbed them as her ‘baby sitters’, so she spent her lonely afternoons over there when her father was at the hospital. It was more fun anyway. Worick always made her food and swung her around. Nicolas climbed trees, hunted bugs and frogs, and played Monopoly with her, among a dozen other things. They baked, they cooked, they helped her with her homework. And it made her happy, even when she skipped one grade, then two, and left what few friends she’d gained behind. And the more time she spent over there the more she learned about them.

Their pasts were dark and they rarely spoke of them, but the gun she found one time in Worick’s bedside table when he sent her in to get something was enough to get an idea. They weren’t ashamed of their scars, but they didn’t exactly explain. Worick had a more bleak view on life, though he covered it with warm smiles and happy words. He was also fluent in thirteen languages. Nicolas had been deaf since birth and he fed a militia of cats that swarmed the house - and he ‘adopted’ a litter of six born on their porch on her twelfth birthday.

They weren’t a touchy couple, but Worick would automatically gravitate and his hands would linger on Nicolas whenever he touched him. They no longer drew eyes when they sparred in the mornings or late afternoons - the audience had dwindled by the time she was twelve until she was the only one, watching with sharp eyes after every page or two of the medical textbooks she had slipped off her father’s shelves.

When she was twelve, going on thirteen, Alex moved in, anxious, shy, and traumatized, but kind and infinitely more mellow than the other two. That raised more grumbles about the strange couple in the pale yellow house with the pretty blue door, but no more spray paint tags appeared on their house. There were murmurs and eyes, but there was no action. Everything was calm.