West Coast Shuffle (Part Three)

A few days into staying at my place in San Francisco, and my guests finally settled into the swing of the still life. Since I never slept, I was the only soul puttering around the house until someone else woke up.

The first person awake was usually Dad. Since he ran the theater, He was usually there from 11 in the morning until later at night on weekdays, so he got up early to get some stuff done before heading into work.

Basically, every morning, he'd hang out with me and eat breakfast in the living room. Mom hated that, but I'd be damned if I was going to eat by myself in the dining room or the kitchen at 6AM like some kind of chump.

Dad and I sat on the living room couch, listlessly eating bowls of cereal while the series I'd been binging on Netflix on-and-off with Saberwolf, "Have you been watching this all night?" He asked.

From right next to us, Wolf chimed in, eager to paint a negative picture of me, "He has been watching this all night. I have been sleeping. This is normal."

I stopped chewing and gave him a funky sideways look, "No. I took a break at 3 to play games with you and work out," He couldn't have thought I was lazy, "I'm not a couch potato. There's just not a whole lot for me to do that late."

"So you really don't sleep, ever?" Dad was still getting used to my powers and all they entailed, including my rampant insomnia, "Hell, if I were you, I'd use all of that dead time to learn some new skills. Be a renaissance man, boy."

I grinned at him and picked up my phone from the coffee table and wiggled it at him, "Funny that you mention that. I have a list."

Curiosity took hold and my dad had to take a look to see what was on It, "'Shit to Learn How to Do This Summer,'" He looked over at me and chuckled, "Hmm. Let's see. Learn an instrument? Not in this house. Learn to cook? Just don't burn the house down," My dad looked up from the phone again and gave me a strange look, "Learn to speak Japanese? Why Japanese?"

Why indeed?

"My teammate talks crap about me in Japanese all the time, right to my face," I deadpanned, "I need to know what she's saying."

What kind of obscene shit came out of Hisako's mouth whenever we argued? I didn't know. She never told me. Also, Noriko was no help. Whenever she was around to hear it, she wouldn't spill the beans either, and to top it all off, last time I brought it up while she was laughing at whatever Hisako said, I got tazed. To be fair, I may have made a crude remark about how Japanese girls all stick together.

My dad was interested in my attempt to better myself, even if it was for petty reasons, "Really. How's that going?"

"Poorly," Wolf commented from the side of the couch.

Unfortunately, as Wolf had bluntly indicated, I had little positive progress to let my father know about, "I don't understand kanji… and I keep forgetting that you're supposed to read it right to left. Also, I don't get a lot of phrases. This is hard by yourself!"

"That's why you usually learn foreign languages in a group, or from a teacher," Dad said, tapping me in the side of my head, "Unless you became a genius while you were gone, I'd look into getting some help with that. You just said your friend speaks it."

I scoffed. After the pain in the ass she was with calculus? No chance, "I am not asking Hisako for help to study anything. Never again," I said.

Dad's eyes lit up, which put me on-guard. He had found an opening for something, "Speaking of your teammates, what the story with the girl upstairs?"

Ah, Laura. Of course. Mom and Dad probably had a pretty decent-length conversation when he came home the first night after I'd showed back up. If they did, it didn't go down around me, but I'd have been a fool to think they didn't talk about Saberwolf and Laura.

The crew had been at home for dinner the night before, and the atmosphere had been... strange, to say the least. Laura wasn't exactly talkative on a good day, and clearly felt out-of-place sitting at the table with us. Wolf was a good sport, though. He was respectful to my mom, answered her questions, asked her questions back. He conversed. A real gentleman. Easily nicer to her than he ever was to me, the bastard.

Laura didn't talk about herself at all. The most Mom could get her to say was that she was familiar with San Francisco, and what kind of classes she took at school.

I was driving myself nuts trying to think of ways to make her feel at home. Wolf had settled in nicely enough. I just wished I could do the same for her.

I let out a sigh and dropped my shoulders. Of course everyone was curious about the quiet girl. But there wasn't anything I could say, "It's not a pretty listen, Dad. I only know a bit of it, and it's more than enough of the picture to tell you that," It wasn't like I could just go about telling anyone else's business to begin with, "Besides, it's not my place either."

We all had our issues. It was up to us how we worked them out; whether we let other people help us or not. By this point, I probably had my share of them too.

Dad eyed me closely, completely ignoring the show on the TV screen, "I'm not going to say anything to your mother, but you look different."

I quirked my eyebrows, realizing this was going into a talk, and paused the show, "You know, Mom said that too."

"No, I mean you have a different look in your eye," He said, "What's been happening in that school?"

What was the right answer to that? I wasn't going to sit down and tell my parents that I'd been tortured and nearly killed several times. When I told them about the things that happened, they got the quick and clean versions. That was how I was going to keep it, "I don't even know where to start, honestly. How I got him might be the most believable story," I said, gesturing to Wolf.

Wolf took that as his cue to make his presence known, "It is all believable because it all happened," He pointed out.

I rolled my eyes in return, "I know that, Wolf. But we were there. You can't really explain that kind of stuff to other people who weren't. It's a hard sell."

I found a Wolf bot in the bowels of a secret hideout under Hudson Bay, manned by a crew of anti-mutant racists run by a cyborg. That was the gist of the story that my family got. It checked all the boxes they needed to know, sounded bad and extensive enough that they didn't ask more questions afterwards, and left out all of the nasty things they didn't need to know.

If Wolf had the vocal range to scoff, he would have, "You humans make everything so difficult. Sharing facts between one another should not be a complicated process."

"My point is-," My dad interjected to get things back on track, "-You look like you've been through some things. The way you walk and look around," He stopped and sucked at his teeth, "Whatever that girl's been through, she's ten times worse than you though, at least. Can't even make a sudden move around her without her flinching."

"She gets much better about that after she gets used to you," I tried to defend for Laura's sake.

"I just want you to be careful," Dad said with a deep sigh, "You said when you left that you didn't know what you were getting yourself into. Do you know better now?"

God, did I ever. I was still greener than goose-shit, but I was becoming accustomed to the chaos of being a mutant – of being an X-Man. Even if I wasn't one officially, I'd had a taste. More than a taste.

"I do," I told my father, reaching over to the side to give Wolf a solid pat, "And trust me when I say, whatever I've seen so far, it's nothing compared to Laura. Just... be patient with her. Laura's pretty weird, but she's a good girl. She won't cause any trouble," On her own, she would be just as much trouble as I was. Whether that was a good thing or not was up for debate, "It's just… she's my friend. My teammate. I don't think it's fair to leave her all alone for the summer."

Just like that, the atmosphere seemed to break. My dad got up from the couch and rubbed my head, "Always gotta be a sucker for the girls, don't you?"

I swatted his hand away. Not like it really mattered if he tried to screw with the curly mess I had up top, "Shut up, old man. It's your fault. I learned it from you."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," My dad yawned as he walked away, "Stay out of trouble today."

"I haven't been in trouble since I've gotten back," I argued in return before looking over and nudging Wolf, "Who does he think we are?"

The lunacy of holding such a conversation with a wolfbot was not lost on me. This was my life now. My normal was now abnormal.