Aaron Cyrus February 21st,20XX

Joyce had run out a few hours ago and had left me to take care of four children on my own.

Unlike her, I was an only child, and the extent of my experience in interacting with children was saying hello and goodbye to her younger sister. Not that I didn’t like children, I’d just never had to interact with any for any significant amount of time.

My childhood home had been in a neighbourhood that was one old couple short of being classified as a retirement district.

I was a homeschool student until high school; it wasn’t bad, but it limited my interaction with other children to those I met at my ‘extracurricular’. It took me launching a siege against my parents and steadily wearing them down for them to agree to let me attend public school and hold meaningful interactions with other kids my age.

The transition from homeschooling to high school had been difficult, but since I knew a few kids from our tennis classes, it hadn’t been impossible. I’d blended in pretty quickly, but the gap between the outsider I was, and the kids that had known the same faces for many years was hard to overcome.

A loud bang from the upstairs bedroom woke me out of my trip down memory lane and I immediately looked around for the kids, starting with the youngest.

Eva was still on the couch, holding her stuffed animal and watching a children’s show. It was a bit young for her age, but as long as it made her happy, I would not interfere. Besides, what did I know about the developmental progress of children?

“We’re okay!”

Tillo’s voice floated down the stairs with a reassurance of their safety. I exhaled in relief that they were safe, but I needed to know what they had broken.

I’d already known that their self-directed tour around the house wouldn’t grant peace for that long, but I’d been hopeful.

Three figures suddenly flew down the stairs before I could make my ascent and stopped in front of me with pleading eyes.

“Hey! Aaron! Can you lift us into the air again?”

Her left hand clawed into Tillo’s sleeve and the right pulled an unwilling but happy Archer. He was small for his age, so Kaja pulled him around with ease.

Tillo being dragged along didn’t surprise me, but Archer did.

It had worried Joyce that the kids wouldn’t get along, but it looked like she had worried for nothing. I’d worried as well since their initial meeting had been awkward, but they had gotten over it pretty quickly.

Tillo was a bit less extroverted but had tried his best to strike up a conversation when Kaja had harassed the eight-year-old girl to speak to her.

But back to the present and the troublesome children’s request.

“What?”

She removed her left hand from Tillo’s sleeve but kept her right in a deadlock around Archer’s upper arm. Although he held a scowl on his face, him not pulling away told me he didn’t hate being dragged along like so.

“Can’t you lift us into the air again? It was super fun last time, but we barely got to enjoy it!”

As innocent and eager as she looked, I needed to be a responsible adult and think things through.

“Well, I’m not sure if there is a good place. I did it last time because I didn’t want you guys getting hurt but it would be reckless to-“

“Ahh. Don’t be so boring mister! You were great at it last time! And even though I told Archer he didn’t believe me! He didn’t say anything, but the way he looked at me made me feel like I was lying. Mister, you wouldn’t turn me into a liar, would you?”

She clumsily took a stab at goading me but the excitement in her eyes and her refusal to stay still it hard to take offence. Well, being called ‘mister’ at my young age of twenty-two had stung.

Still, it wasn’t like I couldn’t take them up into the air. I had some confidence in my abilities and could guarantee that they wouldn’t get hurt, but the building was another issue. It would be reckless to do it up here and risk the floor caving in.

“Don’t call me ‘mister’, I have a name. And I can’t mess around with gravity up here. What if the ground caves in? I also don’t know your weights, so it’ll be hard to control how light and heavy to make you.”

Kaja caught on to my unsaid agreement and turned around to the boys as she spoke.

“That’s fine! We can go to the basement! Archer, follow me! And Tillo, wasn’t there a scale in the bathroom? Grab that and then come down!”

And so she pulled Archer down toward the staircase and left Tillo to grab the scale from the bathroom. Archer resisted her iron grip for the first time, but she was too excited to register it and let go.

“Eva! Come with us!”

He barely had the time to yell out to his younger sister before they disappeared down the stairs to another floor.

I got up quickly and went over to Eva, who watched her older brother disappear down the dark staircase and ran over to join him. She was probably old enough to get down the stairs by herself, but I wouldn’t risk her getting hurt if she wasn’t. Again, I was no expert on child development.

“Hey, want to hold my hand as we go down? It’s pretty steep and dark.”

She looked up at me in surprise and her hand tightened around the stuffed animal she carried around. Her cloudy grey eyes looked at my hand with a conflicted expression. She looked down to the unlit staircase and then back at my hand a few times before she finally grabbed it.

The stairs weren’t particularly long, only fifteen steps, but they were long enough to be dangerous to a smaller person like Eva.

As if to prove my thoughts correct, Tillo breezed past us and accidentally jostled Eva.

She lost her balance and her hands lost strength as she fell forward. Time metaphorically slowed down as I tried to catch her, but in her panic, the kid had pulled her arms into her body and made it hard to catch her.

I acted on impulse and pushed out my hand, then made her light enough to float into the air. The scream that had barely made it out of her throat quickly turned into a shriek of excitement as she wiggled her limbs in the air and relished the feeling of weightlessness.

Her expressionless face slowly bloomed into an adorable smile, and I suddenly realized why my dad had always said he’d wanted a daughter. I’d thought he was joking, but I could see how this would be preferable to the hellion of a child I’d been.

Eva seemed to have a lot of fun as she rolled around in the air, but I needed to get her down and get a proper register of her weight. Although it was a bit too late, I needed to slowly increase the gravity on her, so it didn’t feel like her own weight crushed her. I still felt guilty about last night with Tillo and Kaja, but I’d feel even worse if I ended up hurting the little girl.

“Okay, Eva, I’m going to pull you down now!”

She looked reluctant, but after bouncing around the walls of the narrow staircase a few times; she remembered our original aim in going to the wide basement.

“Okay, can you reach out your hand? I’m going to pull you down, tell me if it feels uncomfortable.”

She reached out her hand as I’d asked but was too far away for me to reach her, and unlike Archer, I couldn’t move objects without my hands. I could move regularly enough in the air, but that control only applied to my person. I still had to move everything else like I would on the ground.

I got into the air and had her get onto my back, then slowly increased her weight to what I figured was a normal weight for a kid her size.

“C’mon mist- Aaron! What’s taking so long!”

Kaja and archer peeked into the door well at the end of the staircase and looked up to find Eva and me in the air.

Archer looked stressed, but Kaja looked betrayed and her lips set into a pout.

“I thought you said we needed to wait until we were downstairs!”