SHOUT - Adopted by Lin Manuel Miranda

NEW YEARS EVE

Lin and Vanessa are going out for dinner in Midtown, then taking a cab to times square to watch the ball drop. I have to babysit Sebastian. Instead of spending New Years Eve in Times Square with intoxicated tourists and piles of vomit, I have been forced into indentured servitude. I hope it rains. 

That afternoon, I sit in Vanessa's bedroom and watch her get ready. She pulls on a silky black dress and sprays on so much hairspray that I feel the ozone layer depleting. Her perfume smells how being a girl should feel. 

"Just get him to bed before 8:00." She rubs her lips together to perfect her lipstick. "No R-Rated movies, no parties, no junk food after dinner. You know the drill."

Lin sticks his head out from the bathroom. "She knows the drill, all right. You little babysitter, you!"

We stare at him for a moment. He's wearing a fancy suit, a bow tie, and enough hair gel to solidify his gray matter. He ducks back into the bathroom and resumes drenching his hair in an economy sized can of Dippity-Do. 

After Lin and Vanessa leave at 5:00, I make Sebastian his dinner: cheese on toast. It's exactly that, melted cheddar spread on a slab of toasted bread. The Parents aren't home. Rebellion is in the air. We eat on the couch and watch Spongebob on the TV with the volume cranked up to an earth shattering magnitude. For dessert I give him crushed animal crackers, which he inhales like it's crack. Tobillo licks the crumbs from his hands. 

On the television, Patrick and Spongebob set up a tent. Sebastian stares wide eyed at the screen. "I want to make a tent, too."

"Then make one," I tell him.

He scrambles to the dining table and lifts a chair over his head. I cross my feet on the coffee table. "If you drop that chair and bang your brains out, it's on you." 

After a moment of watching Sebastian push the chair around the room, I bring the dishes to the kitchen and wash them in the sink. I hear Sebastian thudding around through the walls, doing God knows what. When I return to the living room, he's gone. Did he slip out the door when I wasn't looking? Get hauled away by the New Years Eve drunks?

A voice shrieks through the room. "Over here!"

It takes me a moment to see Sebastian in the corner of the dining area. He sits on his knees beneath a chair overturned and grins. "I made a fort," he says.  

"Wow."

"Come in, come in!" He lifts one leg of the chair, as a door, I guess.

A brand new idea explodes in my head. "Why don't we make a real, big fort?" I ask.

"A real, big fort?"

"A fort that no one can enter but us. A secret bunker."

He nods so fast, his hair flops down each time he lowers his head. We pull four chairs from the dining table and place them around the living room, then fling my afghan overhead to create a roof. Sebastian strips his bed and uses the blankets as carpeting. We de-cushion the couch to make beds, then throw two knit blankets on top. Architects, take notes. We dim the lights and turn the volume down on the TV. I use the atlas and the dictionary to separate the front folds of the afghan so Spongebob can join us in hiding. The sounds of New Years Eve blare through the window. Shouting drunks, illegal fireworks, police horns. 

When the evening hits its peak, I begin to feel drowsy. The neon lights from the TV flash on the afghan overhead. Sebastian is cocooned in his blanket and huddled against my shoulder. I hear the whirr of the furnace, feel the heat radiating through the apartment. I lean forward to look out the window from behind the blanket. It isn't entirely dark. The sunset colors are sinking below the horizon in swatches. Lines of orange, lines of purple, then a sheet of black over the city, like the afghan over New York's secret fort. I lay back down and change the channel to NBC to watch the ball drop.