My mom worked- well, she still works for an inter-Archipelago cruise line, but when I was a kid, she would always drag me along on her stupid company parties. She said that she didn't trust me to stay out of trouble if she left me home alone, but now that I think about it, why didn't she just hire a babysitter? She had the money for it. Anyway, I would usually find a corner to curl up in with a schoolbook, and try to get some work done. The endless rocking of the boat and the colorful flickering lights along the ceiling made it hard to concentrate on the book, and I was a slow reader even at the best of times, so it was a real struggle. I'd gotten pretty good at tuning out the loud conversations around me, which were usually about boring grown-up stuff like sales benchmarks.

We went to this one party when I was maybe 10, which I remember because I was still trying to finish my graduation requirements for primary school. Most of my classmates had moved on to secondary school already, but I was still stuck in little kid school with the little kids. That night, I was trying my best to make the words on the page make sense, but every two seconds, something would happen to make me lose my place, and I'd have to spend ages finding it again. If I remember right, it was a book on spellcasting, one of my worst subjects. There were so many steps to casting a spell correctly, and if you messed up even one of them, the whole thing was ruined. I was getting pretty frustrated by it.

I was startled out of my concentration by my mom's scream of delight, and looked up to see her throw her arms around some guy I'd never seen before. I wasn't surprised by that, since Mom had a seemingly infinite amount of friends, who she treated like her best buddies even if they barely talked. Mom was tall and broad (like me) but this guy was even bigger, a hulking human who slouched forward like he was apologizing for his height. He patted her shoulder awkwardly as she clung to him like a barnacle.

"I can't believe it!" Mom was saying breathlessly, "I haven't seen you in, what, a decade?"

"I think so," the guy replied, "What have you been up to?"

"Oh, so much! I've got a kid! That's Gideon there." Triumphantly, she nodded over to my corner. He followed her gaze with a frown. I didn't know what to do except nod politely and return to my book.

"Congratulations," he said. Mom missed the lack of enthusiasm in his tone, and beamed with pride.

"Thank you!" She paused, then let out a bark of laughter. "Hey, he might be yours!"

I forgot all about my book. My eyes were glued on the man's face. His frown had deepened.

"Don't joke, Rita."

Clearly he didn't know her that well, then. She was always joking. Or, at least, that's what she told people when they got mad at her for the things she said. She gave him a cheeky shrug. "I'm only joking a little. There's a lot of people it could be. I honestly don't remember at this point. It's been so long!"

"Yeah, it has been a long time," the man replied, "But you haven't changed one bit."

"Oh, you flatterer!"

Even as a kid, I was like, "I don't think that's a compliment." I couldn't listen anymore. I got up and walked off, looking for somewhere I could read without any more uncomfortable interruptions. It was a small ferry-boat, packed with grown-ups who cooed at me and asked me questions that I didn't feel like answering. So it was a while before I found a place on the deck where I had room to sit down and kick my legs out. Even then, it wasn't long before someone tapped me on the shoulder, making me jump. It was... the guy from before. He was looking down at the book in my lap thoughtfully.

"Good on you for trying to be productive," he said. "No one else is, and they're being paid to be here."

"Thanks?" I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I figured he was trying to be nice because my mom was acting so embarassing earlier. "I mean, I am trying, but I'm not doing a very good job. I'm bad at reading."

"Bad at reading?" He didn't sound like he was judging me, just curious. "What do you find difficult about it?"

This was something I had explained to grown-ups over and over again. I sighed. "Well, it's that I start on a word, but my eyes skip all over the place, and the letters get all mixed up. And then I get mad, but that only makes it take longer."

"Hmm." The man set down his briefcase on the deck in front of us. Opening it, he pulled out a piece of paper and folded it in half. I watched, confused, as he placed it across my book, blocking out most of the text. "When I was in school, I had to do this all the time. If there's less words to read, it's easier to keep track of them. And the paper helps you look in a straight line. Anyone would have a hard time reading in a busy place like this with so much going on around them, but this might help."

"Oh! I haven't- I'll try that."

But before I could say anything else, someone else called out to him, and he walked off without saying goodbye. That was the last I saw of him, and the last I'll ever see of him. The crazy thing is... he might have actually been my dad? I asked Mom about it afterwards, and she swore up and down that she had no way of knowing, no memory, nothing. She said she didn't even remember his name. And the paper he gave me mysteriously disappeared from my desk the next day. Mom didn't know anything about that either. It was the first time that I started to wonder if Mom's bad memory wasn't a little too convenient for her. Even if he was just a stranger who decided to be nice to a shy kid at a party, I wish I knew who he was. And if he really was my dad after all, it was a pretty fucking weird reunion.