Chapter Text
A month and a half into what is technically her freshman year of high school, Tim is called to the guidance counselor’s office at 9.42AM on a Thursday morning. Despite her official status as a freshman, Tim’s been taking high school classes for years now and Mrs. Gonzales is a familiar authority figure: thirty-five, married to a firefighter, two kids under seven. Her wife is Gotham born and bred but Mrs. Gonzales grew up in Fort Lauderdale and she likes Florida Man memes, retweets of which make up nearly forty percent of her private Twitter account. Tim likes to think she knows Mrs. Gonzales pretty well, but no amount of background checking has prepared her for the academic equivalent of a brick to the head at quarter to ten on a Thursday morning.
“I’m sorry?” she manages, blinking at Mrs. Gonzales.
“Or maybe Princeton, as it’s a little closer to home?” Mrs. Gonzales says. “Your parents might be more comfortable with something in-state.” She beams at Tim, the apples of her cheeks shiny under the unforgiving fluorescent lights. “You don’t have to decide right away, but the application deadline is November 1st.”
“Right,” Tim says faintly. “That’s, uh, early decision?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Gonzales says, shoving a stack of pamphlets across her desk. She fans them open and then taps the middle one with her index finger. Her short nails are acrylic, Tim notes abstractly. Each little French tip has a pale pink line accenting it, no thicker than a hair. “I’ll be honest with you, Tim, they might seem the same from the outside but each of these schools has a very distinct culture. I suggested Yale because I think you might enjoy their more gothic leanings?” She winks at Tim.
Tim has no idea what she’s talking about. Tim doesn’t know anything about Yale. Tim has barely thought about college, because she’d only officially started high school six weeks ago.
“I appreciate that,” Tim says woodenly. She scrapes up the pamphlets and focuses on shuffling them back into a pile. You can’t just leave! something in her nervous system is screeching.
Mrs. Gonzales’ face creases into a slightly more serious expression. “It’s a big decision,” she tells Tim. “It’s possible that you don’t feel ready for it, and you shouldn’t feel pressure from anyone to make a decision that’s wrong for you–especially me! If you don’t want to graduate this year, we’ll just tweak your spring schedule to reduce your credits and you should be set for another year. Nothing’s set in stone, okay? So take a few days and talk it over with your parents.”
“I’ll do that,” Tim lies.
She walks back to calculus in a dazed haze, pamphlets held tight to her stomach. Dread and panic are duking it out in her bloodstream, sending cold pulses down her fingertips and between her shoulder blades. She feels like a rat caught unawares by a streetlight. Outside of her calculus classroom, she has to lean against the wall and put her head down between her knees. It’s stupid to be totally incapacitated by something relatively innocuous, she tells herself, and yet she can’t stop trembling.
The voice in her head softens, with each gasping inhale and rattled exhale, you can’t leave you can’t leave you can’t leave can’t leave can’t leave leave leave LEAVE until that’s all that’s pounding between her ears.
When she can breathe again, Tim feels so unbelievably dumb. Of course she should leave. There’s no reason to stay–what is she realistically accomplishing in Gotham? Tim doesn’t have friends and she hates school. She does a little bit of investigative work on the side but it’s highly unlikely that Batman actually bothers to read the reports that Tim sometimes leaves on his server. He’s certainly continually escalating his firewall in a way that suggests he would prefer to stop getting them.
If anything, leaving Gotham is going to solve a lot of problems for her. This is basically divine intervention.
~
The thing is: Batman hates Tim. Nightwing also hates Tim, but in a way that feels a little more generous. Nightwing hates Tim because he thinks she’s a bug he’s generally too busy to squash. Batman hates Tim because three years ago she stopped him from beating Carmine Falcone’s nephew to death by siccing Poison Ivy on him. Now, whenever he catches Tim up on a city rooftop at night, he confiscates her camera. He’s never said a word to her, not once, which has made it blindingly obvious that he is not grateful for her intervention. It’s not like he knows her, or that his disregard is somehow an indictment of her character–Batman is not actually an omniscient moral authority, no matter what rumors are circulating Crime Alley any given month–or so Tim finds herself rationalizing when she’s laying in bed, unable to sleep.
The second time she’d watched a $5,000 SLR disappear into his cape and then over the side of a building, Tim had wised up. After Jason’s death she’d gone out nearly every night, transfixed by her paranoid superstition that Batman wouldn’t kill anyone if there were witnesses, but once Poison Ivy had talked some sense into him she’d felt safe reducing it to a few nights a week, and then a few nights a month. He caught her much more rarely because she wasn’t as tired, and anyway there were fewer opportunities.
Tim goes out the night after her talk with Mrs. Gonzales. She’s too itchy to stay home, no matter how much homework she has, and her fencing lessons are anyway canceled this month–Hyun-hee has two kids competing at World Juniors–so her docket is mostly clear by six. She’s able to get two hours of sleep before heading out. It’s spitting a kind of light, misty rain that’s pretty characteristic for a Gotham autumn.
Nine ticks over to ten and then eleven and Tim’s got nothing to show for it other than a damp butt and front-row seats to a scuffle between rival gangs of twelve-year-olds who appear to be vying for control of the Juul black market. No one interesting bothers to come by and break them up; eventually they get bored and go their separate ways to nurse their scratches. Tim’s idly flipping through her mental copy of the 189 schedule, trying to decide if she’s going to wait for the last bus at 1:23 or pack up early and catch the 12:03, when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. She’s pretty well hidden, tucked up underneath the ancient HVAC system that purportedly supplies air con to the building’s fourteen apartments and Jazmin’s Elegant Floral Solutions on the first floor, but she still freezes in place and tries to look without moving anything other than her eyeballs.
“Don’t lurk,” orders the dark, writhing shadow on the corner of the roof. “You know I dislike it when you lurk.”
“Sorry, Dr. Isley,” Tim says, crawling out from underneath the HVAC. “I was just trying to stay dry.”
Poison Ivy flicks Tim a skeptical look as the enormous vine she’s riding deposits her on the rooftop. It coils down to lay at her feet like a sleepy, well-trained snake, and wow does Tim want to not be here. Poison Ivy likes kids, sort of, as much as she’s capable of liking any human being, but just because she hasn’t fed Tim to a giant sentient plant yet doesn’t mean she won’t in the future. Tim’s gotten this far by being respectful and keeping tabs on the publication record of Pamela Isley, PhD, but one day Poison Ivy’s probably going to stop finding that charming.
“It’s nice to see you again. You seem busy so I’m going to, you know.” Tim shoots a thumb over her shoulder. “Go.”
Poison Ivy smiles, both benevolent and terrifying, and puts out a hand to pet a very large leaf growing out of her flying plant-snake. “Something troubling you, Tim? It’s not like you to be caught unawares.”
Tim laughs awkwardly, hitching her backpack up her shoulders as she takes a short step backwards. “Oh, just the usual stuff,” she says. “Beginning of the school year. My guidance counselor thinks I should apply early decision to Yale. Calculus is kicking my butt. You know how it is.” She’s made it nearly to the fire escape now, so she lifts a hand in a quick wave and says, “Have a nice night, Dr. Isley!” and makes to scarper down the ladder to the fire escape.
“Oh?” Poison Ivy says silkily. “I went to Yale, you know.”
Tim freezes, only two steps down the ladder. “Oh?” she says. Of course she knows Poison Ivy went to Yale; last year she’d read Pamela Isley’s undergrad honors thesis, “Sarracenia nectar biochemistry segregates with habitat bioclimatic and ecological factors,” to see if she’d be able to follow it with a semester of high school chemistry under her belt. Some of it had gone over her head, but she’d been pleased by how much of it she understood. She’d even gotten a sarracenia of her own–you could mail-order them–and made a little terrarium for it so it would stay humid and warm even in the horrible Gotham winters. After she’d started talking to it while she was debugging code, she’d named it Ducky.
Poison Ivy actually looks a little wistful for a second. “You should never trust a multi-million-dollar corporation, Tim, even if it claims to be a non-profit institution of higher education, but Yale had its charms.” When she looks at Tim, her eyes are very, very bright. “When I was your age, I thought all I had to do was work hard and I would be able to achieve great things. Yale taught me that I would require a more diversified skill-set.” She smirks at Tim and her leaf dress wiggles in a way that makes her breasts look rounder, which Tim tries very, very hard not to notice. “I suppose I could have learned that lesson anywhere, but the Yale chemistry department also had a state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance facility.”
“Cool,” Tim offers respectfully.
“Yes, Tim,” Poison Ivy agrees, “it was indeed very cool. If your little school thinks you’re in a good position to apply, then you should. Don’t let yourself be trapped by the insidious muck of mediocrity. Absorb what you need from these decrepit institutions and then move on when they provide no additional utility. It is, after all, what they intend to do to you.”
“Thank you for the advice, Dr. Isley,” Tim says. Even though most of Tim’s nervous system is currently preoccupied by terror-induced adrenaline–a flying vine-snake –she realizes after she’s spoken the words aloud that she’s being truthful. It really says something that even Poison Ivy is telling Tim that it’s a good idea to get the hell out of Gotham. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You do that, Tim,” Poison Ivy says. “But more immediately I believe you ought to return home. I have an urgent appointment with Jazmin regarding her floral solutions.” The vine-snake unfurls at Jazmin’s name. Did it just– hiss ?
Tim says brightly, “I’ll leave you to that,” and scuttles down the fire escape like the hounds of hell are on her heels. About halfway down she passes Nightwing swinging his way up, grappling gun in hand. It sounds like he might say, what the hell are you doing here , but the Doppler effect makes it difficult to tell. Tim decides that’s probably a rhetorical question, tumbles to the ground, and chances a glance at her wristwatch as she staggers to her feet. 11.53pm. Look at that! Plenty of time to catch the northbound 189.
~
Back in July, during the interminably long days of summer break, Tim had rung in her fourteenth birthday by writing up a list of the goals she wanted to accomplish during her high school tenure. Some of them were no-brainers–minimum 3.75 GPA, at least two formally recognized extracurriculars, become a moderately accomplished sabreuse--but as the afternoon had gone on and the light coming through her bedroom window had cast longer and longer shadows on the floor, Tim had found herself scribbling things she was less sure she would be able to accomplish. Spend a birthday with friends , she’d written, and then she’d immediately scratched it out and replaced it with, Cultivate a better sense of self-awareness .
In the interest of manifesting this goal, in the months since her birthday Tim has tried both meditation and journaling. She’d discovered pretty quickly that she hates journaling and is bad at meditation, but she does feel like she’s been able to modestly improve her sense of her own emotions. She consoles herself that this is probably a key step on the road to self-awareness.
All of which means, Tim wakes up at 11AM the day after Thanksgiving and is instantly able to diagnose the aching, miserable knot in the base of her stomach: she’s lonely. Tim’s usual method for dealing with this is to take a bus downtown with her earbuds and hacked police scanner and spend a few hours hunkered down on a deserted rooftop, waiting for the perfect photo opportunity to sail by on a grappling line. Once, Tim’s stomach had hurt so bad that she’d forgotten her police scanner altogether, which had been massively disappointing up until 2.31AM, at which point Tim had discovered she had the perfect view by which to watch, open-mouthed, as Catman scaled some poor bastard’s balustrade like her joints were made of Jell-O.
Tim has found that her loneliness feels purposeful in the dark. Am I the night? she’s thought to herself in those moments. It never fails to make her snort out a laugh, and afterwards her stomach really does feel better.
But it’s 11AM on a Friday and the sun won’t set for another six hours. Tim’s too miserable to wait around in her huge, empty house, so she packs her backpack with her camera case and two bottles of Gatorade and sets out for downtown. She gets off the 189 in Crest Hill, transfers to the 47C, and then almost right away spies a bodega in Gotham Village selling hot chocolate and churros on the sidewalk and gets off at the next stop so she can double back. If all else fails, maybe she can soothe her loneliness with saturated fats.
Tim doesn’t spend a lot of time in Gotham Village, which her photography hobby has led her to categorize and then dismiss as a dozen square blocks of nothing but warehouses recently converted into trendy dance clubs. As far as Tim had been aware until right this second, the only two things being peddled in Gotham Village were electro house and ecstasy. She’s accordingly a little surprised to find that during the daylight hours it’s full of people bustling around conducting the minute errands of daily life: buying laundry detergent at the bodega and white paper-wrapped packages at the halal butcher and tobacco at the smoke shop, drinking coffee out of little cardboard cups in front of the metal-shuttered clubbing warehouses and complaining about the city trash collection, which is late, again .
Tim’s licking the last of the cinnamon sugar off of her fingertips when she decides on a whim to turn onto Beecher Avenue. Her cuticles are ragged again, she notices–she’s a little bit stressed about her Yale application, which she won’t hear back about for another two weeks–and she self-consciously curls her fingers up, tucking them into the sleeve of her wool coat. When she stops to chug the last of her hot chocolate, she’s in the perfect position to watch the neon sign above her head flicker twice and then turn on: HAPPY NAILS AND SPA #3. About a foot away from where Tim has stopped, a middle-aged woman is unlocking the metal grille over the windows; her long dark hair is streaked with red highlights and she’s wearing platform flip-flops in defiance of the three inches of slushy snow coating the sidewalks. She has what Tim privately thinks of as a friendly face, with small eyes, round cheeks perched on top of high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. Her prominent Adam’s apple is just barely visible above the collar of her mock turtleneck, which is striped red, gold, and green. As she tucks her keys into her apron pocket, she turns and catches sight of Tim.
“You weren’t waiting long, were you, draga?” she asks.
It takes Tim a second to connect the dots. “Oh!” she says. “Oh, no, I just–I just stopped here.”
“Perfect timing,” the woman says. “Oh my god is it freezing out here. Don’t worry, I put one of those little heaters under my station–you know, the ones that look vintage? My sister-in-law, she found it at Bed, Bath & Beyond on clearance. For ten bucks!” She holds the door open and Tim, without embarking on any conscious decision-making process, trails after her into the salon. The inside, painted Pepto-Bismol pink and lined with mirrors, is almost shockingly warm. Tim feels like she’s just plunged her foot into a bath that’s just a shade too hot.
“You have an appointment?” the woman asks.
“No,” Tim says self-consciously. “Is that okay?”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine,” the woman says, bustling around the salon and picking up bottles of things that she then brings back to one of the six manicure stations lined up parallel to the pedicure chairs. Her platform flip-flops squeak furiously on the black and white checkered tile floor. “You can put your coat on the hook. But keep your bag under your chair, okay? You should always keep your purse with you!”
HAPPY NAILS AND SPA #3 smells like acetone and Lysol. Tim’s only ever gotten her nails done once, by her mother’s manicurist, who works out of the spa at the St. Regis. For $115, Tim’s fingernails had been painted a sheer pale pink by a silent woman dressed in a gray linen uniform while Dvořák had poured out of a dozen wall-mounted speakers and a diffuser shaped like a Frank Gehry skyscraper had spat out eucalyptus-scented mist.
“Come on, sit down,” the woman says as she settles into the station. “What’s your name, draga?”
Tim tucks her backpack under the chair and then hooks her ankles around the front legs, trying to make herself feel a little more solidly grounded. What is she doing ? “I’m Tim,” she says. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms–?”
“I’m Sveltana,” the woman says. “All right, show me what I’m working with here. Wow, your hands are so tiny!” She pulls Tim’s left hand across the workbench with one hand as she uses the other to reach into the chest pocket of her apron and fish out a pair of burgundy plastic-framed reading glasses. They have pointy corners, like a librarian from the 1950s. “Do you want extensions? I’m not sure we have frames small enough.”
“No, that’s okay,” Tim says. Svetlana has warm hands, beautifully smooth against the pads of Tim’s fingers. Her nails are long, filed into a shape that looks almost like an almond. They’re painted a dark orange with thin little gold pinstripes that look glittery under the fluorescent lights. “I type a lot. Can I just get regular polish?”
“Of course,” Svetlana says. “Here, pick out the color you want.” She hands Tim a keyring with a dozen little wheels of fake nails painted a dizzying array of colors. “Put your feet under the table, you don’t want them to freeze,” she tells Tim as she leans down to fuss with an electric heater. The front face of it has been molded to look like an old radiator of a similar vintage to her cats-eye reading glasses.
Tim flips through all of the colors, pinks and reds and corals and creams, and thinks of her mother telling the silent gray-clad manicurist at the St. Regis spa, I feel that the best manicure is one that goes unnoticed . Because of the way she’d grown up, Tim hadn’t realized until very recently that her parents felt that their good taste ought to be neither seen nor heard, but instead felt, like oxygen. There was nothing her mother hated more than vulgarity, in either language or presentation of the self.
Cultivate a better sense of self-awareness , Tim reminds herself.
“This one, please,” she tells Svetlana, handing over the keyring and pointing to a fake nail painted a pure, bright green. If she picks it because it reminds her of Robin’s gauntlets, that’s no one’s business but her own.
As Svetlana trims Tim’s nails and cuticles, she tells Tim a long story about her sister-in-law, who had gone to Bed, Bath & Beyond to get new sheets to celebrate the fact that she was finally kicking Svetlana’s no-good brother out of her life–“Good riddance!”--and it had taken her three bus transfers to get there, because the GTA was cutting routes, again , and this time they’d axed the crosstown 47A. “How are we supposed to get anywhere, huh? You need to go to the DMV? Well, the nearest office is in Coventry, good luck! I’m telling my sister-in-law, we left Koštunići to live somewhere normal and modern, and these days we might as well be back in that pit, begging Jovan to give us a lift into town on his tractor.”
“Is that where you grew up?” Tim asks curiously. “Where is that?”
“Koštunići? It’s a very little village, near Kragujevac,” Svetlana says. She wiggles her nose to scoot her reading glasses down and then peers through them as she opens a bottle of clear base coat and begins to swiftly swipe the brush along Tim’s right thumb. “I’m from Serbia, you know? But I’ve been in Gotham twenty years. And I’ve always been able to take the 47A to the DMV, until last month!”
“What was it like?” Tim hears herself ask, a little too eagerly. She tries to draw back, reflexively, but Svetlana has a grip on her hand that’s as solid as concrete. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Gotham,” she quickly explains. “But I’m moving, I think, soon. For school.”
“Best thing I ever did,” Svetlana says with easy confidence. She scoops up the bottle of green polish with her left hand, brusquely inverts it a dozen times to mix its contents, and then unscrews the top. “I was scared out of my mind, you know? Twenty-two-years-old, I’d never lived anywhere else. Do you know how many people live in Koštunići? You wouldn’t, because it’s a pit! Who’s ever heard of it? Only five hundred people live there. I was going out of my mind. Every day, doing the same thing. My sister-in-law was my only friend.”
Tim asks, “Was it easier?” and she can hear that her voice is a little thin. She coughs twice and hunches over her in her chair, before remembering that good posture lends confidence and she ought to straighten her shoulders. “Making friends,” she clarifies, “when you moved. Was it–easier? Than doing it in your village?”
Svetlana hums thoughtfully as she picks up Tim’s left hand. “I think, yes,” she finally says. “I lived there for twenty years and I had one friend. I’ve lived here for twenty years and I have more. Here in the Village, we’re all the same kind of person, you know? We left where we grew up because we needed to be ourselves somewhere else. Our families are back home and they think we’re crazy for leaving. My mama, when my brother and I left she told me, you’ll die of loneliness , that crazy old bat. But here I’ve been for twenty years. I’m happy. I own my business! So fuck Jovan and his tractor, you know?” She pauses in the act of painting Tim’s pinkie nail. “Oops. How old are you?”
“It’s fine,” Tim says quickly.
“Don’t say bad words,” Svetlana scolds. “My nieces, once they started school all the English they picked up was filthy. You’re too pretty to have a dirty mouth. As long as you look sweet and you sound sweet, you get far, you know? It’s not fair but that’s how life works.”
Unfortunately, Tim knows from extensive personal experience that Svetlana is right. “Yeah,” she agrees glumly. “That’s true.”
“Where are you going to school?” Svetlana asks as she starts layering on a second coat. It’s almost hypnotic to watch her smooth, confident brush strokes. “You look like a smart girl, are you going to Rutgers?”
“I don’t know yet,” Tim admits. “I’ve applied, but I won’t hear back for a few weeks.”
“Well, good luck,” Svetlana says. “My mama, that crazy old bat, she would tell you to pray. Do you pray?”
“No,” Tim admits.
“Yeah, me neither,” Svetlana says, winking at Tim over the tops of her reading glasses. “Wow, what a good color for you!” She holds up Tim’s hand and poses it like Tim’s modeling for one of those jewelry advertisements that are always plastered to the side of GTA buses. “Very festive! Do you want me to put a little red? We can do just one finger, make it very subtle.”
Tim imagines the look on her mother’s face upon hearing the words subtly festive holiday nails , and immediately agrees.
Svetlana bounces to her feet and books it over to the back wall, which is lined floor to ceiling with acrylic shelves crammed full of tiny bottles of nail polish. As she picks through the bottles, she calls over her shoulder, “Oh, Tee, draga, just so you know, our credit card reader is broken. Just cash, okay?”
“Okay,” Tim agrees automatically, and then she straightens up in her chair. “Oh, do you–I mean, I could see if I can fix it, if you want? I’m good with electronics.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Svetlana says. “My no-good brother, he knows the guy who works nights at the computer repair place. He says Rory will come by, some day next week.” She returns to her station, flip-flops squeaking faintly, brandishing a small bottle with a bright red base.
“I mean, I could just–take a look?” Tim offers. “It’s fine. I’m not really doing anything today. And I like fixing things.”
Svetlana hums in the back of her throat and looks at Tim over the top of her reading glasses. “Okay,” she finally says. And then, very sternly, she adds, “But you’ll wait until your nails are dry! Don’t ruin my hard work, okay?”
“Okay,” Tim agrees immediately. Her belly is full of churros and hot chocolate, her feet are warm from the little electric heater, and this is the first time in her life she’s going to have subtly festive holiday nails. It’s not exactly going to be a hardship to sit around for half an hour and wait for the polish to cure. “So you said you’ve lived in the Village a long time? Has it changed a lot?”
“Has it ever!” Svetlana exclaims. For the next hour, while Tim first waits for her nails to dry and then carefully pries open the credit card machine to figure out why it won’t turn on–corroded battery, of course; it’s easy enough to fix, especially in a nail salon with basically every solvent known to man already packaged in convenient little squirt bottles–Svetlana regales Tim with deliciously strange neighborhood gossip. Does Tim know that the Penguin is a regular at HAPPY NAILS & SPA #1? Weekly pedicure, never misses an appointment, great tipper. Has Tim seen Pepe Maroni’s mistress’ new tennis bracelet? Fake diamonds!
It’s the best Thanksgiving break Tim has ever had, by a significant margin.
~
Out of, Tim will be the first to admit, a morbid sense of curiosity, she doesn’t actually remind her parents that she’s fourteen when she tells them that she’s been admitted to Yale. The connection is spotty–satellite phone, probably; they’re on their yacht somewhere in the South Pacific–so Tim has to repeat it twice. Yes, YALE, MOM. YALE UNIVERSITY. IN THE FALL.
“That’s wonderful,” her mother says absently. “Your father will be disappointed, of course.” Then something garbled about petty rivalries, so ridiculous , probably something else about the rowing team, unless Tim’s mother has picked up a predilection for profanity during this latest ocean voyage. Tim’s father had been a coxswain on the rowing team at Harvard and his genetics have accordingly doomed Tim, who hasn’t yet topped five feet and isn’t holding out much hope for the future.
“I didn’t commit to any athletic teams,” Tim tells her. “I’d like the opportunity to focus on my academic pursuits.”
“Well there’s no need to go that far,” her mother says. “We’re at our best when our interests are diversified, aren’t we? Now, let me think who’s at Yale right now–Jack, is Meredith’s daughter still at Yale?”
She muses something about medical school that gets chopped up by the bad connection, and then something else about the importance of always being prepared to network. Unsurprisingly, the connection clears just in time for her to crisply offer advice regarding Tim’s fall wardrobe: that shade of blue was at its best paired with black and gray, Tim should remind their personal shopper.
Tim says, “I’ll be sure to do so, Mom,” very dryly.
“Be good, darling!” her mother replies brightly. “You’ll need an apartment, won’t you? We’ll see about going up to New Haven one weekend in the spring and talking with an agent.”
It’ll be a cold day in hell, Tim predicts. “That sounds lovely,” she says.
~
Spring trickles into summer in a damp, lackluster, typical Jersian fashion and Tim finds herself with a lot of free time on her hands once school ends because there’s some new wannabe supervillain kicking up a substantial fuss in Crime Alley. It’s dangerous enough even during the day that both Svetlana and Mr. Zuñiga ask Tim to stop visiting them for a while; Mr. Zuñiga actually tries to bribe Tim with a birthday churro, which she can’t help finding both offensive and heartwarming. Tim is very sure with the confidence of a born and bred Gothamite that they’re overreacting until two days later, when Nightwing catches her around the waist as she steps off of the 189 in Crest Hill and physically stuffs her back onto the bus, yelling something about rocket launchers.
The front page of The Gotham Times the next morning is a full-page color photo of some muscle-bound idiot in a red helmet aiming an AT4 at the Joker. Tim decides it’s probably for the best that she stick around Bristol for a few weeks, just until Batman has a handle on this situation.
Because she goes a little stir-crazy, stuck at home, Tim ends up wasting a lot of mental bandwidth thinking about how she’ll commemorate her last night in Gotham. In many ways it’s a ridiculous thing to think about. It’s not like Gotham is going anywhere. Tim will be back in four years, of course, or maybe six if she decides to go to Wharton and get her MBA right away. But Tim can’t completely silence the part of her brain that speculates, who knows what Gotham will look like in four years? Four years ago, Jason was still alive. Gotham had felt different, then, buoyed on a kind of incredulous optimism: Maybe Batman could make a difference, maybe Gotham could be saved. There hadn’t been a single domestic terrorism incident all winter. High school graduation rates had been up, highest in a decade, all throughout the Bowery. On the Fourth of July, Tim had climbed up to the roof of the Pinkney Tower so she could take photos of the river barges setting off fireworks, and Robin ( Jason ) had given her half of a banh mi and two puffs of her cigarette, traded for the solemn pinky promise that Tim would never tell a single living soul that she’d caught Robin taking a smoke break.
The Bat’d kill me , she’d told Tim.
You guys should unionize , Tim had told her, and Jason had laughed so hard she’d almost fallen off of the roof.
Tim thinks about going to the Pinkney Tower for her last night, like she’s digging her thumb into a bruise. She makes it all the way to the lobby, hands stuffed in the pockets of her jacket–it’s a classic Gotham summer day, 65 and raining–but in the end she can’t get on the elevator. It’s too much, all of a sudden. Who is Tim kidding? Jason’s death isn’t Tim’s personal tragedy, no matter that she’s shaped the arc of her life around it. Tim should probably be embarrassed by how often she thinks about Jason, a girl she’d only spoken to a handful of times.
Why don’t you have actual friends? Tim thinks, there in the lobby of the Pinkney Tower on her last day in Gotham. Why don’t you have anyone real to say goodbye to? Tim’s been lonely for so long that it’s felt like an immutable state of being. It’s only now occurring to her that she’s fifteen and about to go to college, where many people establish profound lifelong friendships. This is Tim’s chance. The only real obstacle is herself: a weird little girl with strange interests and an innately suspicious nature. But Tim is a genius, so surely she can figure it out.
And, frankly, she’s about to have a lot of free time–there aren’t any vigilantes worth stalking in New Haven. She’s checked.