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Show 73 "Would you like to hold Elie?" "Actually, thank you, but I am not that good with babies. Thank you, though." "Come on, go ahead and hold her. She likes you!" she said, and lifted Elie up to my face as if that were some kind of proof. "Wow, she is really adorable. But actually I don't know, I don't really know how to hold babies," I said, lying. I had been holding babies all of my life-I just didn't enjoy it. Nobody believed that I wasn't secretly delighted by the opportunity to hold a baby, and I was never able to explain it. I did have sources: in Wonder Woman comics, "babies" were consistently evil aliens in league with the Nazis, who manage to impregnate key American women in their sleep in order to immobilize them, and along the way create baby spies designed to obtain and report vital information back to the Nazis. Even if that plot was outdated, I still couldn't understand how the rest of my family failed to notice something even ostensibly non-evil babies have in common: namely, the fact that they are gross and boring. "Come on, here you are," Holly said, and handed Elie over. "There, see? She likes you!" She stood up and left me. I held Elie in my arms and stared into her face. She was pretty fat, surprisingly heavy for a baby. She smiled, and it was cute. The perfect spy. Holly was probably three rooms over by now and I knew that I would be looking into Elie's alien face until she started crying or until my mother stopped "visiting" and was ready to go-and I wasn't sure what to do about that. Put my villainous eyebrows to use and start making scary faces at her, |