He’s drying off his back, and I’m staring at his rounded butt cheeks. This is Henry, my friend Henry.
Mortified, I try to app home but lack the necessary concentration and only succeed in hopping two steps forward, crashing right into the skis propped in the corner of Henry’s closet. He turns, and I squeeze my eyes shut. This is why, when I open them back in the safety of my own bedroom closet, I have no idea if Henry saw me or not. My pulse thumps in my temples as I force the picture of Henry’s taut derrière out of my head.
So much for scaring the pants off him. As if I’m the one who’s been caught naked, I wrestle a pair of jeans off its hanger and pull them on right over my shorts. The pile of sweaters on the shelf tumbles to the floor as I extract a gray cardigan from the center of the stack. I’m nervously braiding my stupidly long hair when I hear Henry’s voice.
“Azra? Are you home?”
He’s been in my room a zillion times, but suddenly I don’t want him to come in here. I give up on the braid, rake my fingers through my hair, and rush out of my room.
Henry’s at the bottom of the stairs. I stroll down, trying to act casual. But I can’t look him in the eye. As I pass by, I tell him my mom’s not here so he knows he can speak freely. I lead him into the living room where I begin putting lanterns back on the bookshelf.
Henry helps, setting a brass lamp on the top shelf. His finger glides across the Russian nesting dolls, floats over the Italian mortar and pestle, and stops at the hand-carved Indian chess set.
“Imports, right?” Henry gives no indication that he caught me spying on him. “That’s what your mother supposedly does? How you explain all this cool stuff?”
I utter an affirmative “uh-huh” but keep my back to him as I return another lantern to its original position.
Importing goods from around the world is my mother’s cover story. Like most Jinn, she’s never actually had a human job. Aside from money not being an issue for Jinn, human jobs, like human friends, risk us becoming too ingrained in this world. They grease up Laila’s slip and slide. Most Jinn abstain from both. No surprise I’m one of the few, not one of the many.
Henry sits on the couch across from me. “You’ll be able to travel anywhere. Everywhere.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that. You’re so lucky.”
Henry’s right. My mother’s ability to apport allowed her to plop us on a beach in Hawaii for the afternoon as the snow piled up at home and whisk me off to that shop on the ?le Saint-Louis, the little island in the center of Paris, just to have a cone of the best ice cream (or so she assures me) in the world.
But Henry’s also wrong. I think I was twelve when I fully understood that the ability to wake up in my bedroom in Massachusetts and be eating a fresh-from-the-oven pizza in Naples for lunch came with a price tag that wasn’t paid in dollars or euros. My mother’s souvenirs were a constant reminder that the day I turned sixteen, my desires and choices would be irrelevant. I would be irrelevant. A necessary cog in a wheel whose inner workings I didn’t—and still don’t—quite understand. That day, I shattered my mother’s favorite Chinese vase, swearing I’d never amass such a collection of junk.
Maybe one day I can app to China and find a replacement. If only I could take Henry with me.
He lifts another lantern. It’s Mr. Gemp, the kitschy, tarnished-gold, Aladdin-style lamp with the long spout and curved handle that Hana gave me on my birthday.
“Cheeky and bold,” he says, “hiding in plain sight. I like it. Better than sneaking around and hiding in closets.”
Immediately my face burns. Henry’s innocent look doesn’t fool me. He caught me spying on him. Even I can’t bluff my way out of this one.
*
“You’re being careful with him, right?” my mother asks after Henry leaves.
Suppressing my gasp makes the sound that comes out of my mouth closer to a gargle. Has she discovered our secret?
“I know you two are growing close…” she says.
Oh no, it’s worse than her finding out about Henry. This is going to be that kind of talk.
“… but you can’t slip up and let him catch you using your powers.”
Whew. Instantly my relief gives way to guilt.
She tips her head toward the bookshelf. “Thanks for doing the lanterns. Mind if I ask one more favor?”
To ease my conscience, I’d agree to just about anything.
“You’ll stay in this refreshingly pleasant mood for dinner? Nadia, Samara, and the girls are coming for dinner.”
“Great,” I say.
My mother raises an eyebrow. “I invited Mina and Farrah too.”
“But not Yasmin?”
“Raina said she had plans.”
“Then yes, great.”
Skepticism lurks in my mother’s smile but she wants to believe. So do I. Pretty sure we have Henry to thank for that. He was with me when my phone buzzed like a swarm of bees as texts came in from my Zar sisters. They’d added me to a running chain joking about how Farrah could have tried to give that old guy a womb. Henry insisted this was proof that they really did want me to go with them to see Drunken Toad, which turns out to be a pretty decent band. I think he just wants the chance to see them next time—them meaning both the band and my smokin’ hot “cousins.”
A couple of individual texts with Mina (asking about “the Adonis”) and Farrah (asking about my favorite Drunken Toad track) followed, and Hana and I have been e-mailing (mostly about her flash-card strategies but also about my apparently not-short-enough shorts).
My phone dings, and I sneak a peek. Nate: “Flies not bad. Perfect now for hanging.”
I squeeze the phone in my hand. Perfect now. Is that an invitation? Do I have time to accept if it is?
“When’s dinner?” I casually ask my mother.
“They’ll be here at seven-thirty.”