I nod. Almost done.
“I have a very serious question to ask you, Sebastian.” He leans forward, elbows on knees. I freeze up, my nimble fingers leaden on the cables. I haven’t even touched Aneesa. Well, other than her hand a minute ago. My throat constricts.
“Is there anywhere in this town to get decent Chinese?” he asks.
I laugh nervously and with relief. “Only one place. Hong Palace. It’s in the same shopping center as the Narc.”
“The Narc?” He raises an eyebrow. On him, it’s an elegant, Spock-like movement. It’s face ballet.
“Nat’s Market. The grocery store. It’s what we call it.”
“Why?”
I have no idea. “I have no idea.”
He nods, satisfied, as if my ignorance is somehow the antidote to whatever had been bothering him. “Hong Palace. Do they deliver?”
“Yeah.”
“Perfect.” He smiles and takes the liberated cables from me. “You’ll have to tell me your secret sometime.”
“Sebastian has a secret?” It’s Aneesa, standing at the foot of the stairs, clutching a bottle of peroxide and a fistful of cotton balls. “I gotta hear this.”
“He knows how to untangle cords,” her dad tells her.
“That’s boring,” says Aneesa.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t have any secrets. I’m not interesting enough.”
It doesn’t hit me until later that I’ve lied. It felt so natural.
Later, Aneesa and I sit on the porch, me on a comfortable lounger, she on an ottoman while dabbing at my shins.
“I could do this myself.”
“You’d screw it up.”
“How do you know that?”
“You have a look about you.”
“You know, the ground was slippery the other night. From the rain. And I just lost my balance for a second just now. It’s not like I’m totally feckless.”
She stops mid-dab and gazes up at me, eyes wide.
“Totally what? What did you just say?”
“Feckless.”
Her expression goes back to normal. “Oh. I totally thought you said something else. What does that mean?”
“It means irresponsible.”
“I must have missed that day of test prep.” She bends to her work again, and I just sit like the mute idiot I am.
She finishes with the peroxide and slaps a Band-Aid just below my left knee. My right leg has already stopped bleeding. With a grunt of satisfied triumph, she rocks back on her heels and gestures once again like a stage magician. “Ta-da!”
“It’s like you conjured that Band-Aid right onto my leg.”
“I know, right?” She gathers up the damp cotton balls and scraps of paper from the bandage wrapper. “So, where were you headed in such a rush that you wiped out?”
She doesn’t specify which time, not that it matters. The truth is that today I had no destination. For some reason, I just had to ride past her house and see her. But that isn’t the sort of thing you can confess to a girl while she is cleaning up from nursing you back to health. Or ever.
“I was just going to this place.”
“Oh, yeah. ‘This place.’ I know it well.” An arched eyebrow is my reward and my punishment for such a lame answer.
“Seriously. Nowhere special.”
She’s not taking that for an answer. I don’t blame her.
The next thing I know, we’re walking together along Route 27. It’s late afternoon, not yet what passes for rush hour in Brookdale. At six in the evening, 27 becomes a phalanx of slow-moving vehicles as commuters from Baltimore wend their ways home toward Cantersville. But for now, there’s just the occasional car or big rig. We stick to the shoulder.
I jam my hands into my pockets because otherwise I’m afraid I’ll try to hold hers. That’s the sort of stupid thing I would do.
As we walk, she tells me about herself, about her family. This comes with no questions from me—I never ask people about their families or their pasts. Because then they would ask me about mine.
This is what I learn without breaking out the deerstalker: Her dad works “in finance,” and Aneesa doesn’t really understand exactly what he does. Her mom is an editor for a math journal at Johns Hopkins. “I don’t think she understands what she does.”
They moved here because her dad’s company opened a satellite office in Lowe County, and her father was chosen to be in charge. “They’re all about ‘capitalizing on rural growth and white flight,’” she quotes from an overheard conversation. “Translation: All the white people are moving away from all the black and brown people, and we’re being made to follow the money.”
“I didn’t flee from anywhere,” I say lamely. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“What do your parents do?”
“Mom’s a translation secretary.”
“What’s that?”
“She speaks Spanish. And this guy who owns a company down in Finn’s Landing does business all over Latin America, but he can’t speak Spanish.”
She clucks her tongue. “Who does business where they speak Spanish and doesn’t learn Spanish?”
“Well, yeah. Mom says money buys convenience.”
“I guess so.”
“So Mom handles all the phone calls and correspondence and stuff.”
“That’s sort of cool. What about your dad?”
“Divorce. A while back.” I shrug as noncommittally as I know how. “He’s not really around.”
“Sorry I asked.”
There it is. So smooth. So adult. How did she do that? Sorry I asked. One moment, I’m faking a too-casual shrug to show that it doesn’t bother me that she’s asked about my father, covering for the fact that—surprise—it actually does bother me. Then, with a simple Sorry I asked, I’m no longer bothered. How did she do that?
“It’s okay. Everyone gets divorced, right? A lot of people, at least. No big.”
“Do you miss him?”
Pine. The hoot of a train’s whistle. I shake my head to clear away the memories and to answer her question.
Then she asks the one question I never, ever ask anyone. No matter how curious I might be, no matter how relevant the answer might be, I never ask it, and she does, like it’s nothing at all:
“Any brothers or sisters?”
My Sister
Lola. Her name was Lola.
“No.”
“Me neither,” she says. “I have a bunch of friends with siblings. Half the time they seem to love it and half the time it’s like they just wish they could kill them, you know?”
Oh.
Oh.
So…
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on anything,” she goes on. “Do you ever wonder that?”
So…
So casually.
She said it so casually. People say it all the time, those words. I could just kill him. I swear, if she pisses me off again, I’ll kill her. Sometimes I just want to kill that guy.
The world is filled with invisible, theoretical assassins, armed projections of our deepest ids, bearing guns loaded with wish-bullets. If you listen closely, you can hear them singing as they whiz by your head, always passing harmlessly through their intended targets.
“Do you?” she prods.