People started trickling in about an hour later. Most of them Sunday knew from her lunch table, and she felt a little more at ease when she realized she wouldn’t have to sit in a room full of complete strangers.
Eli was friendly enough with everyone, but he didn’t seem to have any friends in the crowd, and she suddenly wondered how old he was. He didn’t look significantly younger than his brother, but he seemed to instinctually defer to whatever Micah wanted. Then again, he’d seemed totally comfortable cracking open a beer earlier, and he hadn’t stopped drinking.
They moved the pizza boxes and a bunch of drinks to the game room. Sunday’s eyes widened as she took in the enormous screen where they projected TV shows and movies onto the wall like a small cinema, the various game consoles in the cabinet beneath it, and the pinball machines and shuffleboard and poker tables scattered throughout. She wondered what her dad and Ben would think about this room. Her house had plenty of space for the three of them, with big, open rooms and a huge backyard, but the lack of a fourth bedroom meant they had to combine the guest room with Ben’s home office.
“Having fun?” Eli strolled up behind her just as she’d lost another game on the Twilight Zone pinball machine.
Sunday startled. No one had come up to her all afternoon—they waved from across the room or smiled when she squeezed past them, but that was it. Nobody besides Micah and his brother seemed remotely interested in getting to know her. And Micah had been hard to keep up with all afternoon. He kept disappearing, sometimes alone but often with one or two people.
She shrugged, unsure of how to respond. Eli seemed like the type of person who would call bullshit when someone lied to his face. And besides, Sunday wasn’t exactly the best liar around. She was pretty terrible, actually.
Eli was holding two beers. He tipped the unopened one toward her. “Want one?”
“I still don’t drink,” she said, frowning.
“Cool, cool. Thought you might have changed your mind. It sure makes these things more tolerable.” He sipped from his bottle. “Want to take a tour of the house?”
Sunday wondered if this was some grand excuse to get her alone. But Eli didn’t seem like a creep. A little more serious than Micah, maybe—and certainly more surly—but not a bad guy.
“Okay,” she said, and followed him out of the game room.
The Richmond home was probably the nicest house Sunday had ever been in. The art alone was enough to ease her anxiety of being at a party where she felt so out of place. Some of it was created by artists she didn’t know, but she spotted an original Rothko, an Andy Warhol sketch, and a painting by Aaron Douglas that she’d never seen but instantly recognized as his.
“Your parents have incredible taste in art,” she murmured, taking her time to look at it all as they wandered through the house.
Eli shrugged. “I don’t know anything about art.”
“I do.”
They were on the second floor now, wandering the halls that she figured must hold the bedrooms.
“What’s so special about it?” he asked, taking a long drink. He was on the second bottle he’d brought along, having abandoned the first one on a side table earlier, as if he knew someone would clean it up for him.
“Art?”
“Yeah. I mean, my parents bid on all this expensive shit, and then it just hangs here and they don’t even look at it.”
Sunday shook her head. “We go to an arts-and-sciences school. You really feel that way about it?”
“You’re an artist?”
“Sort of. But I mostly want to work with it. I’m interested in the artists and the time periods and genres they worked in. And the mediums they preferred and their inspiration and—” She cut herself off, embarrassed. Those were practically the most words she’d spoken since she’d arrived. “Sorry.”
Eli grinned. “I’m a math guy. Tell me more.”
They were sitting on the floor of his bedroom when Micah stuck his head in.
“You okay here?” he asked Sunday, not looking at his brother.
Beside her, she could feel Eli’s body tense. They weren’t even touching, just sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of his bed, but she felt the change in him instantly.
“Just trying to explain to your brother why art saves lives,” she said, only half joking.
Micah rolled his eyes. “Good luck with that. This one avoids culture like it’s a fucking disease.”
“Oh, just because I don’t want to go to all your little dance performances, I’m uncultured?” Eli narrowed his eyes. “Fuck off, Micah.”
Sunday had been in the middle of arguments before, but she’d never felt this level of animosity. Her father and Ben rarely disagreed in front of her, and the church kids back in Chicago didn’t argue like this. Sometimes they’d raised their voices, but it never got to the point where she was worried they might start throwing punches.
Micah ignored Eli, letting him have the last word. “Gonna go on a beer run,” he said, looking at Sunday. “Want to come with?”
There didn’t seem to be a right answer here. If she left with Micah, Eli would clearly be pissed. But he seemed so easily angered, and she didn’t really feel like being around that energy now. And she was here because Micah had invited her.
She slowly stood, avoiding Eli’s eyes. “Want us to grab you anything?” she asked, but he never answered her, and after a few seconds of silence, Micah nodded toward the hallway, signaling they should go.
Sunday couldn’t believe he would just leave all his friends to fend for themselves in that huge, nice house. She wasn’t sure Eli could be trusted to oversee things, especially in the mood they’d left him in. The art alone was worth millions of dollars. Did Micah trust all of them, or did he just not care?
“Do you guys ever get along?” she asked, looking out the windows. It was completely dark, and the neighborhood appeared different now that the sun had gone down. The houses were cast in haloes of light that made everything look even bigger and more ornate.
“Used to.” Micah sighed. “He’s a couple of years younger than us. I think he sort of expected everything would be the same once he got to high school—that, you know, we’d still hang out all the time.”
“What changed?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t really like my friends, I guess. They don’t like him much either,” he added with a wry smile. “And I think the dance stuff freaks him out.”
“Maybe he’s jealous.”
“He’s not jealous. We both used to do everything—play every sport, dance, play instruments. When we got older, I dropped everything but dance. Honestly, I think he stopped taking lessons because some of the guys at school were talking shit. Like, that he was gay or whatever.”
“Oh.”
Sunday wasn’t immune to some of the looks her father and Ben got when they were around certain people. They were different looks from when people seemed surprised or annoyed to see a black person in their presence. She could always tell when it was about her dad and Ben’s relationship because the glares ignored her and included Ben, who was white.
“I don’t give a shit about any of that,” Micah almost spat out. “I like to dance, and I’m good at it, and fuck anyone who’s bothered by it.”