“Hey, cuz!”
Ren and I both jumped and turned to look at the guy who had come into the kitchen behind us. He was maybe four or five years older than me and wearing a wrinkled shirt and battered flip-flops that went well with his shaggy hair and vacant expression. Naturally, he reeked of pot.
Ren sighed. “This is my cousin, Kai.”
Kai nodded at me. “Hey.”
“This is Danny,” Ren said.
Kai looked at me blankly, and then his expression slowly—painfully slowly—shifted into realization.
“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
Ren punched him in the arm. “God, Kai!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s the usual reaction. ”
“Cool,” Kai said. “So, hey, how’s your sister doing? She still hot?”
I blinked. Ren looked like she was considering punching him somewhere other than the arm.
“You know my sister?” I asked.
“Sexy Lexi? Hell yeah!” he said. “We were pretty tight in high school. Me and Patrick, too. He used to get me the best weed.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I didn’t know what to say about Patrick procuring him drugs, and I definitely wasn’t going to confirm that Lex was, indeed, still hot. So I just said: “Cool.”
“Yeah, dude,” Kai said. He opened the refrigerator and started to gather food in his arms: turkey and cheese slices, a gallon of orange juice, anything he could lay his hands on.
“You’re not supposed to raid the big house fridge, dude,” Ren said.
“Yeah, whatever,” Kai said. “So Lex is good? I always worried about her. I tried to look out for her when I could, but she was—oh, but hey, don’t worry! I never hooked up with her or anything. Not that I would have minded, because damn was she—”
“Jesus, Kai,” Ren said. “That’s his sister!”
Kai started to giggle. “Oh, right! Sorry! That’s some seriously ironic shit.” He opened the door to the pantry and added a box of cookies to the haul in his arms. “I gotta go.”
He drifted out of the kitchen, and Ren shook her head after him.
“How tragic is that?” she said. She turned to me. “Want to go upstairs?”
“Sure,” I said and followed her into the hallway.
“I know he’s family and all,” she said as we climbed to the second story, “but he’s an idiot. Like his parents won’t notice the fridge is empty when they get home. I’m always telling him, just take a little at a time. It’s all about plausible deniability!”
I smiled. She would make a decent scammer.
“He lives here?” I asked.
“Technically, he lives in the pool house,” she said. “He’s supposed to pay rent and buy his own groceries and everything, but as you can see, not so much. He pretty much just gets high and plays video games all day.”
Most of the kids I had gone to school with in my past life were probably living similar existences, albeit in less grand locations. I probably would be too if things had been different. “Not a bad life,” I said.
“Could be worse, I guess,” she said as she opened the door to her bedroom.
I hadn’t been in many girls’ bedrooms. I was suddenly very aware of that fact as I stepped inside. I was interested in what other clues I could gather here about Ren, but I instantly saw that this room wouldn’t be much help. Even if she hadn’t told me earlier than this was her aunt and uncle’s house, I would have been able to tell from a glance that this was actually a guest room. It had that sterile, unlived-in feeling that Danny’s room had, and it was decorated in somber creams and navies while its occupant was currently wearing yellow and electric blue. But scattered over the top of this sedate and antiseptic base was evidence of the same Ren who drove that chaotic Mercedes. Colorful clothing thrown over the backs of chairs, books piled up on a dresser since there was no bookcase, the bottle of that green nail polish on the bedside table. Artifacts of a girl in motion. One who didn’t much care what people thought. A confident girl who didn’t mind showing her room to a near-stranger, even when it was kind of a mess. There was more evidence of Ren imprinted on this room that wasn’t really hers than I’d ever leave on the room that wasn’t really mine back in the Tate house.
She pushed the clothes off the back of the desk chair so I could sit there and then lowered herself cross-legged onto the bed.
“So,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” I said.
And then I just stared at her with no idea what to say next, while she just smiled at me. This should have been easy. She was the one person I didn’t have to be careful around, who I could just be myself with, because she’d never known Danny Tate. But being around her turned me into this empty, blank person. Someone dull and mute and fumbling. Was it just nerves? Was this what normal people felt when talking to a pretty girl they actually liked and didn’t just want something from?
“Should we make fun of Kai some more?” she finally said. “That’s endless fodder for conversation. Like, lately he’s been making these halfhearted attempts at becoming a professional surfer, which I’m sure you find shocking—”
“Sorry,” I said. “I know I’m not easy to talk to.”
“It’s not just you,” she said. “My mouth has no filter, which has always been a problem for me, and I don’t want to say something stupid to you, so I’m really overthinking things over here.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not as fragile as people think.”
She cocked her head at me. “You do seem weirdly well-adjusted, considering.”
I kind of nodded, kind of shrugged. Why had I come here? I couldn’t talk to this girl, not like this, without a crowd to perform for. I often chose not to talk to people, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t. I could always summon the right personality for any situation; it was what had gotten me this far. Why couldn’t I talk to her?
Then I realized.
I couldn’t talk to Ren because I didn’t know who she wanted me to be. She didn’t seem to want me to be anyone but whoever I was, and I wasn’t anyone, not really. I’d spent a lifetime becoming a mirror that just reflected back the person others wanted to see, but she didn’t want anything. So I was nothing.
“Sorry,” I said with rising panic. This was stupid. She was just a girl, I shouldn’t be this scared, but I suddenly felt like I was treading into something dangerous. “I just . . . maybe I should go . . .”
“You’re not going to help me with my drawing?” She reached into her school bag and fished out her sketch pad. “Look, it’s seriously messed up, and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Any ideas?”
She stood and laid the drawing out on the desk where I was sitting, and we both looked at it. It was recognizably a bowl of fruit, but only just. Like someone had passed the drawing through a fun house mirror.
“Oh,” I said. This drawing I understood. This I knew how to fix. The hot, frantic rushing of blood in my veins started to slow. “Yeah. It’s the proportions. See this apple?”
“Yeah.”