“Right up until I leave,” said Cirrus with finger pistols and a shake of her long black hair. “Seriously, though. Probably until I graduate. I mean we. One sec.”
She pulled out her phone again, smiled, typed. “School just let out in Sydney. Oi, Audrey, oi, Simon.”
“Sydney is in Australia,” I said resolutely.
Cirrus tucked her chin at her shirt. “I’m actually wearing Simon, speak of the devil.”
Her shirt once belonged to Simon? Simon was the name of her shirt?
“Great,” I said, making this the third time I used the word great. I was struggling very hard now. Cirrus was cool. Cirrus was so, so cool. She had just arrived from London. She had friends all over the world. Friends who did cool things and were therefore also so, so cool. She came from an entirely cool world. She did not belong in such an uncool house in an uncool neighborhood with an uncool loser like—
“My friend Simon made this tee shirt,” said Cirrus. “Amazing artist. Youngest ever to show at White Rabbit Gallery. He made it for my other friend. Audrey. She’s got this brilliant metal band protesting Asian stereotypes, called I No Kung Fu. Get it?”
“I like art,” I said, wiping my forehead. Say something interesting. “I hate Asian stereotypes.”
I said interesting! Interesting!
I knew no artists. I knew no musicians, other than long-gone Gray. I knew no one cool.
I wanted to blurt out, My brother is a musician! but managed to restrain myself. Instead, I found myself asking the most noninteresting question possible.
“Where, uh, what are your parents working on, doing?” I said.
“A big mixed-use thing downtown,” said Cirrus, “because apparently Los Angeles doesn’t have enough luxury malls and luxury condos.”
“It doesn’t?” I said.
“That was a joke,” said Cirrus.
Now my ears ignited, because normally I had at least intermediate to advanced skill at identifying jokes.
“Hahahahahaha,” I said, busted as hell. “Anyway, malls are cool.”
Cirrus gave me a perplexed smirk: You know better than to call that sort of thing cool.
I scrambled to refurbish my last statement. “I meant cool in the sense that this new mall will help humanity finally get their carbon footprint big enough to make the Amazon rain forest the planet’s hot new desert,” I said.
“Jesus, you’re cynical,” whispered Cirrus, impressed.
By this point, my feet were as hot as my hands and my ears. My body was all-hot.
“How is the UK?” I said. UK stood for United Kingdom. Then I remembered Brexit, and the possibility that the UK would no longer exist, and wished I could do it over again to prove I wasn’t an ignorant American.
Cirrus thought. “Lots of history. Bit crowded. Bit rainy. Not like here, which is lovely.”
“Sure, cool cool cool cool,” I said. I made a mental sticky note to add London to my weather app to compare.
“I like your shirt,” said Cirrus.
Instantly my chin shot down to my shirt and shot right back up. I’d forgotten that this shirt was not my shirt. This was Gray’s shirt. It was quite tight.
And she liked it.
“Oh, this stupid old rag?” I said, far too loudly. The old part was true. I didn’t mention the part about it being Gray’s and not mine. Maybe that was the stupid part. I picked at Gray’s shirt’s sleeves.
“The skulls give it a throwback vibe,” said Cirrus.
I had no idea what the hell that meant, so I focused on her shirt instead.
“What does that hand gesture mean?” I said. I held two fingers straight up, middle and index, like it showed on her shirt.
Cirrus demonstrated by holding up two fingers herself, then curling her index finger down so that only the middle one remained standing.
“It means this, but in Australia,” said Cirrus.
I lowered and raised my index finger: middle finger, two fingers, middle finger, two fingers. “So, eff you, eff you, eff you, eff you.”
Cirrus did this thing where she covered her mouth with the back of her hand to laugh—she had the velvet laugh of a villainess—and for a moment I stood spellbound. Finally I put my hand away like an amateur magician stashing his last, best trick.
Cirrus slowly flexed one leg after another, as if tired from standing for a long period of—
You let her stand in the foyer this whole time?
“How about we go sit in my room!” I cried, and headed up the stairs.
“Sounds great?” said Cirrus, and followed.
I reached the landing and hesitated. An image flashed in my mind: Cirrus, sitting in my room, amid my stacks of white plastic storage containers. Cirrus, opening the containers one by one. Loudly saying,
Got lots of swords and shields and nerdy stuff. Are you one of those big mega-nerds?
I halted abruptly enough to have Cirrus literally bump into my back.
“Oop,” said Cirrus, sidestepping me to slide into my room.
Except it was Gray’s room.
“Ohhhhahhh,” I began, without finishing.
Gray’s door was always open, because that’s how Gray liked things. The door to my room was always shut, because that’s how I liked things.
My door was blank and unadorned. My door could have led to anything—a linen closet, a brick wall, an alternate universe.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, Mom liked to say. It was characteristically shallow advice, but there was a truth to it that I only now realized.
I followed Cirrus, heading left into Gray’s room instead of right into mine.
Cirrus had already made herself at home in Gray’s salvaged steel swivel chair. She drummed her fingers on her thighs, as if eager to be introduced to the room’s history.
I started to say something, then stopped.
I started to say something else, then stopped.
I started to—
Cirrus eyed me with growing concern.
“So are you—” she said.
“These are guitars,” I said suddenly. I craned my neck back to look at them. I stretched, sniffed, did all the things amateurs do when gearing up for a big lie. “They’re my guitars.”
Cirrus brightened. “Wait. Are you in a band?”
“Phtphpthpt,” I said with a full-body spasm. “It’s just a little band, but yes: I am.”