Val: 4

"No," Jet was saying into the phone. We had made plans to hang out at his apartment after school, and I had just walked through the doorway. Lividity lined his voice, and his words were sharp. "No,” he repeated. “I'm not giving you money for you to do whatever you want with it. We're past that, Alena."

He paused. I could make out a the faint echo of a girl’s voice whining on the other end of the line. Jet’s tennis shoes squeaked on the tile floor. "You do?" he asked, his face softening. Soon thereafter, his expression hardened again. "Yeah, well maybe it's time you go the distance. You're not going to be able to run to me for help anymore. Just because I'm your older brother doesn't mean I can stand in as your father whenever you see fit."

There was a pause, during which Alena meekly offered an alternative. Jet switched down the volume on his phone.

"Silas shouldn't have to give you money either,” Jet said, “but he's a more viable option than me, yes."

Another pause.

"I know you're trying."

With cat-like steps, I walked up behind Jet. I set my schoolbags on the countertop, and then wrapped my arms around his middle. My forehead flattened to the spine of his sweatshirt. The familiar fragrance of soap filled my nose, and I found myself thinking of your poignant cologne. Jet removed my arms gently and stepped away. He didn't like to cuddle. He pressed the phone more firmly to his ear, and walked into the bedroom.

I sat down and tried to do my homework. I waited for Jet to reemerge, but he was on the phone with his sister for nearly an hour. I was frustrated; he’d been at work or taking an important phone call during all of our free time of late. It was much more than me taking a lunch period to work on a ‘project’. Sighing, I wrote a note on a piece of yellow notebook paper and stuck it to the door:

Left for work

Be back around 10:30, taking late shift.

Love, Koskia

I sent my mom a quick text, relaying the message that I'd be taking the late shift at work. I grabbed my jean jacket on the way out. I strolled down the carpeted hallway and took the elevator to the ground floor. The receptionist waved to me as I passed her desk. "Hi Charlotte," I greeted, smiling. I was familiar with the building’s imperfections and charm; the way the violet doormat rolled at the edges; the cheerful wave of the doorman; the Claude Monet painting hanging off-kilter at the entrance. Sometimes I believed I knew the place my boyfriend lived better than my boyfriend himself.

I exited through the revolving doors.

The breeze whisked past my cheeks. I tucked a strand of raven-hair behind my ear. As per usual, I took the bus to Subway, paying the driver and then seating myself in the backseat, next to the old man with graying hair who always slept with his chin curled until we reached my stop.

My legs were crossed at the knee, and I gripped my leather clutch. With the opposite hand, I scrolled through Instagram. The blue glow of the screen illuminated my face, nearly drawing my eyes shut. The sleeping man sneezed suddenly and woke, rearranging his wrinkled blue button-up and mumbling a apology.

We both looked out the window on our respective sides of the aisle. Store windows rushed by as if sprinting in the opposite direction.

The bus rumbled to a halt. I left the bus stop.

I shivered and began my brief walk to the nearest subway. I pulled my jacket tightly around me, again fearing the worst from what you were persuading me to do. My ribs worked overtime now to keep structure, clutching each other in desperation and suffering blows to their bodies from internal distress. There was nothing to stop me from blaming you for my own recklessness, but that didn’t keep me from being responsible for the outcome. I walked on, passersby undeterred, me clenching my toes in my shoes and wishing my heart was as numb.

“You want to work overtime?” Fillips asked, gaze lacking the suspicion I’d expected and instead denoting the auspiciousness of a man who was about to fill an undesirable position. I was the only girl who wanted the job.

Mr. Fillips had no defining characteristics. He was neither tall nor short; fat nor thin; handsome nor particularly unattractive. He looked like a typical face in the crowd. We were both seated at the meeting he’d arranged for the two of us.

"Yes," I replied, wringing my fingers in my lap. I attempted to make eye contact, but my eyes were insistent upon flitting around the room. I cleared my throat nervously. The room was silent; dust particles floated in the beam of sunlight that was cast across the floor. I piped up, not wanting him to think about it for too long. “I’m gonna need to afford college by this time next year, so I figure that I should do everything I can to make maximum income."

Fillips assumed a state of contemplation. I winced. The lie might have passed the text, but the comment was selfish.

I cleared my throat again. I wondered if that was my tell. According to Mom, everyone had a tell for when they lied. I had never lied before. Not extensively, anyway. Like everyone, I'd told the infrequent white lie to shirk chores. But never anything that required a tell.

Mr. Fillips rubbed his sweaty palm over his chin. "Okay," he agreed, without much ado. "Cleanup, until 10:00."

I breathed for the first time in what felt like minutes. Relief welled in my chest. The manager stood, sidled around the width of the desk, and placed a beefy hand on my shoulder. "You're a good worker, Koskia. I'm glad you're showing an interest in your future."

He smiled briefly before escorting me to the door. “If you ever need to have a chat about anything else, let me know.

I thanked him, trying to contain my glee. He returned to his office, leaving me to return to work.

There was a lull in the onslaught of hungry customers, so I took a bathroom break. After shutting the door behind me, I took my phone out to text you. I felt almost prideful. It should have surprised me—how much I craved your approval at that moment—but I was unfazed by it.

Me: Guess what?

You texted me back almost immediately. Like you’d already been on your phone.

You: You won tickets to a Warriors game?

My phone pinged again with your incoming text.

You: You won the Nobel Prize for best-attempt at hurting my ego?

Ping.

You: You beat JJ in a foot race?

Ping.

You: Well Jesus, tell me you won something

It was after a complete second of bemusement that I had remembered what I texted you: guess. I’d told you to guess. Sighing, I texted you back.

Me: we're in. I got the overtime shift.

I saw that you'd received the text. My heart raced with slight anticipation. I could see the loading bubble. You were typing.

Ping.

You: You got it?

Me: yes.

You: Call me

I did. I called you. I wanted to hear you compliment me. In retrospect, I guess I had a bit of an ego, too.

I got you on the phone after the first ring. "Chris," I said, elated, smiling even, "I got it. My boss gave me the night shift."

You whooped, clapping once. It was the same reaction you gave one of your buddies when they made a nice shot on the court. When you used to play basketball at lunchtime. "Yeah, Val,” you congratulated. “That's my girl."

I laughed dryly, feeling like I had to acknowledge your exaggerations. It was typical you; making a big show out of nothing.

Then I frowned, feeling like my euphoria had hit a dead end. "Anyway, that's all I--"

"I gotta admit," you interrupted, because God forbid you ever stop talking: "I was hoping for those Warriors tickets, but that's—well, not better. But almost up to par, anyway."

"What's a Warrior?" I asked, also wondering what ‘par’ meant.

And God, why did I ever ask you? I should have known that you'd ramble for ten minutes about Steph Curry's basketball statistics, and refer at least fifteen different times to the NBA Live app you had on your phone. Your quirky sports fetishes were starting to spend all of my phone minutes.

But like the first time, you kept me listening. Through phone static. Through awkward pauses, where all I could hear was the inhale-exhale of you thinking on the other end. Through your stumbling over big words and the "y'know, y'know"s. Through your never-ending stories, the ones you claimed were ‘sports legends’.

You had a deep stutter when you were excited; it wasn't dumb or weak, and you wore it well. I could tell you were smiling and gesticulating feverishly when you went "And he was-he was-he-he was goin' up for the shot" and I decided right then that that was something I liked about you. You had anticipation anxiety; you were always too excited about the next thing in the story to contain yourself to tell it.

Macho-Jock-Chris had a stutter. How endearing.

Eventually you finished your rant. I wouldn’t have known what to say if you’d waited for a response, but you didn’t leave me any time to speak. You signed off with an "I'm out, I gotta run" and then, "so long, Val" before the call was terminated.

“That’s not my name,” I told you, even though you were gone.

Instead of heading home late that night, I took the bus to Jet's. I knocked on the door and then nudged it open. Jet was at the counter, drinking an Orange Soda and then meticulously aligning a pencil against a plastic ruler. His eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he connected the dots of a line graph. Charting data and analyzing statistics was something he'd been doing lately, quite relentlessly, only stopping to figure trigonometry equations and factor trinomials ("those are only for fun," he told me).

I hung my jacket on the coat rack and walked around the corner, leaning my elbows on the marble countertop. My eyes felt sticky and my feet ached. Exhaustion settled over me like a film. "Hey," I greeted. I reached down and massaged the bottoms of my soles. I payed a glance to the clock on the stove—10:36. Jet grunted something inaudible, continuing to sweep the pencil across the paper. "How long have you been doing that?"

"What?" he asked.

"Math," I clarified.

"I did Calculus for my honors program starting at four. I've been trying to work out the graph of this equation for the flight trajectory of an interplanetary spaceship since six. Something I'm working on as a side project. For a scholarship. A way to find a way to travel through space, condoning more volume and less energy. It's literal rocket science," he said, glancing up at me with a furtive smile.

I blinked, appalled, my brain having blocked out everything but the times. "You've been doing quantum mechanics for four and a half hours."

"Technically," he corrected, "you can't define it as quantum mechanics. It doesn't have anything to do with subatomic--"

"Jet," I interrupted, leaning in close. "Go to a party." He looked at me quizzically. "Get out of the house. Do something else. Or, get some sleep. This is bordering on obsessive." I crossed my arms. ‘Bordering’ was a generous term for it. He had crossed the borderline a long time ago.

Jet laughed in the condescending manner he adopted whenever I gave him advice. As if I was too ignorant to understand his priorities. "I need this, Koskia. To have any kind of shot at a scholarship, I’m gonna need this. College isn't gonna pay for itself." He removed a piece of paper from the white binder under his textbook. I exhaled irritably.

"Look, I'm sorry," he said, looking at me through the tops of his eyes. "I just don't have a bunch of time to be wasting."

Am I wasting your time? I wanted to ask. Instead of arguing, he comforted me like a discontented child, walking over and wrapping me in his arms gently. Like I was a fragile gift he was wary of opening.

I wanted to be opened. I was no longer afraid of being torn apart; I wanted him to care enough to want to see how my smile was drowning inside of me. Instead, he pretended he had faith in his own assumptions, even while they were really only excuses for his fear of the truth.

He was friendly and forthcoming only when it suited him; only when he felt empty; only when he needed a crutch in the form of an apology. He used to be different. Back when we'd been kids of fourteen and thirteen. I looked fondly on the past; on the time I'd run from home so Jet and I could have secret rendezvous in the churchyard. We met on a bench that basked in filtered sunlight from beneath a cherry tree.

I remember our first kiss. It had been on that bench. Our feet were wet and heavy from snow. I was crying. Tears were freezing to my cheeks. They were falling like icicles through my fingers.

He’d taken my hand and kissed the center of my palm. “Why are you crying?” he'd asked me, and I told him that I was afraid I'd end up alone like the old lady on Elm Street. I would always see her crocheting something in the window. There were these people—maybe her family or distant friends—that came to her apartment once a week to visit and feed her cats. I told Jet about her. About how there were two little kids that came with the visitors. On Wednesday, when the family came to Elm Street, the kids would always run and gallop and horse around in the driveway, playing with one another. From across the road, I could hear them begging their parents to wait outside. The parents often relented.

I used to lie underneath the swing-set across the street and watch the situation play out. The swing-set was a nice place to think. The wooden swings hung overhead, swaying in the breeze like clock pendulums, stretching time like a rubber band. I liked the shadows that passed over on hot days. I liked when cars drove by and the ground seemed to vibrate underneath me, as if God had sent earthquakes to rumble through L.A.'s suburbia. They were like unanswered messages. Meant for me, or maybe not. It didn’t matter, because I was the one who heard them. Sometimes I called back, tapping morse code into the dirt, hoping that someone would at least feel like they'd been chosen to pass it on.

I didn't tell Jet about the swing-set. I stopped at the part about the kids, and by then, the lump in my throat had grown twice the size of my mouth. If I said another word, I would've puked frogs into his lap and he never would've reached out and kissed me.

I never finished my thought. I never told him that I didn't want to be the mess that people came to clean up at six o'clock every evening while their kids begged to stay in the car. I didn't want to be left in the dust like an spare earring; lost but not important enough to be searched for.

He never heard any of those things, but he leaned in close, cherries on his breath, and told me that I'd never be alone.

"You'll never be alone."

I loved him right then, as our frosty breath swirled together and my gloved hands held his face, and I never wanted anything to change.