—but won’t? I guessed.
Erin rolled his eyes. What we need to ask is who’s the beneficiary? Who is it reassuring?
Not Jacki, I guessed again, filing away the word: beh-neh-fishery.
Exactly, he said, prouder of himself than of my Educated Guess.
Is that why Katy bought the apartment?
Erin frowned. Erin has a crush on Katy, even though he’s in love with Anja, who is a better programmer than him and draws in a notebook and is complicated. You have zero clue, he said.
I clicked my pen and wrote on my hand to Ask Katy If Fountain Is Fake.
* * *
*
4:12 PM. I kneel on the couch and push my face into the living room window screen. Four floors down, the cherubs on the fountain look sketched. “I bet Anja would love that fountain. She’d adore the naked cherubs,” I say.
Erin, who is also on the couch, pulls me from the screen. “You’re going to rip it,” he says.
I stop for a minute, then push in again, more carefully. “Was Anja born deaf? Is it weird that she doesn’t know your voice?”
Erin turns a page in his book.
“What does Anja draw, anyway? Does she draw you?”
He turns another page.
“Anja said she saw you signing. She knows you practice. Do you sign to her, Erin?”
Erin plunks down his book and plods to the bathroom. If Katy were here, he’d close the door, but Katy’s at work, so I listen to him pee. He pees a long time, then flushes and blasts the tap. When he returns he has two spots on his jeans where he dried his hands.
“Mindfulness is the way to save water,” I say.
Erin picks up his book. He’s in hardcore Do Not Disturb mode. But this means he can’t tell me to scooch three point eight feet away, so I scooch closer.
“Does Anja draw because she misses sound?”
Erin doesn’t even twitch. Puberty is powerful. In the window, a fly materializes. It taps and taps the glass, then drops and buzzes along the sill. “I bet Anja would let you make out with her in that courtyard,” I say.
Erin slaps his book. He’s glowering, but at the fly, which just hopped from the window to the coffee table. Erin’s a fly killer. Mother hates it when he uses a book, but books are his weapon of choice, and he’s about to bring it down. In my mind, I picture a giant hand plucking the book and frisbeeing it across the floor. But if I’m good, Erin might speak to me, so I say, “Nice! People will pay you big money when flies take over the earth.”
Erin’s eyes flick toward me, then he slams down the book and inspects The Damage.
* * *
*
“MAI, YOU cow! What’d you do that for?” Erin snatches his book sprawled on the floor and glares at me. He’s a master glarer. Which makes me think I’ll miss it if I never saw it again.
*
Whales are descendants of land-living mammals. They are the closest living relatives of hippos. The two evolved from a common ancestor around 54 million years ago. Whales entered the water roughly 50 million years ago.
—Wikipedia
Why did whales enter water and not hippos?
Will one outsurvive the other?
What happened 54 million years ago?
* * *
*
THE 787 is two point two five times as long as the biggest known whale. It holds the Guinness World Record for the longest passenger jet. Seven is a lucky number in many cultures, and so is eight. At over 40,000 feet, even the 787 is like a fly squeezed inside a giant fist of air.
Also, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was bigger than the biggest known whale, and it vanished like it never existed.
* * *
*
“ERIN, DO you think they’ll open the torpedo?”
* * *
*
KATY’S COURTYARD ends at a wall, on the other side of which is a lawn, overgrown with thickets preparing to ambush the stone house with the faded patio, two lawn chairs sunning on it. Erin says he’s seen people lounging there, but I think what he saw were ghosts.
Can you see ghosts during the day? I asked Katy when she got home last night.
You mean me, personally? Or do you mean can you see them because they exist during the day? she asked back.
Both, I said, impressed by her fine distinction, up there with Spock and Sherlock Holmes, the Greatest Descendants of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.
Well, I’ve never seen ghosts, day or night. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, she said.
Can you always see things that exist?
You’d at least see the evidence, I’d think.
Can you only see things that exist?
Katy thought about this. I hope so. But sometimes people see what nobody else does.
Like Sherlock Holmes, I said.
Heehaw heehaw. Mai’s in love with Sherlock Holmes.
I’m not in love with Sherlock Holmes.
Katy snatched my hand. Don’t, she said.
She’s been rubbing them like crazy, Erin told her.
Do they hurt? She peeled back my eyelids. It doesn’t look like conjunctivitis, but it doesn’t mean it won’t be. I’ll see if I can get some drops.
Katy’s Enlightened; she looks and also sees. But that doesn’t mean she always knows. Seeing is not always knowing, and seeing cannot always solve all problems. Humans often see only what they want to see or believe they’re seeing. Dad said that, believe it or not. Does that mean if nobody wants to see you, you don’t exist? What about if you want to see but you can’t? Or if you can hear but not see? I decided not to ask in front of Erin.
* * *
*
“GREAT. KATY’S going to kill you.”
Erin’s in the kitchen, jabbing me with his toe. I’m evacuating Katy’s below-the-sink cabinet: cleaner (chemical); dishwashing pods (chemical); recycling bag with twenty-three take-out containers plastic #6. “Did you have a good chat with Anja?”
Erin stops jabbing. He plods to the fridge and clatters out an ice cube. He leans on the counter, crunching it. The sound makes me shiver. “You’re a weirdo, did you know that?”
“You’re Prejudiced, did you know that?”
Erin walks away, and I lean into the cabinet. Then I close my eyes and open my pores and feel the cold peeling off the U-shaped pipe. The cabinet itself is warm and scratchy and smells like mold. I run my fingers over the braille of the wood, the nicks and chips like secret dimples, the damp patches like half-peeled scabs, then I touch something: a spongy nest. My fingers shriek, but I don’t let them shrink. Darkness is not the enemy; Fear’s the enemy—it’s the number one enemy of the human species. Jacki does not support Fear. Think what’d happen if you always reacted or made decisions only out of Fear. Jacki chooses to prepare by (a) doing what she can to prevent The Worst, and failing that (b) doing what she can to survive with Integrity.