Our apartment building is in a crappy neighborhood, and Marxy lives in a very rich part of the city, so his mother, Pearl, never lets him come over, even for something as special as my first birthday since he and I fell in love.
Pearl also thinks that Gert is a thug. That is a stupid thing to believe, I think. Do thugs go to college on big scholarships to study about money?
No, they do not. They behave like villains and hurt others, instead of saving them.
My brother is good-hearted, but Gert scares a lot of people because of his shaved head and tattoos, especially the tattoo of the skull on his forearm that is laughing and has a big red tongue, and because he doesn’t dress like someone who works at a bank or has a real job. He wears jeans and tight black shirts.
Those people, the ones who don’t trust Gert, are shit-heels and fuck-dicks, because Gert is one of the smartest people I know, and the bravest, and if we were in the past, people would be writing legends about him, no problem. If villains attacked your tribe, you would want Gert there to defend you in battle.
I also missed AK47, though, and wished she was there. I knew that her and Gert still loved each other, even if she said she hated his stupid guts and he said she was never allowed to be in the apartment again.
AK47 would have liked the Viking. He was standing in his shiny gold underwear, making animals out of balloons. He said that his specialty was dogs. “But I can do some requests.”
“What kind of animal do you want him to make?” Gert asked me.
I asked him for a dragon, since many of the oldest Viking sagas have dragons in them.
He blew up a balloon and in a second it was an almost-dragon. I held up the balloon and told him it looked good, even though it was more like a snake that had tried to tie itself like shoelaces.
“Another?” he asked.
The intercom buzzed. Gert didn’t get up to answer it, the way he usually does whenever someone buzzes. That is a rule we have: whenever Gert is home and someone buzzes the intercom, he’s the one to answer it and decide if the person in the lobby of the building is allowed to come in or not.
The intercom buzzed again. The Viking stopped his balloon and looked at Gert. I looked at Gert too.
“There is someone at the door,” I said.
“I know. Do you want to answer it?”
“But the rule,” I said.
Gert smiled. “I think this is a rule you can break today because it’s your birthday. And because I think it’s going to be someone special.”
Normally we don’t break rules, since we both like knowing how everything is supposed to work, and because I have trouble acting properly if I don’t have rules to follow. But it was true, it was my birthday, and I was now an adult and twenty-one years old.
I stood in the middle of the living room, not sure what to do.
The intercom buzzed again.
“Seriously,” Gert said. “Go answer it.”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten, one of the things Dr. Laird told me to do whenever I felt all of the rules being broken.
“You can do this,” Gert said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
I took the dragon balloon and went to the intercom box on the door and pressed the button that said TALK.
“Hello?” I asked the intercom.
“Is this Zelda?”
It was a woman’s voice. I said it was me, Zelda. Then I heard Marxy’s voice.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
I looked at Gert, talking to the Viking. He smiled over the Viking’s shoulder and gave me a thumbs-up.
He had made magic happen.
* * *
Marxy could not remember the traditional Viking greeting, but Pearl, who brought a smell of perfume with her, pointed to the sign so that he could read the House Rules.
“Remember your book?” Pearl said. “This is like a page from it.”
At his house Marxy had a book of pictures that helped him get through the day, sort of like the House Rules.
Marxy is tall and when he walks he moves his head down, like he is afraid of his head hitting the clouds. He also talks slowly and does not like looking people in the eyes, except for the people he loves and trusts. Sometimes he picks up string he finds and rolls the string into tiny balls that he likes to chew on, which is gross but when you love someone you try not to be bothered by gross things they do when they can’t help it.
A big problem is that he has trouble remembering a lot of the things he needs to remember.
Marxy was dressed very nicely, even though he was always dressed nicely. Today he was dressed like he was going to a wedding. He wore a shirt with a collar and buttons up the front. It was blue, my favorite color. His hair sat on one side and was shiny and combed.
“Gert,” Pearl said, nodding at my brother, who was still with the Viking.
“Hey.”
She looked at the Viking, her jewelry on her arm, gold rings, jangling. “And this is?”
“Thor,” the Viking said. “King of the Vikings.”
Pearl stared and then said, “Okay then. The stripper’s going to keep his clothes on, right?”
“Only balloon animals for this Viking,” the Viking said.
“You’re a stripper?” I asked the Viking. “You take off your clothes?”
“I have many talents,” he said.
“Well, keep it PG-13 for this party,” Pearl said. She handed Gert a card and told him to call her if there were any problems.
“I’ll be back in one hour.”
“We’ll try not to burn the house down,” Gert said, which was a joke, since Gert is very careful about fire in the house and doesn’t even like me cooking unless he’s around, a rule we changed after I proved I could cook things for myself like pasta.
Pearl held Marxy’s shoulders. “You can call anytime. Do you have your phone?”
Marxy showed her his phone. He bent over and she kissed his cheek.
* * *
Once Pearl left, the Viking made another balloon dragon and handed it to Marxy. I had been trying to teach Marxy how to speak Old Norse for months, but no matter how hard we both practiced, he couldn’t remember.
He even had trouble remembering the Word of Today. I started keeping track of how long he could remember the Word of Today for and learned that with smaller words he didn’t know, those words he could hold in his brain for three days. Even though his brain is probably bigger than my brain in size, there is something wrong with how it works, so actually he has less space in his brain than normal people.
For longer words, like gargantuan, he would forget the word in a day. We wanted to have a language we could speak together, one that nobody else could speak. That was why I tried to teach him Viking.
For my birthday Marxy had already given me a gift, a drawing he made of us as two Vikings. Marxy is not very talented at hands and feet and faces. I think he is very talented at showing that we are in love. And swords. Our swords look gargantuan and amazing in the picture he gave me for my birthday.
Marxy let the balloon dragon the Viking made float to the ground. The Viking scratched his hairless, sun-yellow stomach.
“Ack anne there,” the Viking said to Marxy.
“What does it mean?” Marxy asked. He picked up his balloon dragon and was petting it on his lap.