8. Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin #2
After work, Henry went out on a mysterious errand, so I figured the best way to learn more humanisms was by watching more TV. Henry said most of America was raised by television sets anyway. (I was not yet adept at the art form known as “sarcasm,” so I took this as fact.)
While I was in the kitchen getting a “glass” of water, Topher must’ve walked on top of the remote.
When I returned to the couch, a brown-haired woman with wide eyes and an array of red sweater dresses worked hard to put on a Christmas carnival.
In the next hour, a different brown-haired woman with wide eyes and an array of sweater dresses worked hard to put on a concert.
Then a bake sale. Then a charity auction.
On and on it went like that with various handsome men appearing one moment to argue in a lovely bed-and-breakfast and the next to kiss outside in the snow. As the hours ticked by, I tried out some of the phrases I’d heard on repeat.
“You look beautiful tonight,” I said into the mirror by the door.
“Can I have this dance?” I said to the coatrack.
“We’ll never get this done in time!” I shouted at the fridge.
“Let’s take a walk in the snow,” I said to Topher, needing something more animated to play off of. At the time, I had no idea Topher’d had a harrowing experience with a cat leash in the past, which sent him running for cover under the couch at the mention of the word “walk.”
While attempting to coax him back out with some treats, there came a noxious buzzing. The source was a slatted box affixed to the wall beside the front door. When I pushed the button on it, a voice broke through. “Henry? Open up! It’s me!” The voice was muffled yet slightly familiar.
I stood guard at the door. Topher slunk farther beneath the couch. “Who is me ?” I called back.
“Henry? Why do you sound like that? Open up. It’s Alexa!” At the familiarity of the name, I pushed the other button that seemingly unlocked the downstairs door.
The hole in the top of the apartment door proved useful in confirming her identity once she’d clomped her way up to the landing.
Through the warped glass, Alexa with the black hair and the dark eyebrows and the pale skin from the soap stand stood unmistakably on the doormat holding what appeared to be a gift basket.
Figuring my safety was assured, I opened the door. “Hello.”
“Oh, hi,” Alexa said, looking me over. “Is Henry in?”
“In where?”
“In there,” she said, squinting her eyes at me. “Is he home?”
“Oh, no. He’s not.”
Suddenly, Topher brushed my leg, angling for a way out.
“Oops, I better come in before he gets away,” Alexa said, easing herself inside and shutting the door behind her. I awkwardly stepped back and nearly tripped over an antsy, mewling Topher. He hissed before darting off.
“I came to drop off some soap. Where is Henry?” Alexa asked, looking around. Her motives seemed untied to the wicker basket she thrust at me, but I couldn’t ascertain further than that.
“I’m not sure,” I said, because it was the truth. All Henry had said was that he needed to “run out for a bit.”
Alexa’s eyebrows—which appeared painted much like my mannequin ones—converged. “What are you doing here all alone?”
“I live here.”
She stopped meandering and glanced back at me. “Really? You two are serious?”
“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes we make jokes and have fun.”
Alexa tilted her head like Topher did when Henry talked to him. “And how long have you two been ‘making jokes and having fun’?”
“Two days,” I said. “Or forty-eight hours. Or 2,880 minutes. Whatever’s easiest for you to understand. Can I get you anything to drink? Water in a glass, perhaps?”
Taking this as an invitation to stay, Alexa stripped off her fuzzy black coat and handed it to me. As I’d seen Henry do before, I hung it on the coatrack. “Do you have anything stronger than water?”
“Water is a liquid, and solids are stronger than liquids. Would you prefer a solid? We’ve got plenty of those. We have ice,” I said, placing my cupped hand beneath the dispenser connected to the freezer and grabbing several cubes. The cold didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might.
Alexa sat down at the kitchen table. “You’re a goofball, huh?”
I didn’t know what she meant but it didn’t sound like a compliment, so I dropped most of the ice cubes in the sink and a few others at my feet.
Topher dutifully came over and lapped at them on the linoleum.
I laughed nervously. Alexa was Henry’s family.
I needed her to like me if I planned to be perfect for Henry.
“Water in a glass will be fine,” she said. “You said you and Henry have been together for two days and you live here already?”
“Where else would I live?” I asked, setting down her chilled glass of water. “I don’t know how to build, and I don’t have any money.”
“You don’t have any money?” she asked.
“Should I?”
“Oh, you’re funny,” she said without a smile or a laugh. She tapped her nails on the side of her glass, not once moving to take a sip. “Where did you two meet again?”
“In Isla’s Attic.”
“Mm-hmm. When was this exactly?”
“Two-thousand eight-hundred—”
“Alexa!” The door opened with a thud. Henry stood in the entryway, appearing panicked. “Hi! Sorry! What are you doing here?” His voice climbed steadily in volume and in pitch.
“You ran from the mall before I could give you some soaps,” she said, standing and retrieving the basket from the couch where I’d stashed it.
He held the basket as if it were a wounded bird that might peck at him any second. “You never give me soaps.”
“Oh, stop,” she said with a playful smack that seemed to only crank up his confusion. “Anyway, I should probably get going. Sid is making dinner tonight. Lasagna. Yum! But it was lovely chatting with you, Aidan. This has been very enlightening. Bye.”
She pranced out the door.
“She didn’t even touch her water,” I said, staring forlornly at the glass on the table. Was I a bad host?
Henry didn’t even take off his shoes before asking, “What did you say to her?”
“First, I said, ‘Who is me?’ Next, I said, ‘Hello.’ Then, I said—”
“Skip forward a bit,” Henry said, flopping down on the couch. “Did she ask you anything personal?”
“I’m a person, so aren’t all questions person al?” I asked.
“You didn’t tell her about yourself, did you?”
“No. All I told her was that we met two days ago and that I live here because I’m not a builder and I have no money.”
Henry’s palm slapped the middle of his face. “Oh, boy.”
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
Henry’s phone lit up and played a psychedelic-sounding song. “It’s my mom,” he announced. “Damn, Alexa works fast.” More chimes rang out from his phone.
“What did she do?” I asked.
His cheeks reddened as he tapped at his phone again. “She told everyone in the family that I’m seeing you. That we’re living together!”
“Those are both true statements,” I said.
“Yes, but without context, it sounds like I’m going through a rapid, unsettling rebound,” he said.
“It’s like this: Alexa saw the store the morning you destroyed it.
She thought I was having a tantrum, or a breakdown.
Everyone has been walking on eggshells around me since Cam broke it off.
They think I’m sad, volatile. I don’t know.
Alexa has always looked for reasons to one-up me.
We’ve been in competition forever. She’s beating me to the altar with a jock who despised me in high school. Now she wants the store.”
“Why?” I asked.
“There are some people you love through animosity.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Life makes no sense!” His phone started blaring again. He threw it across the room. “Gah, I have seven different who is he texts and three voicemails. What am I going to tell them?”
“The truth?”
“Never!” His eyes lit up in an unnerving way I hadn’t seen before. “But we can invent a truth…”
“So lie?”
“You have an exceptional moral high ground for someone so new at this humanity thing,” he crowed. “You have no backstory, no history, no past. We can invent you. From the ground up. You can be anyone I want you to—I mean, anyone you want to be.”
I perked up at this. “Can I be the president?”
“What? No.”
“An astronaut?”
“Definitely not.” He blanched. “You can be anyone normal you want to be.”
“Okay, then I think I’ll be the town mayor.”
Henry shook his head incredulously. “Oh, boy. Let me get a pen. But first…”
He made a show of opening the Christmas dinner invitation from Alexa in his email. With a few swift taps, he RSVP’ed Yes for “Henry Aster” and “Aidan”…
Carter.
Backspace.
Wright.
Backspace. Backspace.
“No, hold on. I got it!”