The call
Chapter 7
S O P H I A
"Shopi" my aunt sing songs from the driver's seat, drawing out the nickname the way she always does when she wants something"Tell me what happened"
It isn't exactly a surprise that she wants to know.
I have, after all, stormed out of that house like it personally owes me something.
Marched down the main hallway then taken a wrong turn somewhere past the third corridor (because of course I have, because the house is that absurd, so large that entire rooms sit empty just to exist, apparently,
one of which contains nothing but a floor-to-ceiling mirror and the specific echo of someone who has never once in their life been told no) managed to exchanged the politest goodbye I could physically manufacture,
and then folded myself into the passenger seat and stared straight ahead like the windshield had personally wronged me.
My aunt has waited exactly four minutes before starting.
Impressive restraint, honestly.
"Why didn't you get the measurements?"
I turn the question over in my mind.
Because the man who lives in that architectural monument is the single most insufferable human being I have encountered in twenty years of life.
Because he smiled at me like I was a mildly entertaining puzzle he'd already solved. Because he called me a nobody in front of his sweet little sister and was acting as if I would personally hurt her or some bullshit and then looked at me like I was the unreasonable one for caring.
"He had work to do" I say instead, my jaw tightening around the lie.
My aunt makes a sound that suggests she finds this answer incomplete but is choosing, for now, not to pursue it.
Then my phone buzzes in my lap.
I read it twice. Then a third time, just to let the words sink in.
"Shopi"
"Sophia? "
"Earth to Sophia"
"Sorry ...what?"I look up. My aunt is watching me from the corner of her eye . Her lipstick is slightly smudged on one side."Why are you smiling like that? "I am?
I touch the corner of my mouth without thinking and apparently confirm it, because her eyebrow arches with the precision of someone who has been waiting for exactly this.
I probably look like a sixteen year old who has just received a text from her first crush.
Which is mortifying. Because the reality is considerably more straightforward ,I am simply relieved.
New city, new school, new everything, and somewhere in the chaos of the last few weeks, I have apparently managed to find one person who feels like solid ground.
That is worth smiling about.
"I'm not smiling"
"You absolutely are"
"It's just a friend asking me to hang out tomorrow" I say, locking my phone and sliding it into my bag. "That's it"She makes the noise again and then lets it go, which is the thing about my aunt: she knows when to press and when to simply let information marinate.
I turn to look out the window. The sun has finished setting while I was inside that house, and the city has slipped into the particular blue gold of early evening .
The hour where everything looks slightly more like a memory than a moment.
Palm trees move in the warm breeze, slow and unbothered, their silhouettes dark against the fading sky.
The small shops lining the boulevard have turned their lights on, spilling amber across the pavement.
A flower stand on the corner is closing up, the owner wrapping bundles of something white and fragrant in paper.
Two kids on bikes cut across the road, laughing at something neither of them bothers to explain.
It is, I think reluctantly, a beautiful city.
I am still deciding how I feel about that.
The rest of the drive passes in a comfortable quiet.
My aunt fills the silence with old stories about her and my mum.
Then she talks about the house, about the scope of the project, about the ceiling in the east wing and the original tilework in the entrance hall that has made her press both hands to her chest and say "oh, absolutely not,
we are not covering that" Her voice carries this energy of someone who has just been handed exactly the kind of problem they were born to solve, and watching her light up from the passenger seat, I feel something warm move through me , genuinepride.
She deserves this. She has worked for it in the quiet, unglamorous way that most people never see.
I am so happy for her.
I just wish I could be entirely happy.
Because underneath the evening light and the palm trees and the promise of tomorrow, something sits uneasily in the back of my mind, small but persistent.
One thing is clear. Lorenzo isn't going to just leave me alone. Now that he knows I need something from him, he won't just give it to me like a normal person. No. I bet he's already imagining all the things he'll make me do just to get those stupid measurements
Men like him never do. Their egos are so enormously large because something in them requires an audience, and I have made the mistake of refusing to be one. I have pushed back. I have walked away. And in the particular ecosystem of someone like him, that isn't an ending.
That is an opening move.
I look back out the window.
The city glitters.
And then I see it.
In the side mirror bright headlights. Coming fast. Insanely fast, the kind of speed that registers in your body before your brain has processed it, a pair of lights cutting through the dark like something that has never learned what a speed limit was and has no intention of finding out.
"Jesus ..."
My aunt's hand flies to the steering wheel as the car tears past us a dark shape, low to the ground, engine snarling and she hits the brakes hard enough that I grab the door handle on instinct.
For a second, neither of us speaks.
Then the car ahead pulls slightly over, and my aunt exhales through her nose "Can you believe that?" she asks, her voice stretched thin over barely contained fury.
I stare at the rear lights disappearing into the distance.My heart racing under shock.
"That" she continues, pulling back into traffic, "is exactly why there are so many accidents. Because people like that think speed limits are suggestions. On a fifty zone. A fifty zone, Sophia."
"Mm" is the most I can offer. Something tugs at the back of my mind. I might be wrong, but that just looked like the car from the Calloway estate driveway. But it doesn't have to mean anything.
It probably doesn't.
We get home twenty minutes later, and I go straight upstairs, drop my bag on the floor, and sit on the edge of my bed.
Where Prince is already waiting. "What a day" I tell him, scratching behind his ears.
He tolerates it with the grace of someone accepting something they consider beneath them but will allow on this occasion."
I genuinely wish I had your life. "He blinks.
I take that as agreement.And then my phone rings again this time it's a call from Maria.This late ?
I stare at the screen for a moment.Before I pick up.
"Hello? "
"SHOPIII"I pull the phone away from my ear fast enough to avoid the worst of it, but not fast enough entirely. "..hiki girl.... "She screams sounding completely different.
"Are you drunk?" I ask.
"No! I'm just ... I'm just having fun... "The background noise is enormous. Music, voices, something with a bass line that makes the speaker crackle. She is shouting over all of it and still barely audible."You should come ..."
I check the time.
Half past midnight.
Which is actually shocking, now that I see it. I have lost track somewhere between the measuring tape and the drive home and whatever that was with the dark green car. I have been at the Calloway estate for hours without registering it. I am choosing not to examine what that means.
"I can't" I say. "I still have to unpack, and it's already... "
"Shopi don't be a baby"Maria's begging.
I am formulating a response to that when the phone shuffles muffled sounds, Maria protesting and then a different voice comes through, cleaner, closer.
"Give that to me. Sophia. Hey. It's me."
"James ?" I ask, with maybe a bit too much excitement and surprise
"Yeah. Maria called me too." A pause. The music in the background is slightly less deafening from wherever he is standing."Listen ...it's completely fine if you want to stay home. Genuinely. But if you want to come, I can pick you up."
He would pick me up?
I look at Prince.And he looks back at me with the expression of s cat that is hungry and annoyed at the same time becaus I woke him up.
"What do you think? " I ask him.
"...What? " James says.Bringing me out of mz thoughts.
"Oh ...not you. " I stand up, walk to the window, and look out at the street below.
I press my lips together.
Think, Sophia ...you don't like parties, but at the same time, girl, you need some new friends.
"Okay" I say.
"Okay?" he asks. Not because he didn't hear me, but because he wants to make sure I really mean it. "Yes. Sure. Why not" I am already moving toward the wardrobe. "But not long. We have a test tomorrow. "I can't see him, but I know he is smiling.
I text him the address. Get changed in four minutes into a simple dark jeans, a white top, and my hair up in a bun like I always have.
Then I turn to the photo on my dresser.
It has been there since I unpacked the first box. The first thing I took out. My parents, smiling, somewhere with a lot of light behind them. My mother with her hand raised against the sun. My father laughing at something just off-frame.
"Mum. Dad." I press my fingers to my lips, then to the glass. "I promise I won't drink"I love you.
My aunt is still in the living room, reading glasses on, a cup of something herbal steaming on the side table.
"Aunty, I'm going out for a couple of hours"I am already pulling on my shoes. "I'll text you the address. Don't worry."She looks up over her glasses. Assesses me"Not too late" she says.
"I promise" I lean down and kiss the top of her head. "Bye"
James is already waiting outsid, leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets, wearing a plain black shirt and dark jeans nothing deliberate about it, nothing performed and somehow still looks like someone who knows exactly what they look like.
Some people are just like that. It is deeply unfair.
"Let's go" I say, walking toward him.
His eyes drop to my feet and he laughs out "Are those flip flops?"
"Yes" I say. "Why?"He opens the passenger door for me without answering, which I decide to count as respect.
"Nothing" he says, walking around to the driver's side. "You look good. Get in."I get in.
And then I actually look at the car.
"Okay" I say.
"Wow"
"Thanks, it's a ..."
"Porsche 918 Spyder" I run one hand lightly over the dashboard interrupting him mit sentence "I know"He pauses with his hand on the gear shift and looks at me with an expression that tells me that he dident expected my knowledge about cars.
"How do you..."
"My dad loved cars"say it simply, looking straight ahead through the windscreen.
"He used to show me pictures of the ones he dreamed about. "
The sentence lands in the car quietly. Jason is smart enough to let it.
He starts the engine and pulls out into the street without saying anything else, which is exactly the right thing to do, and I like him a little more for it.
Minuts later, we reach the edge of the city.
The building sits at the end of a long access road that feels like it belongs to a different decade an old warehouse, enormous and dark, its walls tagged in layers of graffiti so dense it has become its own kind of wallpaper.
Around it, more structures: low, industrial, windows long since emptied of glass.
The whole area has the particular atmosphere of a place that has been important once and has since been quietly forgotten by everyone except the people who need somewhere to exist outside the city's official hours.
I get out of the car and stand for a moment, looking at it.
"This is a trap" I say. "You're going to kill me. Or sell me. One of the two"
James smiles. "It's behind the warehouse. "He says and leads me around the side of the building, through a narrow passage where the graffiti presses close on both sides, and then the sound hits me first following by the lights.
The space behind the warehouse opens wide much wider than anything the front has suggested. A vast concrete lot, open to the sky, surrounded by low walls and the bones of old machinery. And it is full.
Hundreds of people, maybe more all clusters near the edges, groups pressed together, movement everywhere.
A DJ booth has been set up on a raised platform at one end, lights sweeping overhead in slow arcs of red and white.
Smoke drifts across the ground, low and atmospheric.
Cars are parked in careful lines along the far wall, dark and gleaming , the kind of cars that cost more than most people's apartments.
And motorcycles.
I count at least six, near the center of the space, a cleared circle of concrete around them.
"Why are there motorcycles?" I ask confused scanning the bikes.
When I turn back to lokk at him I see him Opferung hus mouth but he gets interrupted by a loud shrill voice "SHOPHIII"Maria materialises from the crowd like a small, extremely enthusiastic force of nature with her hair loose, eyes bright, a red cup in each hand,
moving toward us with the particular energy of someone who has been having exactly the kind of night she planned.
She throws both arms around me, sloshing something over the rim of the left cup.
"I'm so happy you came" she presses one of the cups toward me, grinning.
"No thanks" I smile back. "I don't drink"
"I'll take it"James says, appearing at my shoulder, and lifts it smoothly from between us.
I am about to remind him that he shouldn't drink when he is supposed to drive, but at the same time he places the red cup on a random table and winks in my direction.
I smile before I look back to Maria noticing that she doesn't miss a beat.
She grabs my wrist and turns toward the center of the space, practically vibrating.
"You guys came just in time... " she shouts over the music. "I thought you were going to miss it"I look around at the crowd, at the cleared circle, at the motorcycles with their engines idling low.
"Miss what? "I ask.
"The show" Maria grins.