17. Sloane
Sloane
The thing nobody warns you about a fake relationship is the paperwork.
Not literal paperwork — though there is a literal list, and the list has eight rules, and I have read all eight of them often enough lately to suspect I’m using them as a worry stone.
I mean the maintenance. The constant low-grade administration of a lie you’ve started telling well enough that people have stopped checking it.
We have a Thanksgiving problem, technically.
The break is in two weeks, and a fake girlfriend who vanishes for a week without a story is a fake girlfriend people start asking about, and so we are, as of tonight, supposed to be “ironing out logistics,” which is how I have ended up on the floor of the Raven House living room at nine on a Tuesday with my back against Beau’s couch and my entire friend group arranged around me like this is a thing we do now.
It is, apparently, a thing we do now.
I don’t remember agreeing to it. That’s the part that unsettles me.
There was no meeting, no vote, no moment where someone said let’s start spending our evenings at the hockey house — it just accreted, the way these things do when you stop guarding the door, and now Wren’s got her feet in Cash’s lap on the other couch and June’s reading in the good armchair like she pays rent and Margo is in the kitchen doing something to Theo’s cooking that Theo is allowing, and I’m on the floor, and it’s warm, and I am suspicious of how much I don’t hate it.
“You’re doing the thing,” Margo says, appearing with two mugs and folding down next to me.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you sit in a nice room being happy and your face files a complaint about it.”
“My face does not file complaints.”
“Your face is, right now, as we speak, filling out the form.” She hands me a mug. “Drink your tea and be a person.”
Beau’s across the room being captain at a video game, which is to say losing a video game with great dignity while Cash narrates his failures, and every so often his eyes find me on the floor and do the thing they do and I look away before mine can do anything back.
This is the part I haven’t worked out how to manage.
The public stuff I can manage. The public stuff is choreography — I’m good at choreography, I’ve been blocking my own movements through rooms since I was nine.
It’s the private stuff that’s started to slip, the unscheduled hours like this one where there’s no audience to perform for and we keep being a couple anyway.
There’s no one here we need to convince.
Wren, June, and Margo know it’s fake. Cash, Wyatt, and Theo think it’s real but they’re his people, not a crowd, and you don’t perform for your people.
So whatever this is — me on his floor, him finding me across the room, the warmth I’m filing complaints about — it isn’t the plan.
I know exactly what it is. I have a rule about it. The rule is in pen.
“Beckett.” Cash, from the couch, pointing the controller at me like a microphone. “Settle something. Beau says you can name every Sondheim musical in order. I say no human can do that and he’s lying to seem cultured.”
“Why would naming Sondheim musicals make him seem cultured to you? You set your own eyebrow on fire.”
“That was one time—”
“It’s framed in the hall, Cash, I walked past the photo on the way in. Someone laminated it.”
“Wyatt laminated it,” Theo says, from the kitchen doorway, deadpan, holding a wooden spoon.
“Because it’s a historical document,” Wyatt says.
“Anyway.” Cash waves all of them off. “Sondheim. Go. Prove the captain right or expose him as a fraud, I’m fine with either outcome.”
I don’t even have to think about it. “Saturday Night, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion.” I pick up my tea.
“I left out the ones where he only did lyrics, because if I’d included West Side Story you’d have pretended to know it, and I didn’t want to give you the win. ”
The room is quiet for a second.
“I’m a little scared of you,” Cash says, with deep sincerity.
“Good.”
Across the room, Beau is looking at me over the top of his controller with an expression I’ve decided not to catalog, and he says, to Cash, not taking his eyes off me, “Told you.”
“Okay, but here’s what I want to know,” Margo says, settling in with the relish that means she’s about to start something. “How does a hockey house this size have negative groceries? There is a single egg in that fridge. One. It’s been in there long enough to have opinions.”
“That’s Theo’s egg,” Cash says.
“Why does Theo have a personal egg?”
“I don’t have a personal egg,” Theo says.
“You labeled it.” Wyatt doesn’t look up from his phone. “There’s a Post-it. It says Theo’s. On an egg.”
“Because someone keeps eating my eggs, so I bought one egg, and I labeled it, to make a point about the egg situation in this house.” Theo says this with the flat gravity of a man presenting evidence in court. “It’s working. The egg is still there.”
“The egg is still there,” Margo agrees, “because no one wants the sad labeled egg of a man who’s clearly unwell.”
“I’m extremely well.”
“You have an emotional support egg, Theo.”
“Okay,” I say, because someone has to, “this is the most functional dysfunction I’ve ever witnessed, and I grew up around real commitment to the form. The egg stays. The egg has earned its place. It’s the only one in this house with a clearly defined boundary and I respect it.”
Theo points the wooden spoon at me. “She gets it.”
“She gets the egg,” Cash says, mournful, like he’s lost something. “Beau, your girlfriend sided with the egg.”
“She’s right, though,” Beau says, easy, from the floor. “The egg’s got a boundary. That’s more than you’ve got.”
And the room dissolves into Cash defending his boundaries — he has many, he insists, they’re just flexible — and I’m laughing, the real one, the one that gets all the way out before I can put it back, and across the chaos I catch Beau watching me laugh with a look I’m not going to catalog, and I let myself, for one second, not catalog it.
The thing I do catalog, because I can’t help it, because reading rooms is the one skill that never switches off, is Margo and Theo.
They’ve been at it since we got here. Low-grade, constant, the kind of bickering that runs under a room like a current — Margo reorganizing his kitchen with the breezy confidence of a woman who has never once doubted she’s right, and Theo, who guards his space the way a dog guards a bone, letting her, which is the part that doesn’t track.
Theo doesn’t let people touch his things.
I’ve watched him relocate his own water glass three inches because Cash set it down wrong.
But Margo’s moved his entire spice situation, alphabetized something, and told him twice that his sauce needs acid, and instead of throwing her out, he’s standing at the stove adding lemon, jaw tight, saying nothing.
“You’re welcome,” Margo says, not looking up from whatever she’s now doing to his cutting board.
“I didn’t thank you.”
“You added the lemon. That’s a thank-you in your language. You’re very fluent in passive-aggressive gratitude, it’s honestly impressive.”
“It needed acid. You being right about it is a coincidence.”
“Theo.” She turns, leans back against his counter — his counter, the one he wiped down twice — and looks up at him, all six feet four of him scowling down at all five feet five of her, and the air between them does a thing the air between people does.
“It’s okay to like that I was right. It won’t kill you. Probably.”
“You’re standing in my workspace.”
“I’m aware of exactly where I’m standing.”
And neither of them moves. He doesn’t step back and she doesn’t step away, and they hold it a beat too long, a beat that has nothing to do with the cutting board, and then Theo turns back to the stove with a muscle going in his jaw and Margo smiles to herself like she’s won something, and I think, oh.
Oh, that’s going to be a problem for somebody.
Not me. Not tonight. But somebody.
“Stop reading the room,” Margo says, dropping back down next to me without missing a beat, and I realize she clocked me clocking them.
“I don’t read rooms.”
“You read rooms like other people breathe. What did you see?”
“Nothing,” I say. “A man adding lemon.”
“Mm.” She steals a sip of my tea, unbothered, but there’s color high on her cheeks that wasn’t there a minute ago, and she doesn’t say anything else about it, which from Margo — who says everything about everything — is the loudest thing she could possibly do.
Here’s the thing about the Raven House that I didn’t expect, that I keep not being ready for: it’s easy.
I am not built for easy. Easy is suspicious.
Easy is the thing that happens right before the floor opens.
I grew up in a house where the temperature could change between the front door and the kitchen, where you learned to read a room the second you entered it because the reading was the difference between a fine night and a bad one, and I have never once in my life walked into a space and just — let my shoulders down.
Chen has been trying to get me to drop my shoulders in Stage Movement for two years. The Raven House does it without asking.
It’s the noise, I think. The specific texture of it.
Four people who’ve clearly been loud at each other for years and have nothing underneath the loudness but loyalty, and it fills the room in a way that doesn’t require anything from me, and I can sit in the middle of it being warm and filing complaints and nobody needs me to perform okay because nobody’s checking whether I am.
I notice I’ve stopped cataloging the exits.