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  Month 2 (August)

  Elijah

  “Okay, so, once you beat the eggs, just chop up the carrots and the bell peppers and add them to the mix,” Samantha said as she leaned back against the fridge.

  I went through the motions, hammering my cleaver down on the orange and red vegetables across the cutting board situated on my counter. The air conditioner hummed nearby, cooling the heat from the sizzling skillet of turkey sausage and the empty pan next to it slick with avocado oil.

  “No, those are too chunky,” Samantha said. She reached over and took my hands by the wrist. “Hold it like this,” she said, raising my hand slightly. Her hands were soft and smooth around mine, and I flinched, but I didn’t push away. “And go for swift, fine slices, like this. If they’re not the same size, they won’t cook as fast or as evenly, and the texture will be all wrong.”

  “Never thought about food texture before,” I admitted, feeling her breath on the back of my neck. She was wrapped around me, the softness of her curvy body pressing into my lean frame. I could feel her hip-dip through her dress, and the faint beginnings of her breasts were evident against my shoulder.

  “I think about it a lot, honestly,” she said, her face next to mine as we looked down at the cutting board. Her cheeks weren’t quite pressing on my own, but it was inching ever closer second by second. She was warm and delicate, the floral scent of her perfume perking up my nose. “Now, slowly, evenly.”

  I let her hands guide me through the motions, allowing the cleaver to carve through slices of carrots and peppers in thin, delicate chops and leaving them in small, proportional pieces. “You’ve got a real delicate touch,” I said as I turned my head and found my face, my eyes and my lips in particur, less than half an inch from hers.

  She flinched, and she pulled her hands away from mine, and she pulled her body away from mine. A hollow feeling erupted within me as she retreated. Her face was redder than the peppers, and her hazel eyes were downcast even as the morning sun made them sparkle.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Fine, just… Just forget it. You might wanna get back to cooking, though -- give that sausage a stir.”

  “Right,” I said, shaking my head and trying to put it out of my mind. Probably better this way.

  I added the veggies to the egg mixture, then poured it onto the empty skillet. The aroma went through the air, instantly making my stomach rumble and sering my concentration on the task at hand. Better to put useless thoughts away and concentrate on what I could do.

  Like learn to cook. Given all the free time I had tely, it seemed like a good thing to do. And Samantha had offered to teach me -- she’d been picking up the skill herself recently as part of her whole ‘wanting to eat healthier’ kick. Combined with everything else she was doing, it was paying massive dividends: she looked fantastic. Colr-length raven-bck hair curled and tied back and framing her smooth, cute face beautifully, and a loose-fitting bck dress draped over her milky body. Seriously, how someone managed to stay so pale in southern California was a mystery to me, but…

  No, no, none of that, I thought as I stirred the eggs and vegetables together. The heat was on a low setting, so the eggs would cook slowly enough for the vegetables to sauté as well. According to my new teacher, it was best to take things slow most of the time, let them simmer until they were ready so as to keep them as nourishing as possible.

  “How’s the job hunt going?” she asked as I stirred the contents of the pan.

  “Interviewed at a burger pce,” I said.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Well, they wanted to test me out by having me try making a burger.”

  “And?”

  “And I accidentally set it on fire,” I grimaced.

  “Ah,” she said with a light chuckle. “Hence the sudden request for a lesson.”

  “I mean, that’s part of it, yeah,” I said.

  “Oh? And what’s the other part?”

  I shrugged. “Wanted to hang out with you.”

  “Aww, thanks,” she said, pacing back and forth across the kitchen. “So, you’re sure your parents won’t mind me being here?”

  “I mean, they probably won’t find out,” I said, watching the egg mixture solidify. “When do I add the cheese?”

  “Now,” she said. “Remember -- not too much, or it becomes a lot less healthy.”

  “Right,” I said, grabbing a small fistful of grated parmesan from the small pte next to the stove. I tossed it haphazardly onto the eggs.

  “No, no, not like that,” Samantha sighed.

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll get stuck on the pan, and you won’t get as much of the fvor out of it,” she said. “You need to be gentler with this stuff. Take it slower.”

  “I… Dammit, you’re right,” I winced, angrily jabbing at the cheese melting on the metal with the wooden spoon.

  “Boy, what did I just say?” she deadpanned. She reached over and said, “Gimme that, I’ll try to salvage this.”

  I relented, and she went about scraping the cheese off the metal and into the eggs.

  Eventually, it was done, and we had ourselves two veggie omelets with a side of turkey sausage. We sat down at my kitchen table, and I took an enormous bite of food.

  Not bad. Not great, but not bad.

  “What do you think of your food?” I asked, looking up and instantly regretting it when I saw her face contorting. “Yeesh. That bad, huh.”

  “Just… Just too chewy. Must’ve let it simmer for too long,” she said, forcing another bite into her mouth and cringing again.

  “Okay, but you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it --”

  “I want to,” she said.

  “Coulda fooled me.”

  “It… I want to like it, I really do --”

  “But…”

  “But it’s not quite working.”

  “I was too rough, huh?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Figures. I always apply too much pressure --”

  “Hey, c’mon now,” she said. “You know what you did wrong, and now you know how to improve. That matters a lot more than beating yourself up. Now, I dunno know about you, but I was raised to believe that if someone invites you into their home and feeds you, you eat every bite they put in front of you. So I’m gonna finish this pte.”

  “Samantha --”

  She shoved another forkful into her mouth. It was like watching someone gargle with lemon juice.

  “Is it really that bad for you?” I asked.

  “The taste itself is fine,” she said, hand covering her mouth. “It’s the mouth-feel that’s off.”

  “My apologies.”

  “Hey, it’s cool,” she said, still cringing. “You’ll get there.”

  She chewed and swallowed, and looking at her there, doing that nonsense for me, putting up with my inept ass… I had a real friend in her.

  Now all I had to do was avoid screwing it up.

  ***

  “Fuck!” I said as I fumbled the wires again.

  “Language, dear,” Mom said from across the dinner table, not bothering to look up from a patient’s chart that she’d photocopied and brought home.

  “Just… try again, mijo,” Dad said, frustration boiling off of his hunched posture and gravelly voice and tapping fingers.

  Before me, standing between me and my dinner, was a simple closed-circuit involving a battery and a lightbulb. Easy. Basic stuff. The kind of thing elementary schoolers were given when they first learned about electricity. And my useless fingers and trembling hands kept fucking it up.

  All of this was compounded by my total inability to even get a freaking part-time job so I could at least have some extra money going into trade school, but I couldn’t even manage that much because I was a complete fucking failure, an utterly useless person with absolutely nothing going for me.

  “Mijo,” Dad said, “try again.”

  And I did.

  Nothing.

  “I just don’t understand why it isn’t working,” Dad said.

  “You’re the electrician.”

  “And so are you.”

  “Am I, though? Am I really?”

  “You got any other ideas for what you’re gonna be?”

  I stared at him bnkly.

  “Didn’t think so,” Dad said. “Try again.”

  I tied the wires around the end of the battery, and looped it around to the end of the lightbulb, silently praying that God would be so merciful as to let there be light on this one occasion. Mom and Dad had always had a pretty simple policy growing up: no dinner and no television until my homework was complete. And in this case, a very basic electrical task that I would be expected to know how to do going into my first semester, was the homework.

  I held my breath.

  I finished the circuit.

  And THANK FUCKING GOD THERE WAS LIGHT!

  “AY! There we go! My boy’s got the touch!” Dad said, cpping me on the back way too hard with one hand and passing me a pte of cold pork chops and peas with the other.

  “... Yeah,” I said, “Do you mind if I heat this up?”

  “Go right ahead,” Mom said, still reviewing patient charts, not even looking up.

  That was nothing new. She’d always done that. So had Dad, albeit usually in terms of reviewing manuals and magazines to keep up to date on the test innovations. So why was it starting to bother me?

  Maybe it was because I was home more often. I didn’t really have a ton to do right now besides clean up around the house, but my inability to get a job was clearly bothering them, alongside the fact that I wasn’t very good at the thing I was going to start studying in a few weeks. And I was as frustrated as they were by all of that, but it all coalesced with them just… never really being home and not really talking to me much when they were home… into this general atmosphere of my not feeling like an actual part of my own family.

  Can’t say I was crazy about it.

  Can’t say I particurly wanted to bring it up to them, either.

  So instead I just put my food in the microwave and drummed my fingers on the counter. Our kitchen was spotless -- thanks to my efforts -- and while it was small, it housed a lot of good memories: birthday dinners, family get-togethers, holidays.

  Part of me wanted to ask why things were different now, but I already knew: I was an adult now. I didn’t feel like one -- not even remotely -- but my parents were treating me like one.

  And I guess this was what that looked like.

  “Any pns for the evening?” Dad finally said something non-work-reted as I sat back down with my pte.

  “Gonna hang out with Samantha,” I said. “Mind if I borrow the car so I can pick her up at work?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” Dad said.

  “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with this Samantha girl tely,” Mom said, finally looking up from her work. Of course.

  “Uh, yeah, now that you mention it, I guess I have,” I said after swallowing a mouthful of food.

  “What does she do?” Mom asked.

  “She works at the comic shop I go to,” I said. “Her uncle owns it and she helps him run the pce.”

  “Oh. Well, hopefully she’ll have something else lined up soon,” Mom said. “Those pces don’t make much money, you know.”

  I flinched. “Yes. I know.”

  “Where are you taking her?” Dad asked.

  I shrugged. “Movies. Not really pnning on seeing anything specific -- just gonna head over there, see what the showtimes are, grab some snacks beforehand. That kind of thing.”

  “Keeping it casual -- probably for the best.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

  “You’ll be starting school soon, going somewhere in life. You won’t have a ton of time to date a girl with no direction.”

  I squinted. “First of all, she and I aren’t dating --”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Sure you are,” Mom said in her fttest tone possible.

  “You… You guys know that men and women can just be friends, right?”

  They locked eyes with each other, having some sort of silent conversation I wasn’t privy to. Finally, they both nodded, and Mom said, “I think it’s much easier said than done. But I know that we raised you to be an honest person, so if you say this girl is only a friend, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “She is,” I said. She was, right? I guess I hadn’t given a ton of thought to the idea, but… She was a real cutie, I couldn’t deny that part. And I did love spending time with her, talking to her. We talked… basically every day at this point, either over the phone or through text messages if we weren’t around each other face to face. And hell, I hadn’t really told my parents this part, but I usually invited her to come over on her lunch breaks to eat with me. She gave me a cooking lesson, we’d shoot the breeze, talk about what we were reading. That kind of thing. Was I doing that to be a good friend or because…

  Because…

  Well, I knew why. I was doing it to make her smile. And because I liked being around her. Nothing complicated about it. Did that mean…

  Did I…

  “Does she know that?” Mom asked, pulling me out of my confused haze. “Because… a girl can sometimes get the wrong idea when a boy is extra nice to her.”

  “The reverse is also true,” I pointed out. “Remember in seventh grade when I thought Riley Drysdale had a crush on me because she gave me a pencil when I lost mine.”

  “Vaguely,” Dad said.

  “All too well,” Mom nodded. “But you still haven’t answered the question.”

  I blinked, and I thought long and hard. “I… I have no idea.”

  “I see,” Mom said. “You might wanna find that out, just set the boundary now.”

  “Uh…”

  “I mean, you’re assuming our son won’t catch feelings for this girl given sufficient time,” Dad said.

  An image floated across my mind’s eye: Samantha and I in a darkened movie theater, a horror movie pstered across the screen, Samantha jumping with fright, my arm slowly wrapping itself around her body, her head resting on my shoulder.

  A warm, magnetic feeling went through me, like she was really there, like I really wanted to…

  To…

  Another image appeared in my head: her face inching closer and closer to me, her lips puckered up, my lips pressing against hers…

  The warm and fuzzy feeling burst into an explosive heat, felt in every cell in my body.

  Huh.

  Did I like Samantha?

  Could I? Was I allowed to? What were the rules here, for dating in general, for dating…

  Well, for dating a girl like her?

  Didn’t feel like a question I was allowed to ask, and I somehow doubted my parents would be super knowledgeable on the subject given the complete dearth of understanding I’d been given by them.

  I scarfed the rest of my dinner, then said, “I have no idea if she sees me as anything more than a friend. And if it doesn’t come up, I’m not gonna ask, because that would make things awkward.”

  “It’ll be a lot more awkward if you start --”

  “Guys, enough!” I snapped. They’d been rgely unwilling to talk to me for months, and now this of all things was what they wanted to pick my brain on… What the hell?

  “Watch the tone, mijo,” Dad said with a stern voice as the light reflected off his gsses.

  “... Sorry, sorry --”

  “Yeah, you should be!” Dad said. “You don’t talk to us like that! We raised you not to.”

  “I said I’m sorry --”

  “And you need some consequence for your behavior. No car tonight. Take the bus, or get a rideshare,” Dad said.

  My jaw dropped and I gred, but neither of them budged an inch. So I breathed out and said, “Fine. I’ll be back te. I’ve got my keys, so don’t wait up for me.”

  “Have a nice time!” Mom said with a forced expression of cheer.

  ***

  Samantha

  “-- So yeah, that’s why you should read it,” I said, gesturing to the single-issue in the customer’s hand. I stood behind the counter and smiled, confident I’d done my part in bringing attention to an underselling title.

  “Okay, but like… What is it about?” the customer, a short and stocky teenage boy with nappy hair and a scrunched-up face, asked while tilting his head to the side.

  “Oh, uh,” I stumbled. Had I really not described the plot at all? Dammit. What had I even told him? “Okay, so, you see, there’s this guy, right? And he has to go on a quest to save his girlfriend, but his girlfriend gets possessed by a space ghost --”

  “So it’s a horror story?”

  “Well, kinda --”

  “So it’s sci-fi?”

  “It has sci-fi elements, yes, but it’s more of a murder mystery --”

  “Nothing about that sounds mysterious.”

  “But it is, because the space ghost was murdered by a space bounty hunter --”

  “So how much space stuff is there?”

  “A lotta space stuff,” I said. I had him on the hook -- this was good.

  “I hate space stuff,” he said.

  FUCK! “I mean, there’s also a strong central love story at the heart of it --”

  “I don’t really give a shit about romance,” he groaned. “You know what? Forget it. I’m gonna go somewhere else.”

  “But --”

  He put the comic back on the shelf of newly arrived issues. “Seriously, just forget it --”

  “Hey now, let’s not jump to conclusions,” a familiar voice spoke out. The bell rang as the door closed behind Eli, and he sauntered in, grabbed the issue off the rack, and leaned on the counter. “How’s it going, friend?”

  “Uh… Who are you?” the young man said.

  “Just a discerning connoisseur of comics and graphic novels, and I gotta say, you are missing out if you pass on this one,” Eli said. “You into mysteries? Horror?”

  “Yeah, I like those,” the young man said. “But I don’t really go for sci-fi or romance.”

  “Those are just fvors for this comic,” Eli said with a wave of his hand, locking eyes with the young man and flipping through the pages of the issue. He stopped near the middle, at the scene of the protagonist looking through a crime scene at his apartment with a crashed UFO in the background through the window. Ghostly images of suspects in the disappearance blurred in and out in sketchy, harsh images, while the vanished girlfriend loomed over the scene as a giant head. “Look at this surrealist shit -- isn’t that the wildest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “That is pretty wild,” the customer said, hand on his chin. “But what about the writing?”

  “Oh, the writing is rock-solid. Very good fair-py mystery -- you can figure it out as you go if you look at the evidence hard enough, but it’s not too obvious. Legit, I thought I was onto something, but the end of the first volume threw a wrench in my theories. Like, genuinely mind-blowing stuff.”

  “It’s already out in trade?”

  “Two volumes are, yeah,” Eli smiled. “C’mere a sec.”

  I looked at him in awe as he led the young man over to the indies shelf and grabbed two volumes off of it, and as he kept telling him more and more about until the young man was purchasing both volumes of the book AND the three uncollected issues. He waved good-bye to the customer as he left, and the customer waved back. I smiled at Eli, unable to blink, unable to take my eyes off of him. “That was amazing!”

  “Nah.”

  “No, seriously, it was! You just closed a sale in under five minutes. I’d been working on that guy for a half hour and was making no progress at all. That… That was so cool!”

  He flinched, his mouth opening just a crack but a dearth of words escaping from betwixt his lips. He looked down at his shoes, his feet shuffling awkwardly on the floor. It was… Honestly, it was adorable. He could shift from effortless confidence and charm to the dorkiest person I’d ever seen within seconds and it was…

  Fuck, it was cute, alright? That feeling of seeing a vulnerable side to someone incredibly cool. Maybe it was reminiscent of that morning, too, when I was trying to teach him to cook. He wasn’t great at it, but he threw himself into it immediately.

  He tried. And he wasn’t afraid to fail. It was more than I could say for a lot of the people I’d met. Including myself.

  The sheer depths of the red zone into which the store had plummeted armed behind my eyes, and I blurted out, “Do you want a job?”

  “Yes!” he excimed, his smile lighting up like someone had flipped a switch. Then he tilted his head. “Wait, are you allowed to do that?”

  I scrunched my brow, tilted my head to the side, and shouted, “Hey, Uncle Paul!”

  A bored breathing combined with a creaking of joints that pumped cortisol through my brain like a Biblical flood reached out from the stock room as Uncle Paul lumbered towards us. I really hoped he didn’t protest. He seriously needed to rest more. And yeah, taking on another employee might not be the most immediately prudent pn, but if Eli’s sales skills were what I thought they were…

  “Hello, Elijah,” Uncle Paul said. “Good evening, niece. What’s going on?”

  “Can Eli have a job?” I asked.

  Eli said, “I completely understand if that’s not something you guys can do right now --”

  “Can you start tomorrow?” Uncle Paul said.

  Now it was my turn to blink. Huh. I’d expected that to be way harder.

  “Hell yeah, I can!” Eli said, cpping his hands together. I sighed dreamily at his enthusiasm.

  “Awesome,” Uncle Paul said, rubbing his shoulder and wincing in what looked an awful lot like pain. “You start at 10 AM. That’s when we open. I’ll have your paperwork ready to go. Samantha can show you the ropes. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great!”

  “Told you I could make it happen,” I said, grinning and side-eyeing my new coworker. “I got connections. I’m a powerful dy, a real mover and shaker --”

  “I’d expect nothing less from someone as cool as you,” Eli said, leaning against the counter and resting his cheek on his fist.

  My heart sounded inside my chest. It was then I realized I’d be spending almost every day going forward with this cute, charming, cute, thoughtful, cute, hardworking, CUTE young man.

  Perhaps things were on the up-and-up.