BLACK JEANS WERE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND. They stood out from the usual indigo. They made your legs look longer. And that dark wash was great when you were out on a date and needed to do something about greasy pizza fingers. Not that I was on a date. Was I on a date?
There was just this way that Kael was looking at me that made me wonder. The fact that he agreed to come to the party at all made me wonder. But as with everything with Kael, I couldn’t be sure.
We were still sitting next to each other on the couch. Kael’s empty plate rested on a napkin on his lap. The plate was clean and the napkin was spotless. My plate had a splinter of hard crust on it and a bit of stray pepperoni. My white paper napkin was splotched with pizza sauce. My black jeans didn’t show my greasy handprints, though. Small mercies. I wasn’t neat and tidy. Not like Kael. And certainly not like Estelle, the perfect housewife whose picture was hanging in a thick black frame above us. A black cloud was more like it. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her bearing down on me. I knew that picture well—it had been taken on one of their many vacations. My dad was next to her wearing a big smile and a Florida tan. A beachfront American gothic.
Kael leaned up to grab a pizza box. “Can you hand me a napkin?” I asked.
Another guy might have made a crack about the red sauce massacre I had going on, but he didn’t say anything, just grabbed some pizza and napkins, then leaned back into the couch cushion. I could feel the heat rising off him. My imagination was playing with that. My body, too.
“Want some?” he asked. He offered his plate, which had two thick slices, glistening with cheese.
I shook my head, thanking him.
“I see you have a new twin.” Austin pointed to Kael and mostly everyone looked at him, then me. His shirt and jeans were practically identical to mine. I thought back to the photograph of my dad and Estelle, standing side-by-side in their matching Hawaiian shirts from Old Navy, and burned with embarrassment. Kael cracked a smile, though. A very small smile, but it was there, all right.
“Ha ha,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You were gone a while, sooo—”
Laughter bounced around the room.
“Fair enough.” Austin took a bite of pepperoni pizza.
Cheese slid down the slice and he caught it with his tongue. He was so much like a teenage boy sometimes, as if he had stopped maturing after tenth grade. It was part of his draw, I guess—the innocence of him. He really did have a good soul and it was easy to see. He was the kind of boy who would start a fire and then save you from it.
I wondered if this new girl understood what she was in for, if she knew she was playing in the brush on a hot day. A pretty brunette with a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, she had deep blue—almost navy—eyes. Her shirt set off her coloring, and the style of her loose peasant top resembled her hair—ruffled sleeves falling in waves down her arms, just like the ones curled into her long tresses. She was sitting on the floor by Austin’s feet, looking up, a flower tilted to the sun. The attraction she had to him was clear as day. The way she almost willed him to turn his face to hers, to say something, anything, to her. The way her shoulders were angled toward him, pulled back to expose her long, graceful neck. She wasn’t sitting cross-legged like the others on the floor. The awkward child’s pose was not for her. She had folded one leg on top of the other, ankle to knee, and she was tilted sideways so that her legs formed an arrow pointing toward my brother. This girl was vulnerable and open. Calculating, too.
Body language could be so obvious.
Did Austin know that she was planning their first kiss, their first date?
The paper plate in his hand slipped a little and she lifted the corner for him. He looked at her, smiling, thanking her, and then she did this pouty thing with her lips, and a flippy thing with her hair. It was impressive as hell, even to me, and I wasn’t the intended target. I looked away from my brother and the girl. I’d seen this movie before.