It was arranged in a spiral with the vegetables in the very center. Her phone and huge camera lay at the end of the table, which meant she’d already put it on one of her four blogs.
“Is it all right?” Sofia asked anxiously. She crumpled a napkin in her lily white hands.
This was usually the part where people assumed Sofia suffered from heavy parental expectation. But the only thing I could tell that my aunt Lauren expected of Sofia was for her to be as stressed out as she was, and Sofia seemed to be doing that admirably.
She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.
“It’s a gross overachievement as usual,” I said. Sofia sighed in relief. I circled the table, examining it. “Did you vacuum the entire upstairs, too?”
Sofia said, “I didn’t get the stairs.”
“God, Sofia, I was joking. Did you really vacuum?”
Sofia peered at me with giant, luminescing eyeballs. She was such an imaginary animal. “I had time!”
I attacked a piece of bread with a serrated knife. Goal: sandwich.
Side effect: mutilation. When Sofia saw my struggle, she hurried around the table to help me. Like a slow-motion murder scene, I wrestled the knife out of her hand and cut two uneven slices on my own. Aunt Lauren had no problem with her being so goddamn subservient, but it bothered the hell out of me.
“What about that book you were reading?”
“I finished it.”
I selected roast beef and shaved Parmesan. “I thought you had that collage-sculpture-thing.”
Sofia carefully watched me select a very green mayonnaise.
“The first part is drying.”
“What is this? Arugula? When is your erhu lesson?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about Sofia as the whitest girl in the world taking erhu lessons. I couldn’t decide if they counted as cultural appropriation or not. But Sofia seemed to enjoy them, and she was good at it, like she was good at all things, and no one on her erhu blog ever seemed to complain, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Watercress. It’s not until tonight. I already practiced this morning.”
“How about a nap? Normal people nap.”
Sofia looked at me very heavily. What she wanted was for me to take it back and tell her that no, she was actually normal, everything was fine, she did not have to take deep breaths because this was not an emergency, this was life, and this was how it looked for everyone.
Instead, I returned her heavy gaze with a long blink, and then I took a bite of the sandwich. I couldn’t believe Sofia had spent yet another afternoon with condiments as friends.
“You should get a life,” I told her, swallowing my bite. “This is delicious and it offends me.”
Sofia looked cowed. Whatever small creature that was my guilt was pricked. And now I was thinking about how my mother kept saying the same thing to me. Getting a life, I mean.
I kept telling her I would get a life just as soon as I found people worth hanging out with. It was possible Sofia just hadn’t found anyone worth her time yet.
I said, “Look, let’s go out tonight. You can put on something red.”
“Out?” she echoed, just as I remembered that I was supposed to be going out with Cole. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but on the other hand, I could. Because it was like having a good dream and forgetting it by the time you got downstairs for breakfast.
I felt a not entirely great sensation in my stomach, like someone was opening an umbrella inside it. It was like I was afraid of Cole, but it wasn’t that. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be who he thought I was. He’d been so charmed by the idea of me in California, like the state and I would be good for each other.
I wondered what I was walking into.
“Damn,” I said. “Not tonight. I have dinner out. But tomorrow night. Red. You and I.”
“Dinner?” she echoed.
“If you keep saying everything I say, it’s canceled.” I took another bite of the sandwich. It really was an exceptional sandwich.
“Where’s your mother?”
I never knew how to refer to my aunt Lauren. When I said Lauren to Sofia, it sounded like I was being snotty. When I said your mother, it sounded like I was being cold. And I could not say your mom, because I never said the word mom if I could help it. Probably because I was snotty and cold.
“At a closing,” Sofia replied. “She said she’d be home before Teresa.”
Teresa was my mother. When Sofia said it, she sounded neither snotty nor cold. She sounded respectful and fond. What ferocious magic that was.
The doorbell rang. Sofia looked martyred. “I’ll get it.”
She did not want to get it. Getting it meant she might have to speak to whoever was behind the door, and if she spoke to them, they might judge her clothing or hair or face or skills and find any of these things wanting.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “Seriously. I’ll get it.”
Only it was a celebrity at the door. Before my brother died, he used to say that things came in threes. Three celebrities in one day. Not bad, even for the greater Los Angeles area. This one was a petite woman with a heavy brunette fringe half covering her sleepy green eyes. She was beautiful in a casual, vintage way that looked so effortless that it must have taken a long time to achieve. She was not a woman. She was a picture of a woman. It took me a moment to place her, because she was one of those third-tier celebrities who got featured in interior tabloid pages and on slow-news days on gossip blogs. Her name was something strange, I remembered. It was — “Hi, I’m Baby North,” she said. “Are you Isabel?”
She clearly thought I would be shocked into something by hearing my name, but I made it a point of pride to not be shocked by anything. Especially after my sense of surprise had pretty much been broken by the appearance of Cole St. Clair earlier in the day. I could feel Sofia behind me, though, and I could just tell that her mouth was ever so slightly open.
“Sofia,” I said, stepping out onto the too-bright front stair, “would you go check the oven? I think I left it on.”
There was a pause, and then Sofia vanished. She was not stupid.
“What’s this about?” I asked. I didn’t realize it wasn’t polite until it came out of my mouth.
“An opportunity. If you’d give me a moment, I can introduce myself, tell you who I am, what I do —”
“I know who you are,” I said. She was a very pretty vulture who reanimated corpses for web TV, but I didn’t add that part, since I figured she already knew. I had an uncomfortable feeling inside me, a sense of why she was here, and some part of me knew I wasn’t going to like it.