Lucky Caller(3)

“Did she also give you a vat of radioactive waste? ’Cause that might help things along,” Sidney said. I nudged her with my foot, but Jamie just huffed a laugh, and then it was quiet again among the four of us.

“How’s … stuff?” he said eventually, looking at Rose. She was always the default.

“Stuff is good,” Rose replied.

He shifted a bit closer to where we were sitting. He really did seem taller. And broader, maybe? I would go down to the gym with Rose to use the ellipticals sometimes, but I never saw him down there.

“Still working at Bagels?” Rose said with a smile.

Bagels was a shop in the big strip mall by the Target uptown, sandwiched between a UPS store and a kids’ clothing store. It technically had a real name—The Bagel Company or something like that—but the sign hanging above the place simply said BAGELS in bright red letters. So we just called it Bagels and left it at that. You had to say it like there was an exclamation point after it, though, like jazz hands were implied: BAGELS!

“I am,” Jamie said.

Sidney looked up from her book. “Can you get us free bagels?”

“They usually sell out, but I could bring you a bag of leftovers sometime if they have any. It helps if you like pumpernickel or jalape?o though because those are usually the only kinds left.”

Sidney wrinkled her nose.

Jamie looked back at Rose. “So … Do you like college so far?”

She shrugged noncommittally.

“How about eighth grade?” he asked Sidney.

“No one likes eighth grade,” Sidney replied.

One corner of Jamie’s mouth ticked up. “That’s fair.”

“How about you?” Rose said. “One more semester, and then you guys are done. Got big plans? Anything fun coming up?”

“Not really.” He shifted from one foot to the other for a moment, and then: “Oh—I’m, uh, taking that radio class.”

“Oh! So is Nina.”

He glanced at me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. Meridian North High School’s radio broadcasting class was open only to seniors and was reportedly one of the most fun electives you could take.

“Cool.” A pause. “Hey, you’ll probably be great at it. You know, because of your dad and stuff.”

My dad hosted a breakfast radio show in San Diego—Conrad and Co., KPMR 100.2, mornings from six to ten thirty.

“I mean, I don’t think it’s … genetic or anything,” I said.

Jamie bobbed his head, smiled tightly. “True.”

Silence.

Mom crossed into the living room with the cookie platter, and Rose hopped up to join her as she placed it on the dining room table.

“Sorry,” Jamie said after a moment. “For just showing up in the middle of … an important thing.” He grimaced a little. “I told Gram we shouldn’t bother you guys, but…” He trailed off.

“It’s not like it was a surprise,” I said. “I mean. You were a surprise. You guys. Coming here. But we basically knew already about…” I waved a hand.

“Good.” He nodded. “That’s good.”

It would never not be awkward around Jamie. The trick was to spend as little time with him as possible. So when Rose came back with cookies, I got up to get some too. He didn’t follow.



* * *



That night I stared up into the dark recesses of the ceiling in the room I shared with Rose and Sidney and knew deep down that I should’ve tried harder with Jamie. Like asked him what he was up to besides working at BAGELS!, or if he had picked out a college yet. Was he even planning to go to college? I didn’t know, and peeling back the layers on why that was baffling and sad was too much for this time of night.

There’s something a little sad already about going to bed on Christmas. You know it’ll be 364 days until the next one. And Christmas at our apartment building, the Eastman, was one of my favorite times of year. They piped Christmas music into the lobby 24/7. There was a massive white tree decorated in gold and silver with a sprawling pile of gold-and-silver-wrapped boxes underneath it. White poinsettias everywhere. It was a historical building—more than a hundred years old—and it felt at its most authentic at Christmas, I think.

We had lived there for years. I had some early memories of the house we had shared with our dad before, a one-story place on the east side of Indianapolis, but the bulk of my life thus far had taken place in our two-bedroom at the Eastman. My mom took the smaller room—it was barely big enough for a bed and a dresser. The three of us shared the other room, which was larger due to a small bump-out in the back where the room abutted the elevator and the laundry room. I remember fighting Rose for that space when we were little—she was ultimately triumphant, but more fool her, because she had to learn to sleep through the sounds of the washer and dryer (at the far wall) and the sounds of the elevator (immediately adjacent). The elevator dinged when the doors opened, and we could hear the whir of it going up and down the eleven floors of the Eastman all hours of the day.

It dinged once faintly now, and I could hear the shift of the doors opening on our floor. People getting back late after an extended family Christmas, maybe, laden with gift bags and leftovers.

It had been a good Christmas overall. It was our second one with the Dantist. Last year, he gave us each a Polaroid camera and all the fixings—packages of film, photo albums, kits for decorating. We had since dedicated a portion of our wall to Polaroids—the first one was a blurry shot of the five of us, Sidney’s face the only one entirely in frame, everyone else just a chin or an eye or a corner of forehead.