Birds of California(3)

“In here!” her sister Claudia calls back.

She finds them sitting in Estelle’s den watching TV and wearing identical Korean sheet masks, highball glasses of ginger ale sweating on malachite coasters on the coffee table. Brando, Estelle’s dozy pit bull, snores happily on the sofa between them. “Hi, sweetheart,” Estelle greets her—at least, Fiona thinks that’s what she says. With the mask on her face it’s hard to tell. Estelle has lived next door for as long as Fiona can remember; she isn’t the casserole-making kind of neighbor, but she left Lean Cuisines on their doorstep for a full month after their mom took off.

“How was school?” Fiona asks Claudia now, perching on the boxy arm of the midcentury sofa. Fiona dropped out when she was fourteen, and she loves to hear the details of what it’s like for her sister, the more mundane the better: the menu options in the cafeteria and who got in trouble for talking in study hall, which of her teachers is the best dresser. Part of it is just that Fiona loves Claudia desperately, but more than that is the mysterious allure of actual high school, which feels like either a disaster she narrowly avoided or a glamorous vacation she missed due to illness. Maybe both.

Claudia peels off her sheet mask, revealing the same high cheekbones as Fiona and a spray of freckles scattered across the bridge of her seventeen-year-old nose. “Stultifying as usual.” She’s still looking at the TV, where a busty nurse in oddly low-cut scrubs is yanking a shaggy-haired doctor into an empty exam room while a soulful acoustic cover of an eighties pop hit plays in the background. “Although a kid in my AP Chem class got suspended for lighting a Pop-Tart on fire inside his desk.”

Fiona blinks, both at the anecdote and at the television. “Wait,” she says after a moment, registering for the first time the broad slope of Sexy Doc’s shoulders, the familiar quirk of his mouth. Right away, and very stupidly, she feels her cheeks get warm. “Is this—?”

“‘A genius in the operating room,’” Estelle intones, echoing the tagline on the dramatically lit billboards plastered all over LA. “‘A fool in love.’”

“Oh my god.” Fiona laughs, but only to avoid some other reaction. She steals another quick glance at the TV. “This show is an abomination,” she says, though she hasn’t actually let herself watch it. The entire conceit of The Heart Surgeon, as far as she can tell, is that the title character—a handsome and charismatic savant with an international reputation for greatness—cannot keep his dick in his pants.

“Don’t be mean!” Claudia chides, bumping Fiona’s knee with her shoulder. “It’s good. I mean, it’s bad-good, but it’s still good.”

“Uh-huh,” Fiona says, leaning forward to take a sip of Claudia’s ginger ale. “See, now that’s what they should put on the billboards.”

“I’ll grant you it’s not exactly Masterpiece Theatre,” Estelle concedes. “Still”—she points at the doctor, who’s pulled his own shirt off to expose a six-pack you could use to scrub grass stains out of your dirty laundry—“one might argue the aesthetics are equally pleasing, in their way.”

“Fiona dated him,” Claudia reports, reaching over to rub Brando on his smooth pink belly.

That gets Estelle’s attention. “Did she, now?”

“False,” Fiona corrects. Sam Fox—the eponymous Heart Surgeon—played Fiona’s cool older brother on Birds of California; he starred in a couple of teary YA adaptations for Netflix after that, then turned up as a three-episode love interest on virtually every network drama before finally landing what is, according to People magazine, his big leading-man break. Not that Fiona reads People magazine. Or Sam’s IMDb page. Because she doesn’t. “I definitely did not date him.”

Claudia looks unconvinced. “But you kissed.”

“One time,” Fiona reminds her. “And I don’t actually think it counts if it happens in between getting kicked out of a Wendy’s for flashing the assistant manager and falling off the stage at the MTV Movie Awards.”

Estelle tuts. “You should have worn different shoes that night,” she muses.

“Oh, for sure,” Fiona agrees, nodding seriously. “It was the shoes that were the problem.”

“Well, my darling, I think it’s fair to say they didn’t improve the situation.” Estelle peels off her own mask, chunky bangle bracelets jangling on her delicate wrists. Estelle was a costume designer for MGM in the seventies and eighties and still dresses like it, all scarves and patterns and designer separates in bright, jazzy jewel tones. Two of the three bedrooms in her house are full of rolling racks crammed with immaculately preserved vintage gowns, which she’s promised to Claudia after she dies and not one second sooner. “And if you didn’t date him, you should have. He’s delicious.”

“He’s symmetrical,” Fiona counters. “And freshly waxed.”

Estelle fixes her with a look that suggests she isn’t entirely buying it. “There are worse things to be.”

Fiona glances down at her own scruffy Converse and the baggy denim jacket she stole from her dad and supposes she doesn’t have much to say in rebuttal. On TV, Sam and the bosomy nurse are still going at it, his bare back tan and muscular, his big hands cupping her face. Fiona ignores the weird, involuntary thing her stomach does at the split-second flash of his tongue, then stands up and nudges her sister gently in the side. “Homework in half an hour,” is all she says.