Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (13 page)

“But how come?” I asked. “What does it mean?”

“It comes from the gaming world. It means someone who’s new to a game and really, really stupid,” he explained. “As opposed to a ‘newb’—spelled n-e-w-b. That’s someone who’s new to a game but who you can tell will eventually get it. But noobs?” He shook his head. “They’re just perpetually clueless. Like low-brain-cell-count stupid.”

I nodded. “Got it.” Glad to see my brother had left this part out.

Narc yawned again. “I think I’m gonna go crash for a while.”

“I thought you said you were going to get coffee,” I said.

“I was. But I changed my mind. I’m beat.” He padded toward his room. “See you later. Make yourself comfortable. We’re pretty laid back around here.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, as I looked around at the chaise lounges—the kind you saw on outdoor patios—that served as furniture in this place.

Narcs, noobs, pizza crusts, boxer shorts . . . what had I just signed up for?

I turned to Nicola. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not north of Montana anymore.”

six

Between the glass-half-fullism and the fact that he liked to put maple syrup on cornflakes, I had always thought of my brother as a little weird. But after I met the rest of his roommates? He looked as normal as someone in a J.Crew catalog.

“Okay, guys,” Max said a few hours later, after everyone living in the house had been called together via text for a house meeting. After Narc went back to sleep, Nicola and I bolted out of there. We spent the rest of the day on Abbot Kinney hanging out with Brad and brainstorming about how to tell her mom I was going to have to move in for the month until I got Max’s text. “Remember how the last few days I’ve been saying that I feel like there’s something I’ve been forgetting to do?”

The five guys sprawled around the room stopped chomping on chips and chugging Red Bulls long enough to nod. Until one of the guys—who looked to be a little younger than me and was wearing a
HARRY POTTER IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN NEW JERSEY
T-shirt—raised his hand. “Wait. I don’t remember that.”

“How can you not remember that?” Max asked. “I specifically remember saying it during the massacre in the shower as we were watching
Sorority Girl Slaughterhouse
the other night.”

Nicola and I looked at each other. The idea of my brother somehow thinking of me while watching a horror movie was a little weird.

“And then I said it again when we watching the original
Halloween
on channel eleven and the commercial came on for the My Pretty Pony doll.”

Okay, that made more sense. Back when I was six, Max and I had put My Pretty Pony in the microwave to thaw her out after I had put her in the freezer so she could cool off with some air-conditioning. Needless to say, from the funeral we had to have in the backyard afterward, it didn’t go over well.

“And then—” Suddenly, he stopped and peered at the kid. “Wait a minute. Who
are
you?”

The kid reached for some more chips. “I’m Herbert. I live across the street. I came over to give him some pointers on Death Watch Seven.” He pointed to a guy with short dreads and a soul patch sitting on the stairs trying to get his arm out from between the slats in the banister.

“Are you Noob?” I asked.

The guy looked up and nodded. “Yeah!” His forehead got all wrinkly. “Wait a minute—how’d you know that?”

“I—”

He gasped. “Are you . . .
psychic
?”

“No. I just figured it out from what Narc had told me.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. He shrugged. “Well, that’s okay. I’m not psychic, either.”

My brother looked at Herbert. “Herbert, it’s very nice to meet you, but this is a house meeting. Meaning for people who live in
this
house—not the one across the street.”

“I love that dude House,” Noob announced to no one in particular as he tried to wiggle his arm out of the banister, “You know who I’m talking about? The doctor with his own TV show? The one who walks funny?”

“Okay,” Herbert said. “I get it. I know when I’m not wanted.” He stood up to leave.

“It’s okay. You can stay,” Max sighed. Max was a sucker for the less fortunate. Which was very time-consuming when you had to walk past people soliciting money for that creepy Children International thing at the mall, because he always stopped and not only donated but then made the mistake of asking the people how they got involved in the organization.

“Cool,” Herbert said, plopping back down and grabbing another handful of chips.

“Now. Back to what I was saying,” Max continued. “Thanks to my sister, Simone, here,” he said, motioning to me as I stood next to him yanking at the hem of my dress because it suddenly felt very short, even though it came to my knees, “I remembered what it was. I forgot to tell you guys that she’s going to be staying here for a little bit.”

“What about the other girl? Is she staying, too?” Herbert asked hopefully.

“No. Nicola isn’t staying here,” Max replied. He glanced at her. “You’re not, are you?”

I could tell from the way that Nicola’s blue eyes bugged out so wide that they were in danger of turning inside out that the fact that my brother had spoken directly to her was going to appear in the next installment of the “Monumental Moments in Recent History”
section of her Tumblr. In, of course, some cryptic form so that it wouldn’t be clear that she was talking about him in case he happened to Google her and came across it (which, although I didn’t say this to her because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, probably wasn’t going to happen). After she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out, she cleared her throat. “Well, I wasn’t planning on it, but I mean, if you
wanted
me to, I guess I could ask my parents.”

Max looked nervous.

“Or, you know,
not
,” she continued. “I could just come visit. A lot. Luckily, I didn’t get that job I applied for at the mall—it was to work at one of those carts, for this Dead Sea bath salt thing, which, to be honest, I found to be a little sketchy, because even though it said ‘Authentically from the Dead Sea in Israel’ on the package, it also said ‘Made in Taiwan’ in little letters on the back,” she babbled, “so as of now, I’m totally free.“

As my brother looked at me, confused, I shrugged. So much for Nicola clamming up whenever she was around my brother. It was like someone had given her mouth a laxative.

A guy with red hair and a smattering of freckles across his cheekbones looked up from what seemed to be a very big textbook. “Max, could you better define ‘little bit’ for us?” he asked. “I think I speak for the group when I say that would be helpful.” He looked at the group. “Right, guys?”

The group looked at each other and shrugged.

The guy sighed. “Precision is such an underrated virtue. I’m Ethan, by the way,”

“But we all call him Doc,” Max said. “He’s pre-med at UCLA. We found him off Craigslist when my roommate Peter backed out when he got that gig as Ryan Reynolds’ stand-in in his new movie.”

If there was a Ryan Reynolds look-alike living here, I wouldn’t care how messy it was. I nodded. “Got it.” With his green polo shirt and brown khakis, Doc was the most normal looking of the bunch.

“I like your glasses, by the way,” Ethan/Doc said.

“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t believe how much mileage I was getting out of them. Even some homeless woman on the street had complimented me on them.

Doc turned to Max. “So. As you were saying. A ‘little bit’ would mean . . . ?”

“Kind of around . . . a month?”

I waited for a chorus of annoyed “Dude, are you
kidding
?!’s, but all that happened was that Noob let out a loud “Phew!” as he finally managed to free his arm.

For good or for bad, these guys seemed very laid back.

Over by Narc, an Asian guy wearing a Boston Celtics hat sneezed.

“God bless you,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said as he took out a tissue. “Please tell me that you don’t wear perfume,” he said after he was done blowing his nose.

I shook my head. “I don’t.” Now that I was dressing like a girl, it was probably something to look into, but I found it gross.

He sneezed again.

“God bless you again.”

“Than—” he managed to get out before another sneeze ripped through him. This one was sort of a sneeze/cough hybrid.

I waited for it to happen again, but other than a donkey-sounding throat-clearing sound, he was quiet. He smiled. “Thanks.” He turned to Max. “You didn’t mention how polite your sister is.”

“That’s because he didn’t mention he
had
a sister,” Narc said.

“Yeah, well, still—none of you guys bless me.”

“Don’t you have to be, like, a priest to do that?” came Noob’s voice from over in the corner. I looked over to see him trying, unsuccessfully, to get up into a headstand.

“It looks like he’s trying to do a headstand,” I whispered to Max.

“I
am
trying to do a headstand!” Noob called out happily as I made a mental note to remember that what the guy lacked for brains he made up in superhero-level hearing. “You know those little video screens in elevators? Last week when I was making a delivery at this ad agency—I’m doing this bike messenger gig for the summer ‘cause it’s hard to get a sculpting gig around here—I saw something that said that doing a headstand for forty-five minutes a day, three times a week, was good for your heart.”

“Are you sure it didn’t say forty-five minutes of
cardio
three times a week?” Max asked.

Noob flopped over again. “Huh. I don’t know. Maybe.” He looked at me. “I never did very well on the reading-comprehension parts of standardized tests.”

The Celtics fan sniffled. “Okay, so you don’t wear perfume, but do you by any chance wear scented body lotion?”

I shook my head.

“Huh. I wonder what’s causing this allergy attack then.”

Narc shook his head. “Dude, what
aren’t
you allergic to?” He turned to me. “That’s Wheezer.”

“You know, Wheezer, I keep meaning to tell you, I think it’s rad that you’re named after a band,” Noob said. “Especially an old-time one. You know that sweater song they sing? It’s, like, actually
called ‘
The Sweater Song’—”

“I’m not. There’s an
h
in there,” Wheezer said, “‘cause of, you know”—before he could finish, he sneezed again—“the fact that sometimes, when the attack is really bad, I start to wheeze,” he wheezed.

Nicola and I looked at each other. Allergy attacks, arms stuck in banisters—what was I getting myself into?

Nicola let out a scream.

“What?!” I cried.

She pointed to the couch. “There’s something moving underneath that blanket to the side of the couch!” she cried. In what was an excellent move on her part (albeit a very nonfeminist one) she reached out for my brother’s arm. However, in her nervousness, she overshot the mark and ended up grabbing his chest instead. Which, from the look on his face, freaked him out.

“Sorry,” she mumbled as she uprighted herself. “I was just . . . see, I . . . you know what? Forget it,” she said, staring at the floor.

He smiled at her. “That’s okay.” Uh-oh. I knew I’d be spending my afternoon listening to Nicola dissect the twenty possible meanings of my brother’s smile.

He turned to the blanket. “Hey Blush, what’re you doing? Stop hiding and say hi to my sister.”

Very slowly, the blob on the floor stood up and the blanket fell to reveal a very tall, very large, very hot African American guy. “Nice to meet you,” he said softly, with his eyes to the ground.

How a person that large had a voice that soft was hard to imagine. Also hard to imagine was how he managed to stay hidden under a blanket for that long and not suffocate.

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said shyly. He looked so uncomfortable that it was making
me
uncomfortable.

“He’s a little on the shy side,” Max whispered, “which is why we call him Blush, but don’t worry—he’ll warm up.”

I nodded. I knew what it was like to be shy. Maybe we could just hang out and be shy together and not talk.

Before I could ask if everyone in the house had a nickname and would I have to get one, too, the door opened and a guy with a shaved head and wearing an
ANARCHY RULES
T-shirt under a leather jacket and black skinny jeans came striding in. “Reason three thousand eight hundred seventy-six why I hate this dumb city—the traffic!” he fumed as he began to pace. “You’d think that at some point the brain trust here could get it together and get a decent public-transportation system up and running, but no! That would mean giving up their yoga and spin classes and fancy fresh-squeezed juices chock-full of antioxidants that make you live to a hundred and twenty, even though with the way things are going now with the government and the economy and the environment, who really
wants
to live to a hundred and twenty?!”

Scared, I looked over at my brother, but he didn’t look too concerned.

The guy stopped pacing. “Huh. I think I just broke through my creative block and came up with my next spoken-word piece.” He looked at me. “Who are you?”

“Thor, this is Simone, my sister,” Max said happily. “She’s going to be living here with us for a while. She’s awesome. You’re gonna love her. And this is her friend Nicola—”

“Who won’t be living here, but will be visiting a lot.” She looked at Max. “But not, you know, to the point where it looks like I’m a stalker or anything, because I’m totally not.” She looked at Thor. “Cool name.”

“His real name is Larry,” Narc said.

“Yeah, but what looks better scrawled in the lower right-hand side of a canvas?” Thor asked. “Larry or Thor?” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe my parents would give me such a conventional name. There’s a lot of passive aggressiveness in that kind of a move.” He turned to me. “Thor was the god of thunder.”

That made sense. “So you’re a painter?” I asked.

“Painting is one of my mediums, yes,” he replied. “But I don’t like to limit myself. I also do a lot of spoken-word and performance art.”

“
And
he plays the ukelele,” Noob said. “Isn’t that rad?”

The idea of someone so angry strumming a little happy-sounding ukelele was a little . . .

“I know that probably seems ironic to you,” Thor said, as if reading my mind. “But it’s supposed to be. I’m very into irony. It’s part of my personal artistic credo. So
what
if it’s a happy instrument? With all the war, and poverty, and corruption in this world, don’t you think we could use a little happiness? I mean, this government of ours—”

“Okay, so now you’ve met everyone,” Max interrupted. Leave it to my brother to keep things from getting heavy. “So like I said, Simone’s going to be with us for the next month. And just to get a few rules out of the way, I know she’s beautiful, but (a) she’s only sixteen,” he went on, “and more importantly, (b) she’s my little sister.”

And leave it to him to embarrass me. “What are you doing?!” I hissed.

“What?”

“I keep telling you to stop with the beautiful thing.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not true,” I hissed louder.

“It so is.”