Hello (From Here)

by Chandler Baker

  “I assure you this playground has been sanitized to comply with the highest possible standards of cleanliness.” I stare at him blankly. “I basically poured a bucket of sanitizer over everything.”

  “That seems . . . wasteful?”

  “My summer trip to Paris was canceled. I know there are much bigger things, especially right now. But I won this scholarship to a program there and, well, it was sort of a once in a lifetime deal. So, yeah, I kind of needed to get out for a hot minute.”

  I nod, like I understand. “So then this is your Arc de”—I cock my head and shield my eyes from the waning sun—“what’s the opposite of Triomphe.”

  “Defeat?” he offers gamely.

  “Arc de Fail.” I like that better.

  He swings his feet back and forth like a little boy. “Well, climb aboard the Failure Ark, skippy.”

  I don’t budge. “Two things. One—skippy?”

  “It’s a nautical term. Short for skipper.”

  “So that explains the boat shoes.”

  He pulls his chin back, all Excuse me what? “Boat shoes are a classic American style. Like Ralph Lauren.”

  “Uh-huh.” I feel the corners of my mouth pull up ever so slightly. Because the funny thing I’ve noticed about Jonah is that sometimes he doesn’t even know when he’s being funny.

  “There was a two?” he says.

  “Two is, I’m watching you.” I point my finger at him. I’m going for formidable.

  His eyebrows skyrocket. “You think I’m just going to lunge at you? That I can’t contain myself around the gravitational pull of Maxine Mauro? That I lose all self-control, restraint, and abstemiousness?”

  He clutches his chest. And it’s all fun and games. I mean, obviously. But also, what the hell is abstemiousness?

  And I don’t know him well enough to know his tells. To know if his lip twitches when he’s trying not to laugh. Or if his ears are always pink. Or if the something behind his eyes is, in fact, something or nothing. Because it feels like it might be something.

  “We’re on a playground. Kindergarten etiquette applies. I’ll keep my hands to myself.” He makes it sound reasonable.

  I nod once, satisfied. “Well, as long as that’s settled. And as long as you’ll clean the playground good as new after we leave.”

  I wipe my hands off on my black denim shorts. If this is the most rebellious teenage activity I partake in, then I figure I’m probably doing okay. I grip the sides of the ladder up to the monkey bars—the far side, just to be safe—still warm from the day’s sun.

  I forgot that there is no “grown-up” way to get to the top of monkey bars. I try planting my foot on the side to wedge my way up, but just as I push, my flip-flop slips and my chin knocks the top bar and I yelp.

  Then Jonah’s hand is wrapped around my wrist. It’s cool and surprisingly strong. He’s leaned practically all the way over, reaching across to me, and our eyes are nearly level. Bits of gold and green catch the late afternoon light. And it’s a beat too long before I look down at our hands. Clasped together.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Shit,” he says.

  I withdraw my hand without another word, sliding back onto the top rung. It’s silent as, this time, I remember that the way to get up on top of monkey bars is from underneath. I swing my feet up through a pair of the bars. My shirt slides up to my bra, exposing my bare stomach, and I pray that Jonah isn’t looking as the blood rushes to my head. I elbow my way through and push up gracelessly so that finally I’m sitting seven feet in the air.

  Jonah has scooted over to a safe distance again. We both stare straight ahead.

  “It’s okay.” He breaks first. “It was just one touch. It was two seconds. We’re fine.”

  “We’re idiots,” I say.

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  I smile at that. He’s probably right. Or probably wrong. Both seem just as likely.

  But there’s no rewind button. No turning back the clock. The moment’s gone and what’s done is done. There’s a twist in the pit of my stomach that I can try my best to ignore as I pull out the miniature hand sanitizer tucked in my pocket and spread the gel over my palms while Jonah does the same. The whole thing is weird.

  He’s trying, at least. And I’m letting him try, which is . . . something. And even if he doesn’t know it, seeing him takes away some of the anxiety sparked by my mom’s note, by the recurring worry that has suddenly reared its ugly little head again that our life depends on balanced finances, and our finances? They might be starting to lose their balance again. So yes, does being around someone as Jonah-y as Jonah help ease my apprehension? Sure. Someone as sheltered and adorably nervous as Jonah—I wouldn’t mind a bit of that rubbing off on me.

  But then I touched him. And—hello—there is a whole other level of unease in play now and I guess the question is really whether one cancels out the other.

  I shake my hands dry over the rails. “I’m sorry your trip got canceled,” I tell him.

  “C’est la vie.” He has a nice French accent.

  I look sideways at him. Jonah’s face is tan. There’s a hint of blond peeking through his hair, a small constellation of freckles at the far point of his right cheek and across his nose.

  “Why do you need a scholarship to go to Paris anyway? I mean, can’t you just, like, go later?”

  “Not for that program.” He leans his weight back on his hands and I notice his elbows are double jointed, bending just a little too far the wrong way, and noticing something dumb like that actually makes me feel like I know him.

  “I’m saving up for a business degree. My mom took over a business a few years ago and she had to learn everything while it was happening and it was . . . it was a lot. I bet I could learn how to franchise it. And someday when I start my own business, I’ll know what I’m doing and I can hire people to help and I won’t be gone all the time.” Most of that plan was all me, but I’ll admit that it was Arlo who pushed me to be specific about what I wanted. He told me everyone should act like the protagonist of their own life and that every great heroine needs a specific goal, not a mushy one.

  “Max Mauro, famed tycoon. Has a nice ring to it.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I kick off my flip-flops and let them plummet to the ground below. “It’s more like . . . Okay, when I was seven, child protective services took me away from my mom. It was a whole thing. I set off a smoke alarm by burning a bag of popcorn in the microwave and a nosy neighbor found out I was home alone every day after school while my mom worked and then they took me and put me in foster care for a month until my mom could set up a plan to get me back.”

  “Wow. That sounds . . . wow. Were they nice at least? Is that a stupid question?”

  “They were probably nice. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t talk to them for the entire month I was there.”

  Jonah turns his face to meet mine and his eyes crinkle at the corners. “You took a vow of silence at seven years old?”

  “I can be pretty stubborn, I guess.”

  “You don’t say.”

  I look down at the ground, which feels farther away than it should. “Anyway, my point is, I want to be successful enough, have enough money so that bad things like that can’t happen to us anymore.”

  “I’m not sure it works like that.” He turns his face so that he’s once again in profile.

  “What about your mom? You said you two like to watch Winter Robbins movies. Sounds like you actually get to do the crazy thing of—gasp—spending time together,” I say.

  The breeze ruffles the hair that’s growing too long over the tops of his ears. I notice they aren’t pink anymore.

  “Jonah?”

  “What?” he asks, coming to. “Oh, yeah, she’s—yeah, she’s cool.”

  I swallow the sense of something down. Earlier
he’d seemed excited to talk about his mom, but now there was a definite wedge between me and the subject.

  “And anyway,” he says, but I think he forgets to finish the sentence. He just kind of spaces out all over again. And then, “You know . . . it’s not Paris, but the view’s not half bad.”

  Together, we look out. The sun is nothing more than a line of gold behind a row of low-slung vacation rentals in the distance. Leaning palm trees are dark silhouettes against an orange-and-violet sky. Streetlights blink on. Somewhere up the 405, beyond view, is a measure of ocean so vast, I can never quite comprehend it. Like a math problem with no solution.

  “There are definitely worse places to be stuck,” Jonah says, looking not out at the horizon, but directly at me.

  I wonder what my tells are.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maybe there are worse places to be stuck, I think. But, when I consider my tiny apartment in Huntington Beach, my mom’s and my toothbrushes side by side, a coffee table for her office, I think that some universes are bigger than others. And Jonah and I, we aren’t really stuck in the same place at all.

  One day later, I decide to initiate Jonah into my universe. “Trust me,” I tell him. “I’m doing you a favor.” I have the apartment to myself while Mom checks on the storefront, and I have the afternoon off and several hours to kill, plus a Wi-Fi connection that momentarily doesn’t suck and, so, minus the risk of data overages.

  “A T-shirt,” Jonah says over FaceTime. “That’s what’s going to make you happy.”

  “No,” I say. “That’s what’s going to make you happy.” Jonah looks skeptical. “Okay, look, if I were forced to enter a . . . marathon for boats—”

  “A regatta.”

  I pull a face. “You made up that word.”

  “It’s Italian.”

  “As I was saying, if I were forced to sign up for a regatta, you’d be the first person I’d call.” I take out a plastic barrel of neon-orange cheese puffs from the shallow closet we call a pantry and untwist the top because we buy this stuff in bulk.

  “Thank you.”

  “But quarantine, now here is an area in which I have expertise. I’ve been training my whole life. You are speaking to the master.” I give a small bow and then eat a cheese puff.

  “And now I’m concerned you’re convincing me to join a cult,” Jonah says from the comfort of his bedroom, and I do mean comfort. There’s a couch in there and an attached bathroom.

  “Put on the T-shirt, Jonah.”

  It’s kind of sweet that he steps off-screen to change his shirt, returning in one with the LA Rams logo on the front pocket.

  “I didn’t know you were into football,” I say.

  “I won it in an Instagram giveaway.” He looks down at his new outfit. “I have to be honest, Max. It feels the exact same as my polo, but I look less put-together.”

  “That’s the point. It’s a state of mind. Prepare to do . . . nothing.” I, for one, am fully prepared. I’m wearing a tie-dye shirt, my big gray sweatpants, and slippers with synthetic sheepskin lining the inside. Game on.

  He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

  “Step two,” I instruct. “Sustenance.” I wait until Jonah has had time to make the commute—yes, actual commute—from his bedroom down to his kitchen. There are stairs involved and it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to remark on the life-sized oil painting of a young Jonah that he passes in the hall. Here’s what I can make out of Jonah’s kitchen. An island, which isn’t only reserved for tropical vacations apparently; a refrigerator big enough to hide not one but two dead bodies; and a bunch of shiny appliances that are probably really expensive and do only one specific thing each, like slice hardboiled eggs or fry zucchini—honestly I have no idea. “Okay, so like with all great chefs, I have a philosophy when it comes to cooking and it’s this: If you aren’t eating stuff your dentist would be mad about, you’re not doing it right.”

  Jonah literally writes this down on a notepad.

  “You’ll need flour, sugar, milk, cocoa, more chocolate, preferably in the form of chips, but I’m not picky, and some baking soda and vanilla and whatever kind of oil you have. Got it?”

  “Should I go ahead and preheat the oven?” he asks with the innocence of a young babe.

  “God no, that would take forever.”

  On our opposite ends of the world, Jonah and I gather the same set of ingredients. I nod approvingly. “Now, dump them all in a coffee mug,” I say.

  “A coffee mug?”

  I demonstrate mine, which is shaped like Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey pot and acquired during that one ill-fated trip to Disneyland. Jonah selects a pretty blue-and-white one that he swears his sister made.

  “Now we just pop it in the microwave for three minutes and voilà—chocolate mug cake.” We click our microwave doors shut in sync and set our timers and then we just kind of stare at each other.

  There are worse things.

  “Were you ever mad at your mom for leaving you alone all the time?” he asks, a question I don’t think anyone has ever asked me before.

  “Yeah,” I answer honestly. “For a while. Other kids had parents picking them up from school or bringing cupcakes for their birthday. I knew there were kids who got to do gymnastics at the Y and take swimming lessons, and I felt kind of trapped. I didn’t have a way to get anywhere. It sucked.”

  “I feel kind of trapped now,” he says. “This whole lockdown thing sucks.”

  “Totally sucks,” I agree. “No parties, no formals, no reason to get dressed, let alone dressed up. I have a bomb dress hanging in my closet and nowhere to wear it to. Which sucks. “

  “I miss restaurants,” he says. “Takeout kind of sucks. My cooking sucks even more, though.”

  “Zoom classes are going to suck.”

  “Try being stuck for days on end with my stepmother. That sucks.”

  “I just started wearing a mask all day and trust me that—”

  “Sucks,” Jonah finishes for me.

  The microwave beeps and we both break eye contact simultaneously.

  “Hold that thought. We’re not done with our culinary lesson yet,” I warn.

  I talk him through my famous nacho popcorn made spicy with crushed Flaming Hot Cheetos.

  “Really, how you haven’t received a Michelin star yet is beyond me.” Jonah taste-tests his, which is sadly devoid of Cheetos.

  “Do you at least have whipped cream?” I ask.

  He rummages in his fridge and sticks his arm all the way to the back. “It’s probably old.”

  “It’s fine. It’s just chemicals anyway.”

  “That’s . . . comforting. For the cake?” he asks, shaking it.

  I grab my own canister. “No, it’s for our mouths. To 2020.” I cheers him and then tip my head back and spray a big dollop of whipped cream straight into my open mouth. “The year in which everything sucks. Except for cake.”

  “Except,” he says, mouth half full of whipped cream, “for you.”

  chapter ten

  JONAH

  “You may enter.”

  Olivia’s voice is oddly sonorous, and for some reason a little British, and as I push open her bedroom door, I am assaulted by a truly baffling assortment of smells: clay earthenware, wet socks, sandalwood, something acidic (malt vinegar?), and the tang of leftover salmon.

  She is in the middle of the room, her hands sliding up and down a hardening, misshapen mass spinning on a small wooden pedestal. She has no glasses on, her hair is streaming down around her face and shoulders, and she seems to be in a sort of spiritual trance, mumbling along to the tinkle of New Age music playing from her MacBook. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, though you’d never know it since the curtains are all drawn.

  “What in the hell—” I start.

 
; “The ancient art of pottery,” she says, eyes half closed. “I received the kit yesterday from Amazon. It’s my sixth new hobby since I returned, but I find this one particularly stimulating. I did order the ingredients for a charred Mesopotamian flatbread. Might try that on an open firepit in the backyard tomorrow.”

  Discarded clothes have formed a new sedimentary layer across her entire bedroom . . . most of them tangled, deeply wrinkled, and either black, gray, or a lighter black.

  “How did you use so many clothes?” I ask, amazed. “You don’t even change.”

  “I try different arrangements for sleeping, then throw them off in overheated fits.”

  I push some jeans to the side and settle onto the couch—is that a french fry?—and turn back to my sister, who has since created the rudimentary shape of a vase, eyes still aflutter. I watch her with increasing concern. Olivia has always been a little eccentric, but things are escalating fast. The bathrobes, the cookies . . . yesterday she painted an accent wall in our basement.

  “Have you considered taking a walk? Maybe a light jog at a time when there aren’t a lot of people around—”

  “Why?” She looks up at me, brow furrowing instantly.

  It’s surprisingly sharp . . . even for Olivia.

  “No reason,” I say quickly. “Kate wants me to put a grocery order in . . . you need anything?”

  “Do you? Or just a visit from a certain Maxine.”

  She really drags out the name. Max is probably somewhere cringing.

  “That would have been nice, but she’s booked up, I guess. I checked. Only some dude named Claudio is available today. But apparently we urgently need lamb shanks and polenta for tonight . . . and it can’t wait.”

  “Poor you. How do the Max visits work? Does she stand below the windowsill and cry, ‘Jonah, Jonah, let down your hair’?”

  I frown. “Are you okay? You seem particularly embittered today.”

  “And what if I’m not? The earnest young man in the throngs of courtship cares not for the plight of the world, nor for his older sister’s heartache. He cares only for love and lust.”