The Second Wren

Chapter 5: Fifty Dollars

The phone rang once. He had it at his ear before the second one.

"Hey."

"Wow," Wren said. "You're up."

"Yeah."

"You picked up on the first ring. That's a good habit. Keep doing that." A pause, the sound of her moving around a room. "Most people let it ring twice and then answer like they're doing you a favor."

He didn't explain. A phone that almost never rang did something to a person: you answered like a man who'd been awake for hours, because explaining why you hadn't been was worse.

"So where do you live?" she said. "I'll come to you."

"You're coming here."

"Is that a problem?"

"You're the one who came back. Shouldn't you already know where I live?"

There was a pause on her end. He heard her set something down.

"We weren't close in high school, Ethan."

"No," he said. "Right. We weren't."

He sent the address. Then he stood in the middle of his living room. Chair with a shirt on it. Two plates on the coffee table, ring stains under them. A paper bag of delivery containers by the door that had never made it down the stairs.

He took the plates to the sink, threw the shirt in the closet, bagged the containers, took the bag down the hall to the chute. Came back. Five minutes in the shower. Ordered breakfast from the place on the corner — one sandwich, one bottle of orange juice — and sat on the arm of the couch with his hands on his knees.

The buzzer went fifteen minutes later. He opened the door expecting a guy in a red jacket.

Wren was standing there with the bag.

"You're not the delivery guy," he said.

"I was in the elevator with him." She pushed past him into the apartment and set the bag on the counter. "I asked if he was going to 3B and he said yes, so I took it and told him he could go back down. He looked relieved. I think he was behind."

"That's—" He closed the door. "You can't just take a guy's food."

"He handed it to me."

"That's not the same thing."

"I live across the street. Cut through your parking lot. That's why I beat him." She looked around the apartment. "You don't have any pictures."

"What?"

"On the fridge. On the wall. Anywhere. I've been in this apartment twice." She walked past the couch, looking at the blank walls the way people do when they want you to notice they're looking.

He didn't have an answer for that one, so he looked at her instead, which was a mistake, because she was wearing a matte purple bomber jacket, a white tee, denim shorts, and a pair of high-tops that had been white a long time ago and had clearly been through something. He got as far as the shoes and stayed there. It was a decision he made in about a quarter of a second.

"Ehh," she said. Long, drawn out.

"I wasn't—"

"I stood here for four seconds and you didn't say one word." She took her jacket off and folded it over the back of a chair. "You looked at my legs, then my shoes, then the floor. Three stops."

"They're nice shoes."

"Stop." She sat down on the couch. "You looked at my legs for four seconds and said nothing. That's the gross part. The nothing. Not the looking."

He didn't say anything.

She watched him not say anything, and something moved in her face and then went away, and when she spoke again it was slower.

"Rule one. If you want to look, look. If you want to say something nice, say it. The hiding is what makes people feel like a creep."

He stood there with his hands in his pockets. He wanted to write it down. He could see himself doing it — phone out, thumb moving, her watching him do it — and he stayed where he was.

"Rule two," she said. "I carried your breakfast up three floors and you didn't ask if I'd eaten."

"I only ordered one."

"That's my point."

"Then—" He picked up the bag, put it down, picked it up again. "Have you eaten?"

"Yes. But you asked after I had to make you." She held out her hand. "Give me the juice."

"You just said you ate."

"I did eat. The juice is different." She took it out of the bag herself, unscrewed the cap, and drank a third of it. "There's a food stomach and there's a drink stomach. They don't vote together. Somebody says no to a whole meal and yes to a drink nine times out of ten. If you don't offer, you're the reason nobody's comfortable."

He sat down on the other end of the couch, which was as far as the couch went.

"Look," he said. "About today. Can we do—" He made a small gesture with one hand. "One day. Call it a sample. And then we reassess."

"Two rules," she said. "You get those free. The rest of today you do what I say, and I decide when we're done."

"That's not a trade. That's a—"

"It's a trade. I'm here. You're not." She stood up. "Where's your closet?"

"That's not an answer."

"Bedroom?"

"Wren—"

She was already walking. He followed her into the bedroom saying something he could hear himself losing, and by the time he got to the doorway she had both hands on the closet door and had pulled it open.

The pile came out.

Underwear, socks, a jacket, two hoodies, a shirt still in the shape of a body without a body in it. It slid down and spread and lay there.

Neither of them said anything.

Wren turned her head slowly, the way people do when they want you to watch them do it.

"Is the machine tired," she said, "or are they keeping each other warm?"

He crouched down and started grabbing things. The ones with Captain Barnacle on them were on top, of course. He got them under his arm and stood up red to the tips of his ears.

"Are you going to say something about these," he said.

"I was going to say nothing about those. Now I've seen your face and I'm going to think about it forever."

"Great."

She stepped back and let him deal with the pile. "Here's the thing. People get one look at you and they're done. That's the whole interview. A second and a half, and you don't get to talk during it. So we're not fixing your personality first, because nobody's going to stand around long enough to find out."

"So you're here to fix my—what, my silhouette?"

"I'm here to break the shape you've got." She pulled out the bottom drawer, looked at it, closed it. "Everybody at that school has already decided what you are. You don't have to become someone new. You just have to stop confirming it."

Two years at Harlow Bay High, and before that a school up in the hills where the same line went on the same form every spring—pleasant, quiet, no concerns. Nobody had ever asked him to be different. Now somebody was standing in his bedroom with her hands on her hips.

"What about that one," she said, pointing at the closet's top shelf.

He got the suitcase down. He set it on the bed, unlatched it, opened the lid, and lifted out a coat with both hands. He held it up and turned it so she could see the back.

It was long and white, red at the collar, and across the back was a red sigil in a script that only meant something if you were already in on it. A costume.

Wren looked at it for a while.

"Put that away," she said.

"It's a limited run. It's numbered—"

"Put it away and sit on the bed."

She dug through the suitcase herself and came up with a hoodie—orange, faded at the cuffs, a character in a spacesuit across the chest, a patch on the sleeve. The show had been off the air for six years. He'd stood in line four hours in a parking lot in another city to get it.

"Not that one," he said. "That one has value."

"Value to who?"

"That's—" He worked at it. "It's a collector thing. You don't wear it, you keep it."

"Nobody can look at a closet and know what you kept. Put it on."

He put it on. Thirty seconds. He turned around and looked in the mirror on the back of the door, and she was smiling, and he didn't ask why.

"Yeah," he said. "There it is."

"There what is."

"Every movie where the kid takes his glasses off. Look at me. I'm a guy in an orange hoodie. I look like a guy in an orange hoodie." He tugged the collar. "Only good-looking people get transformed by a jacket. The rest of us just get a jacket."

"You're at least a guy in an orange hoodie instead of a guy in the dark. That's a step. There are more steps."

She went out of the bedroom and across the hall. He heard the bathroom light click on.

"Ethan."

"What."

"Where's your face wash?"

"I have soap."

She came back and stood in the doorway. "You have soap and nothing else."

"I wash my face with soap. It works. My face feels tight after, which means it's clean."

"It means all the water evaporated out of it."

"That's what the internet said. The tight feeling is the cleaning."

"The internet didn't say that. Some guy on the internet said that."

"He said it very confidently."

"Get your shoes. And your keys. And your wallet."

He pulled on one shoe. "How much is all this going to cost?"

"See, that's—"

"No." He was already shaking his head. "No, that's where I get off. You show up with a bag I already paid for, you take it out of a stranger's hands in an elevator, and now there's a list. You and the delivery guy. That was a setup."

"He was not in on it."

"He looked relieved. That's what a guy looks like when he's been paid."

"Ethan." Her jaw moved. "I was going to pay."

"That's worse."

"How is that worse?"

"Because then I owe you." He said it too fast and heard how it sounded. "Forget it. Money's the one thing I'm actually careful about. It's the only thing I got from my father that works. If this costs more than fifty dollars, I'm not doing it."

"Fifty."

"Fifty. If it goes over, I stay home and you go do whatever it is you do."

She stared at him. "Fine," she said, through her teeth. "Fifty. And when I tell you to put something on, you put it on. No arguing in the store. That's the deal."

"Fine."

"Say it back."

"Put it on. No arguing."

"Also." He got the other shoe on. "Before we do whatever this is. I have questions."

"Oh no."

"You said there's no system."

"There's no system."

"Not even a menu? A stat screen?"

"I worked at a place that sold phone cases," she said. "There was a screen. It showed the schedule."

"So no lottery numbers."

"Ethan, come on. No."

"So what's the point." He stood up. "Seriously. You come back from—wherever, and there's no system, no numbers, nothing you can write down."

"Nothing useful."

"One thing. Give me one thing."

"No."

"Who wins the next World Cup."

"Argentina—" She stopped. "What are you doing."

"Writing it down."

"Ethan."

He set it as his lock screen and showed her. Then he put the phone away.

"One more. When does Hollis Ream put out the next record."

She blinked at him. She actually thought about it, which he appreciated. "He doesn't, for a while. He tours a little, and then it gets quieter. He's still out there. It just gets small."

"Does he put out anything good?"

"He puts out one thing that everybody agrees is his best and nobody listens to."

"Huh." He put the phone down on the counter. "Okay."

"That's it?"

"It's better than the World Cup."

"You can buy a lottery ticket," she said. "You can't buy that."

"I don't play the lottery."

"Of course you don't."

She picked her jacket up off the chair and put it on. Her face closed, not angry, just shut.

"You came back and you know things," he said, "and there's nothing in it. No tournament winner, no stock, no—"

"I told you one thing."

"A World Cup and a sad record."

"That's what there is." Her jacket was on now. "I'm not here about the money. I'm here about this. This, right now. Not the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"Stop." Quiet. "I'm not going to argue with you about what I came here to do."

He put his hands up.

She took a breath, let it out, and when she started again her voice was flat and businesslike, and he could tell she was doing it on purpose.

"You need a direction. Not a list of stuff. A direction, something with a shape, so that when somebody looks at you for two seconds they come away with something other than Ethan Hale, third floor, eats lunch in the stairwell."

"I eat lunch in the stairwell because the cafeteria's loud."

"Case in point. You're proving it while arguing with it." She leaned against the counter. "Give me a name. Anybody. An actor, a ball player, somebody from a show. Somebody who's already the thing. I'll tell you if you can pull it off."

"That's stupid. Nobody builds a person out of a name."

"Everybody builds a person out of a name. Give me one."

He didn't want to do this. He hadn't wanted to do any of it. He was standing there with his keys in his hand and an orange hoodie on, which was its own kind of answer.

But she had her chin on her fist and she was waiting, and there was a pressure in being looked at like that, and something in him wanted to put a card on the table just to see how she'd pick it up.

"Julian Pryce," he said.

Her hand stopped on the counter. She looked at him for two blinks, her mouth open on a word she didn't say.

Two nights ago he had gone through her photographs and counted the shoulders and the backs of heads and the one face turned around. He didn't know what the two things meant together. He knew there were two things.

He heard himself start talking over it. "He's—look at him. He's good at everything and he doesn't make it weird. People like him without deciding to. He plays piano, he's got the whole—" a noise that meant the haircut and the jaw and the family, "—the whole thing is finished. It's a finished product. Why would you build from scratch when there's a finished one right there."

"Really," Wren said.

"Yeah."

"You want to be Julian Pryce."

"He's the obvious answer. He's everybody's obvious answer."

She looked at the counter for another second. Then she picked her bag up off the floor and put the strap over her shoulder.

"You know what this is like? You've got a thousand hours in Glitterheart and you think it's going to help you in Ashfall."

"Glitterheart has good mechanics—"

"It has clothes. Ashfall has clothes. That's the whole overlap." She was at the door. "It's not a difficulty thing. A game like that, you have to be bad at it for a long time and keep going. You don't want to be bad at anything. You want somebody to tell you it's fine to stand there."

"Okay, that's a little harsh—"

"You're a passenger, Ethan. You've been in the passenger seat of your own life so long that if somebody doesn't get behind the wheel, you're going to sit in the driveway with the engine off."

He didn't have an answer to that.

She had her jacket collar up and her hair was catching on it and she wasn't going to fix it, and she went into the hall.

He stood in the kitchen with his keys in his hand.

He got as far as "I didn't say—" at the empty doorway. Then he grabbed his wallet off the counter, checked for his key, and went after her. One of his shoes was still loose and he didn't bother with it until they were out on the landing and the elevator was coming up.

Wren was looking at the numbers over the door.

He stood next to her and fixed his shoe and didn't say anything else.

The elevator came. She got in and pressed 1. He got in after her.

"Monday," she said. "You come to school in something that isn't gray. If you don't, I pick, and you don't get a vote."

"I don't own anything that isn't gray. Except this." He looked down at the hoodie.

"Then I pick."

The doors closed.

"Fifty dollars," she said.

"Fifty."

The elevator started down. Neither of them said anything.