Chapter 4: An Unasked-For Room

Samir’s apartment was on the second floor of a building that had probably been nice sometime around when his parents bought their first car. The stairwell smelled like somebody’s cooking three doors down, and the railing wobbled a little under Eli’s hand as he climbed. Samir let them in with a key on a taco-shaped lanyard, apologizing before the door was even halfway open. “It’s a mess—my mom’s on nights this week so nobody’s picked up in a while.” But when Eli stepped inside, it didn’t look like much of a mess to him. Just lived-in. Shoes piled by the door, a couch with a blanket thrown over the back, a kitchen table with mail stacked at one end and a half-finished puzzle at the other—one of those thousand-piece lighthouse ones that somebody had clearly given up on around piece six hundred.

It didn’t look anything like the Calder house. The Calder house had a whole system for things: mail sorted the day it came in, shoes lined up by the door, a calendar checked every morning. This place looked like people actually lived in it without worrying too much about appearances. And something about that—the plain, unselfconscious clutter of it—hit Eli harder than he expected. Right in the chest, before he even knew why.

“You can put your bag anywhere,” Samir said, already heading for the kitchen. “You want something to drink? We’ve got, like, three kinds of juice because my little sister can’t commit to one flavor.”

“Whatever’s easiest,” Eli said. He set his bag down by the couch, careful, like it might make noise if he wasn’t gentle with it. While Samir banged around in the kitchen, Eli looked around the room—at a shelf with photographs on it, school pictures in cheap frames. A woman Eli figured was Samir’s mom laughing at something out of frame in one shot. A little girl missing her front teeth in another. Such an ordinary wall of photographs. Eli found he couldn’t stop looking at it.

“That’s Nadia,” Samir said, coming back with two glasses of something orange. He followed Eli’s eyes to the shelf. “My sister. She’s nine. She thinks she runs this place, which—honestly, she might.”

“She’s cute.”

“She’s a menace. Don’t let the missing teeth fool you.” Samir handed him a glass and dropped onto the couch, patting the cushion beside him like it was the most natural invitation in the world. “My mom’ll be back around eight. She works at the hospital—nights this week, days next week, it rotates. My dad’s not really around. Different story, long one, not today’s problem.” He said it plain, no drama in it, the kind of fact a person states once they’ve made peace with its shape. “Anyway. Sit. You want food now, or should we wait for her? She’ll probably bring something back from the cafeteria—they let her. It’s not great, but it’s food.”

“Now’s fine,” Eli said, “if it’s not a hassle.” Samir waved that off and got up to make grilled cheese, plain and unglamorous—four slices of bread and a whole lot of butter in a pan that had clearly cooked a thousand grilled cheeses before this one. Eli ate two sandwiches faster than he meant to, faster than was probably polite. Samir didn’t say anything about it, just made a third when the second disappeared, like it was the easiest thing in the world to keep feeding somebody who needed it.

They ended up on the couch with the TV on low, some rerun neither of them was really watching. It was more background noise than entertainment, the kind of thing you put on so a room doesn’t feel too quiet. Nadia got home a while later, dropped off by a neighbor who carpooled her from some after-school thing, and blew through the apartment like a small storm. She demanded to know who Eli was, decided within about ninety seconds that he was acceptable, then commandeered the remote to put on a cartoon neither of the boys objected to. Objecting to Nadia, Eli was already gathering, was not really a productive use of anybody’s time. She fell asleep on the far end of the couch about twenty minutes later, sock feet in Samir’s lap. Samir didn’t move her, just kept half an eye on the show and half an eye on Eli, patient the way he’d been patient all day.