Sean Olin - Reckless Hearts

Just the thought of telling Elena how he felt made Jake’s heart swell until it almost cracked in half. Immediately defensive, he said, “She’s my friend, that’s all.”

“She’s your friend whose pants you want to get into. Unless you’re lying to yourself, too.” Taking another nip from his flask, Nathaniel stared at Jake like he was trying to break him. “I don’t think that’s true, though. ‘Don’t hate me for loving you’? You know exactly how you feel.”

Jake didn’t know what to say. Nathaniel was right, of course, but he didn’t seem to understand how sensitive and complicated the situation was.

“I know how it goes, man. I’ve been there,” Nathaniel said.

“Have you?” Jake said shyly.

Nathaniel smirked knowingly. “Here’s the thing.” He handed Jake the flask again. “Drink up.” As Jake forced himself to swallow down a little bit more of the rum, Nathaniel laid it out for him. “You can go on following her around forever, making puppy-dog eyes, knotting yourself up inside, dying a little bit every time she mentions some other guy, but you’ll never get what you want that way. You’ve gotta make your move. That’s the only play.”

Maybe it was the rum or maybe it was the fact that they were in this intimate space that had once been Nathaniel’s and was now Jake’s, or maybe it was just that Nathaniel seemed so much more self-confident and successful at life than Jake, but Jake felt like he could trust him, like he had something to learn from his new stepbrother. “If I never make a move, she can never reject me,” he said, admitting his deepest fear.

“So let her reject you. Then get on with your life,” Nathaniel said. “There’s a lot of fish in the sea.”

Jake knew he was right, but that didn’t make the truth hurt any less. He nervously picked out the few bars he’d written of his new song.

“There you go,” Nathaniel said. “Sing your heart song. And stick with me. I won’t steer you wrong, brother.”

By the nextday, Elena’s new Jake-less reality had begun to sink in. She sat on the tile floor in the living room, cradled in a misshapen pink-and-yellow polka-dot chair pillow that just barely fit in the space next to the tree, tooling around on her computer to distract herself from her sister’s television program and, hopefully, escape the funk she’d fallen into since Jake had moved away.

The show today was Hoarders —even worse than Storage Wars .

As Elena bounced back and forth among BuzzFeed and Twitter and her own AnAmerica page, which was still racking up likes and comments now, three days after she’d posted her latest animation, she couldn’t help but track the gist of what was happening on the show. A woman in her forties who rescued cats to com-fort herself from all the ways she couldn’t rescue herself is confronted by her worried parents after they discover that the house she lives in is so overrun that she’s now sleeping in her garage.

The thought that Elena was supposed to find this entertaining disgusted her, but she wasn’t about to say anything to her sister. Nina loved it. She sucked on a giant candy cane and periodically popped it out of her mouth to click her tongue at the outrages the show paraded across the screen, shaking her head, bugging her eyes at Elena.

“Ay-yi-yi-yi!” she said.

Elena smiled in recognition and checked her AnAmerica page. A new comment popped up. Some guy going by the handle Harlow. “You’re the best artist on this site,” he said.

A grin broke across her face. She didn’t get compliments like this all the time, and it felt good to be singled out. She wondered who this Harlow guy was.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

“Love the way you reference those seventies posters of big-eyed children.”

She was surprised to see that he had caught the reference. She hadn’t realized that anyone but her even knew those posters existed. Commenting back, she said, “Big-eyed kids. Good catch. So sad and yet so sweet. Thanks for the shout-out.”

“These people!” said Nina, gawking at the TV. “How do they live with themselves?”

Elena didn’t know where to begin answering this question. She looked at the nest of cast-off clothing Nina had strewn around herself, the glass-topped coffee table Nina had crammed with food like a buffet table from hell: takeout tacos, three more candy canes, Diet Pepsi, Cheez-Its, and the pineapple she’d been craving nonstop lately. Elena could see the seeds of a Hoarders episode taking root right here in her own house.

She wanted to say, Nina, look at yourself before you start judging other people. Think about what you’re doing to your unborn child . But this was just too mean. She knew that her sister was in real discomfort today. She’d thrown up all morning. Her ankles were so swollen that she couldn’t even fit socks over them. Feeling bad for her, Elena had made a promise to herself to be cheerful and kind and to baby Nina today in the way she knew nobody else would. Trying to play along with her sister’s mood, she said, “It’s good that she’s getting help. The producers are going to give her a whole new house. I just worry about what will happen to all those cats.”

“The cats!” Nina said. “It’s just too much!”

“Mmm,” Elena said as she scanned an article about Scarlett Johansson on Flavorwire. She tabbed back to AnAmerica to see if Harlow had responded to her comment yet. He had.

“They remind me of the graffiti I saw last time I was in Paris. Big-eyed kids are making a comeback there.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never been to Paris,” she wrote.

“We can change that,” he responded.

This made her smirk. “Oh yeah? How are we going to do that?”

“We’ll take my private jet.”

She smirked again. This Harlow guy was fun. But he couldn’t possibly have a private jet, right?

Before she could respond he shot her another message. “JK.” Then another one. “Who’s the emo boy?”

“Jaybird?”

“Yeah.”

“A friend.”

“Boyfriend?” he asked.

Elena knew he was fishing. Before answering, she pulled up his user profile in a separate screen and scanned it for signs that he might be a creep. There wasn’t a lot there. His profile picture was an aerodynamic cartoon motorcycle with giant jet boosters flaring out the back. Under likes, he’d listed “ Cowboy Bebop , Studio Ghibli, getting lost in foreign cities where I don’t know the language,” and, mysteriously, “trouble.” She decided to risk it. She hadn’t flirted with anyone in a long time.

“No. Just a friend,” she wrote.

His response came immediately. “So let’s go to Paris.”

“We’ve already covered this,” she said.

“Right. How ’bout this. I’ll bring Paris to you.”

She couldn’t help but smile at this.

Her sister poked her with a toe. “Elena, you’re missing the best part,” she said. “What’s so funny, anyway?”

“Nothing, just … internet stuff.”

Elena glanced at the television. The shrink and the camera crew were wandering through the cat lady’s house, poking at the six-foot-high stacks of empty litter containers, saying how nauseating the place smelled. “This is the good part?” she asked her sister.

Grinning, Nina shoveled a handful of Cheez-Its into her mouth. “Uh-huh,” she said, dribbling crumbs onto her sweatshirt.

Elena shrank a little bit inside. This family. These people. How had she ever come to be related to them?

When she jumped back to the chat screen, she saw that Harlow had left a new message. “Still there?”