s i x t e e n
Aunt Evelyn doesn’t have a bookshelf in the living room, which is odd if you think about it.
Our apartment doesn’t have a bookshelf either, but we have three cartons full of books and it’s sort of the same thing, really. But Aunt Evelyn’s living room has nothing. There’s an expensive TV and couches and CDs and DVDs and paintings on the walls and pictures framed in a display cabinet, but nothing else. You might think that’s all there is to a living room, but that’s not true. There’s more. There’s a lot more. It’s called a living room for a reason.
It’s six in the morning. I don’t know why I’m looking for books in Aunt Evelyn’s living room – I don’t know what I’d do with one if I found one anyway. I don’t read anymore, you see. The last book I read was in the first year of college, it was some trippy British thing with switching narratives and lots of metaphors and one of the characters had a disgustingly huge vocabulary so I had to read it with a dictionary in my lap. I’ve read stuff for curriculum though. Like poetry and stuff, and Shakespeare for my medieval English literature classes. But it’s different when you have to read something and you want to read it. I do want to read, though.
Anyway, I can’t find any books in this goddamn place. I knew I shouldn’t have come. I should’ve just stayed in Benna Lui. I don’t care if it would have driven me to suicide.
Aunt Evelyn’s up, I think. I can hear her bedroom door opening and closing. Silliman, who is sleeping on her mauve suede sofa, jumps off and curls up on the rug where he’s supposed to sleep, I guess. Then the glass door to the living room slides open, and Aunt Evelyn sort of blinks and sort of smiles when she sees me standing in the middle of the room in a t-shirt and my underwear.
“Evianna! I wasn’t expecting you up so early.”
Her hair is very thin and very messy in the mornings, in clumps all around her head and sort of lying on her shoulders like dead baby snakes. Her skin is nice, though. Aunt Evelyn has good skin. Her whole family does. I don’t.
“Good morning,” I say, because I don’t know how else to respond.
“I usually have tea before breakfast,” she says. “Care to join me?”
I want to say no, but I don’t know what else I’d do if I didn’t have tea with Aunt Evelyn before breakfast, so I just shrug and say, “Alright.”
She smiles very widely, like it’s the most exciting thing in the world that I’m gonna be having tea with her. For fuck’s sake.
“Alright then! I’ll be right back.”
I feel a little odd suddenly when she leaves the room, probably to make the tea. I will definitely make a very bad tea-companion. She’s going to be a disappointed, but she doesn’t know it. She thinks it’s going to be a fun aunt-niece bonding thing. It’s not.
We have the tea in the balcony. It’s not like the balconies in Benna Lui, or like Dexter’s balcony, tiled and cramped with a washing line stretched across it. Aunt Evelyn’s balcony is a big paved square that’s open to sky, with a tiny lawn in the middle and wrought iron chairs and a glass-topped table. She has a maid bring us the tea. Till it brews we sit in silence (more or less). From here you can see the city right till the horizon, and the metro line going up and down, and the trains running along the line with their goofy pink fronts, like weird caterpillars. It’s pretty sunny for six-thirty. It’s pretty quiet too. You can actually hear birds, but Aunt Evelyn says that’s just because we’re really close to the biggest park in city, which is just down the road or something. Apparently it’s a problem for people with asthma because there’s shitloads of pollen in the air. I don’t have asthma so it’s okay. It’s a different thing that I can’t breathe right half the time, but it’s not because my lungs have fucked up or anything.
