My Best Friend's Brother

Chapter Two

“So, thanks for walking me home,” Elle skipped alongside me, her signature, kind smile on her face. “You didn’t have to.”

But you asked, I said in my head, but didn’t say out loud. When she turned to me, I smiled, and she turned back, satisfied. I sighed, though she could barely hear.

After the stint at lunch, finding out that Dylan – before that, he was just the guy – was her brother, I did follow her lead and stayed well away from the jocks, though it proved hard. One of the other jocks, Tyler, had sat next to me in English Lit, and he was just as annoying as you’d expect. Rude, too, but he was strangely clever, which had drawn all the attention from the new girl.

Namely, me.

“Want to come in?” Elle asked once we’d reached her house. I’m not quite sure you could call it that, though. It was huge! And not huge as in that big house that was at the end of your street that you always wanted to move into and never actually saw who owned it. Huge, as in, celebrity huge.

The inside was better and much, much bigger than it appeared on the outside. “Whoa, do the Beckhams live here?” I blurted out without thinking. Elle laughed, tossing her keys into a glass bowl on a nearby table.

“Thanks, I guess,” she said, leading me towards a long, spiral staircase. “Come on.”

“Are you sure your parents won’t mind?” I asked, glancing around the house warily. Nobody seemed to be home, except for a loud blast of music coming from somebody’s room on what seemed to be the third floor.

Dylan.

“Nope,” she said, “they won’t. They never do. They’re never home.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure on how to reply. Soon enough, we were at her room, and she led me inside, kicking a few stray jackets that had landed on the floor away.

“Sorry about the mess,” she kicked off her Dr Martens and sprawled out on the bed like a snow-angel, before sitting up and pulling her knees close to her chest, flicking through her iPod.

I didn’t know what to do, so I pulled out my phone and typed out a quick message to dad, telling him that I was fine, and just visiting a friend. God knows how I would get home, but, that would come later.

“Want a drink, or any food?” Elle asked as I’d just finished putting my phone away in my pocket. “We’ve got J20, or Root Beer, if you’d like.”

“I’m not thirsty or hungry,” I said, though my throat ached. I realised I should’ve actually ate my lunch, instead of leaving it, because my stomach made a loud rumbling noise. I blushed as Elle laughed, scrambling off her bed to put her iPod in her docking station.

“Sorry,” I said, “but my dad told me that he’s taking me out to dinner tonight. He knows New York more than I do and he wants to help me settle in. Plus, first day, no groceries.”

Lies.

We had plenty of food in the house. In fact, my big sister Sam would probably be cooking us some pasta, or anything she’d learnt from her Italian college roommate. And my dad didn’t know anything about New York. My sister, on the other hand, knew more than both of us combined since she had studied at Yale, but my dad knew nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“Okay,” she said, skipping through a few songs on her iPod before a heavy metal sounding tune blasted through her speakers, almost deafening me. I stood awkwardly in the middle of her room, nodding my head slightly to seem like I enjoyed the music.

I tried desperately to listen to the other music, just to work out what it was. I came to the conclusion that it was hip-hop, with some rap. After two or three of the heavy metal songs, a few Eminem songs had passed through the other speakers, before they stopped completely, and Elle’s iPod turned to a Killers song.