The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

41 part 2: Tremors (2)

Eleven a.m. and no sign of a firefighter. Julián's entire supply of cookies that he'd hand out to blood donors had been shared between all thirty-three of us, and I was starving. Gloria was probably feeding Will gorditas and chocolate while my stomach rumbled like the quake.

"Where's Jules?" I asked, suddenly remembering how surprised I'd been to see Selena in the studio instead of her.

"She's home, probably. I do six a.m. classes now. She and Lars are doing a FlowYoga video shoot today. Well, they were gonna." The mention of Lars seemed to take Selena to a new level of dejected. On top of her injuries from the quake, she looked like she hadn't slept for weeks. "Jules's place is north-east so she won't have felt the worst of the tremors anyways."

I guessed that Jules had a good insurance policy on her rental contract for the Pier Studio, given that it was suspended on fucking pillars in an earthquake zone. By sheer luck Selena had taken the six a.m. yoga class, saving Jules from the horror of seeing her beloved studio fall into the ocean, and I suspected that Jules wouldn't have been a fucking badass in a crisis like Selena had.

The Pier Studio's calendar had been packed with so many of California's big yoga events, I couldn't imagine that there was a single yoga studio in California with the same serene atmosphere; anywhere else would seem inadequate in comparison. But the selfish traitorous shibal-seki in me secretly thanked the Santa Elena Faultline for taking the studio down, hoping that its loss would delay Jules's purchase of FlowYoga, perhaps for long enough that Lars would have to fly home before the contracts could be signed.

The thought of Lars Eriksen moving to Cali set the contents of my stomach swirling. Selena looked equally as nauseated by the talk of Lars. Selena hadn't been the same since the West Coast Yoga Retreat, when she'd hidden herself in convenient corners, like she'd wanted to disappear completely.

"What's going on with you, Selena? All this," I said, lifting a section of her wavy black hair, lank and matted with dry blood. "You used to look like a carbon-copy of Jules."

"I'm...doing my own thing now," she said, with all the enthusiasm of a priestess whose idol had just been shattered before her eyes.

"Did Lars say something to you? Didn't he like that you dressed like Jules?"

Selena toyed with her bandage, fraying the end of it. "He doesn't care about that."

"Jules said that you don't like him because he keeps his fee for his masterclasses at the Retreat, when the other teachers give theirs to charity."

"It's not just that, Zeph. It's...it's everything about him." She pulled at her bandage. The end started to unravel. "He's always so friendly and charming in front of the cameras, or when the gurus and Swami Narayan are there. But he doesn't have to impress nobodies like me and Katelyn and Meena, so he doesn't even look at us. Sometimes I think that he can't stand Jules, and he's just hanging with us because it makes FlowYoga look good on Youtube."

I took her injured hand in mine, partly to stop her from pulling her fraying bandage off. "Why don't you think he wants to be with Jules?"

"Jules texted me from the beach, asking me to pick up programs and posters from her place on the first day of the Retreat. I heard Lars on her balcony, talking about Jules to someone on the phone. I don't know who he was talking to..." Selena tugged at her bandage again, the frayed end slipping before I could stop her. "He didn't even call Jules by her name. He called her The Walker Project."

Project.

I hadn't heard that word for weeks. Not since I'd left Sigma. I took Selena by the shoulders. "What did Lars say?"