"HI," I COO, BACKING BACK INTO the doorway. My heart elevates into my throat, my mind stuck on her like a scratched record. Ashlynn's Levi's cousin.
Ashlynn's Levi's cousin!
Golly, the irony in my life just doesn't want to leave me alone. Ash's high voice still zings in my ears an octave as high as crickets in the dead of night. She could work on her harmony with sopranos. Or society.
"You're the next door neighbor?" She asks, placing the bat on the navy table top if the ping-pong table.
I stumble into the room, cautiously keeping my eye on everything. Levi switches on the TV, keeping himself busy with it. He's blatantly ignoring her. Ashlynn rushes over to me like a flaming arrow, ready to hit and burn me. I don't like the burning part, though, it's making my heart palpitate and my palms clammy. I had my fair share of ambushing, but this new-friend-thing is still a bit of a fresh wound to me. A salted wound, burning like the charring piece of wood—the arrow.
She greets me with a tight embrace, her floral candy scent extracting my aura and overpowering it like a WWE fighter. She squeezes me two dress sizes down, juicing out all cell plasma like orange juice. I wrap my arms around her tiny corset waist, wrapped up in a long, pale high waist jean and a white crop top. I am still clothed in the same as I was all day, she had the decency to dress. It didn't even cross my mind to maybe slap on another piece of clothing.
I'm still getting used to the spontaneous dinners at whom could be the new generation of super-offsprings. I don't think I could possibly get used to visiting other people, even if I were destined to visit others. Then again, I'm still getting used to this whole Miami thing. My mother lives for ambiguous, spontaneous dinner parties and tea dates with whom could be Russian immigrants here on a ninety day green card to find a person to marry.
She releases me, throwing my balance back. I stumble, wheezing, having a severe amount of difficulty to reshape my lungs back to sacks and not pancakes. My vision washes black as my blood rounds back into the top half of my body. I managed to survive the squeeze of an anaconda.
I am a survivor.
"Your house is really pretty. And big. And close to the beach," she rambles, struggling to figure out if she wants her weight rested on her left leg, right leg, heels or toes. My eyes flank to all the sides she scoots to. She's like an hyperactive toddler whom just had a whole can of Red Bull.
Everywhere.
"I'll thank the contracto's who built i'," I thank her awkwardly, adding a nod to make my sarcastic retort less robotic. She giggles curtly before turning around to the ping-pong table. To no surprise, the back of her shirt is tattered up and cut open in gaps, supposedly fashionably. I like ripped clothes and cut outs and all, but there's a thin line between okay cuts and just downright slut-like cuts.
"You wanna' play ping-pong or something?" She turns back while talking to me. She shrugs, encouraging an answer out of me I do not yet possess.
What if I'm too short to play ping-pong? What if I really suck at ping-pong? I have the tendency to suck at any sort of coordination with bats, balls, feet and hands. Or movement overall. I suck at moving. She could mock me for being limp-like and awkwardly structured together in all the wrong ways to activate physical activity, or the way my gate changes when I have to turn the gears up to sort-of sprint in short rounds back and forth.
With rambling thoughts, I look over my shoulder at Levi, stretched out on a bean bag chair in blasé, as if he knows he lost the battle with Ashlynn. My breath hikes in my throat, rocketing guilt down my veins so hard my fingertips start tingling.
He still chews on the gum I smelled when I first encountered his life in the house. I said I would play video games with him, not play ping-pong with Ashlynn. Then again, I didn't count on running into Ashlynn, on account of: this is an Olson house, not Gunn. More of, Levi Olson.
She couldn't possibly be related to someone as laid back—and annoying and hyperactive [which is a whole other demeanor as I am still slightly confused on what I get to call his random emotional-energetic whiplashes]—as Levi. It was the last thing I brought my mind to, as a matter of fact. I skip my eyes to Ashlynn, patiently waiting for my answer.
I look back at Levi, holding one of the newest generations of iPhone in his hands. He doesn't look appreciative of Ashlynn, his blonde hair covering his eyes as he texts out a message.
I look back at Ashlynn, biting down on the inside of my cheek. The immense amount of strength pushing down on my flesh makes me wince, but helps me make a decision. I don't reject people, and I'm still sensitive about her rejection of my attempt of acceptance. I'd love—like every other teenage girl my age—to have a coven of my own.
"Actually," I start nervously, my voice rattling into a mutter. "I want to play Xbox," I point over my shoulder with a thumb at the large flat TV on the Xbox homes screen. I'm not dropping out now, I'm a girl of my word, and I promised Levi before I encountered Ash. And I love gaming, although I keep on dying. This decision may or may not be guilt ridden, I'm still deciding [I don't think I'll make that decision].
"Fine, drop me for her," Levi's brother—the one she played ping-pong with—says, strolling around the sofa seperating us from him.
It is Levi's brother.
It's written all over his façade. They share the same bleached blonde hair, dangling in slight waves from their skulls. They share the same beautiful emerald eyes, grimacing in the dim white light probing every inch of this house. They have the same broad shoulders, same wonky body structure, same thin, pale, chapped lips. Only difference is that you can see his brother's forehead, which enhances his slightly corrugated cheeks. He's about half a head taller than Levi as well, which means he's a head and a half taller than myself. I skip my eyes confused between the two siblings, blinking away my slightly triggered confusion.
"Shame, Bennie," Ash jokes with a thickened puppy dog lip. He retorts with a heavy eye roll, folding his muscled arms over his chest.
"You can join, right?" I make sure, cocking up my brow. They live in any teenage's dream haven, so I bet there's more than one remote.
"Oh, yeah," he nods, his emerald eyes catching glimpses of the weak light from the bulb, staring at me, reflecting the light so sharp, shards of his beautiful irises bleaches out of human vision. Now I really do feel short. The boy topples over six feet, probably, wearing his weight good to his height.
"What games are in option?" Ash asks, straightening her stance towards Levi's brother, her hair swaying to her endless bouce-like movements. I look at Levi, not even listening at their conversation with half an ear, but keeping his eyes on the iPhone screen he weakly grasps.
"Well," he rests a finger of his peachy lower lip. "We've gotta' keep it PG 13 since you arrived," he jokes. She plants a fist on his arm with a clenched jaw.
"Come on, Ben," she groans.
"I saw you have Halo," I say, looking at the rows of Xbox games beneath the TV. Levi got up from the beanbag chair, standing in front of the large flat screen, staring at the games down below. He doesn't move a muscle, as if he's a deer in headlights. His body is rigid and his fists clenched white. His shoulders are drawn back slightly in suspense.
We stare at him as if he's an exhibition at a zoo, a rare, new specie. His chest doesn't even expand. There's not sign of life in his body, other than the goosebumps waving over his arms as if a breeze slides down it like water. As if he got froze by the press of the remote control button. Ben exhales hopelessly, his arms falling down to his sides.
"Come on, Levi," he carps.
Levi doesn't answer.
It's as if he didn't listen, or merely swallowed his tongue like Raj in The Big Bang Theory.
Ben steps closer to his sibling, cautiously, the way you'd step closer to a stray animal in attempt to keep it from running away. Ash steps backwards, as if she fears her cousin as a boogie man. I knit my brows together, my eyes flying to and fro like a tennis ball from Ashlynn to Levi to Ben.
I'm not in the family, so I can't tell what's going on. As a matter of fact, I don't even know if I should be worried or not. If I could tell, I would've figured it out, but I can't. I'm not familiar with behaviour like this.
His queer behavior, his odd mood swings and unrelated speech impairment, it sends nervous chills down my spine, churning my stomach the way a horror movie would. At this point, Miami is nothing but the start of a gruesome horror movie to me. I'm waiting patiently for Freddie Krueger or Michael Meyers to pitch up in my dreams.
"It's moving," Levi whispers terrified, trembling. He looks over his shoulders, his brows knit together, the celery stick irises impaling Ben immediately. "Again."
I did not see any of those disk boxes move a single movement, never mind an inch. Nothing fell from the wall unit. Nothing shifted.
No disk cases got pulled or pushed out. No breeze rumbled through the plastic, no breeze even touched us, other than the hard movement of my brother and his eldest brother's voice. My fear roots deep in my brain, recoiling my body into its shell.
What if the disks moved, but no one of us saw it? Could this actually mean I could possibly take part in the next Paranormal Activity?
Movement? No. I'm either really paranoid or he's seeing things. Or both.
Ben grips Levi's shoulders with both hands tightly, leading him backwards to the couch looking at the TV. Levi launchs his elbow into his brother's rib, growling a series of swear words angrily. Ben recovers from the blow quickly, sucking the pain up like water.
He hurls his arms around Levi, reeling him in like a staggering fish. Levi still fights, his face churning in anger, although most of his hair covers up what we see of his face. Ben inevitably wins, overpowering Levi, before the brothers plop down on the couch.
Levi is a human, not a beast?
"You never took your meds, right?" Ben whispers, not unclamping his arms from his strange brother anytime soon. He faces Levi, but Levi's celery eyes are glued to the games still motionless beneath the TV. His expression is rock hard, but his eyes is a coarse wild pine-tree fields ravaged by a strong carousel whirlwind.
Levi gasps, his eyes flailing up to his brother in a grave panic. "She told you," he whispers paranoid. "Did she tell you?" His voice hardens.
My heart jerks into my throat strongly, twisting my emotions into a new level of paranoia. Anxiety rummages through my brain like a ceiling fan, cutting through every possible scenario why this kid's nerves and brain doesn't fit together all that well. My hands break out in cold sweats, but I just run my hand over my jeans to get rid of it. Could I affect his nerve system path the way a roof affects the signal of a car radio?
"Hey you guys, you can come..." Sam stops mid sentence, staring hard at her sons on the sofa. "...down to the diner for dinner. We're plating up." She murmurs audibly, walking closer to her sons.
She holds her hand out to Levi, curling her fingers inwards and outwards as gesture for him to give her his hand. He obeys, patting his hand down on his mother's before he gets up and follows her out of the room. My eyes follow confusedly, my brain unable to sequence the puzzle pieces to even fit in the same puzzle.
Ashlynn jerks at my t-shirt, staggering me into her direction. "It's my uncle's birthday," she utters, pulling me into the direction we came from originally. "So, how is Mourning been for you the past couple of days?"
My jaw opens and closes with answers rambling through my mind. Weird. Strange. Different from my expectations. Fruitful, maybe? Could be better.
Definitely a start of my horror movie.
I flick my eyes up to her pale blue eyes, soaking me through like bleach. "I think it was a lot better than I expected," I conclude, giving her a content, tight-lipped grin.
She chuckles at me, throwing her blonde hair over her shoulder. "What did you expect it to be? Terrible?"
"Well," I snort at her sarcasm, "I didn't expect to make friends so quickly," I mutter, dropping my head to my black coated nails. "And I didn't expect the students to be so nice."
"Compliment taken," she nudges me in the arm, "but it's so nice meeting you, Phoebe. You're a lot nicer than you are in Yesterday."
"I'm supposed to play a bitch in the series," I shrug.
She snorts amused. She leads me into a roomful of people, breaking claustrophobia over my skin like hives. I itch all over, but a chill freezes off the insects rummaging violently into my flesh.
A huge, black wood table centers the room, decorated with simplistic wine crystal glasses reflecting the light the way the movies portray a fly's eyes reflect. My parents sit cornered at the table, closest to Levi's parents. I take a seat next to my brother, tipping the family line.
"You should see Christmas," Levi exhales, slumping down in a seat next to me. "It looks like an ant farm."
I snort, rolling my head over to him. He didn't even have to hear my voice, he could reply by reading my mind.
His mother passes behind him, dropping a handful of pills in front of him. I stare a while at the white puddle of compressed powders bluntly, expecting him to just randomly explain to the new girl next door why he has to swallow the entire drug store's supplies.
He collects all the pills in his palm before throwing it all in his mouth and sipping it all down with one small sip of water. I swallow hard, having difficulty to put thought with picture. That many pills? The last time I saw so many pills, was the amount my grandma downed before she died.
"Where are you from, Phoebe?" Levi asks, flicking the discomforting stare-pierced silence, passing me a salad bowl.
"Portsmouth," I answer, accepting the crystal bowl's pass. I drop a dollop of the salad into the white plate in front of me before handing it to my brother.
"The place where they hold those hoarding and OCD cleaning TV shows on TLC?" He asks, an amused smile curling on his face. I laugh, nodding at his accuracy. I've seen loads of episodes in hoarding related to Portsmouth, since I only watch BBC and Discovery's channels.
"I wanted to sit next to Phoebe," Ashlynn moans the way a toddler will just before throwing a temper-tantrum, tapping Levi on the back of his head with her finger.
"Go sit somewhere else. You're not paralyzed," Levi mumbles, pushing around the content in his plate. He stares poker faced down at his food, as if Ashlynn made him loose his appetite. There's a strong sense of tension between the two of them. It's obvious they don't have pity for each other. Or look out for each other the way normal cousins do. They don't even encounter each other politely. I put the fork in my mouth, clenching it between my jaw.
"You're not much of a gentleman—"
Levi pushes his chair out, standing up.
"Here you go, Princess," Levi utters, holding the seat out for her. His hair curtains over his eyes, and he doesn't do anything to flick it out of his eyes. "I'm going to sit elsewhere," he mutters under his breath shallowly.
"You gotta' eat, Levi," his mother says after him. He doesn't even listen, he just walks away, disrespectfully. "David, could you please just go check up on your brother. Take him food."
"I'll go too," I blurt out, already pushing myself off the chair. Samantha blinks at me questionably before nodding.
"Thank you, Phoebe," she says, "but take something to eat, please. You guys can put on a movie and eat in front of the TV." She stands up from her seat. "Sorry about Levi, he's not a people person," she apologizes to the guests, taking Levi's plate from David.
David looks like an older, muscled version of Ben, the three brothers all carry the same features with slight tweaks. David has brown hair made up and combed back circa Grease [go Grease Lightning, go Grease Lightning] time; but they all share one feature their parents lack: the glimmering emerald green eyes shocking your soul down to paralyzation.
Sam scoops only macaroni and cheese into Levi's plate before handing it back to David. Ashlynn stands up as well, tagging along with me and David after I put a few things in my plate. Like a row of ants, we follow David back through the ant farm mazes to the TV room.
Levi's not playing video games. I don't think he's in the entertainment quarters either, because no ping-pong ball's shallow echo reverberate off the walls, no white and blue powdered pool ball smashes into stripes or solids and no air hockey puck is hovering.
David puts down the two plates before turning around into Ashlynn and I.
"You guys can sit, I'm just gonna' look for Levi. But Ash, you can put on Netflix and choose a movie, you know how to. Pick something calm. No horrors, no nasty comedies, something decent."
Ashlynn just nods at David, passing between us before jogging out of the room. Ashlynn places her plate on the couch before she walks towards the TV. "What movie do you want to watch?" She asks, "no horrors," she repeats, "my cousin is a wuss."
I snort amused at her shaking my head in a sense of disapproval. Or just purely shock the lack of respect Ashlynn and Levi has for each other. I don't consider it a sense of disrespect between them anymore, but maybe it's suspense.
Maybe it's the stereotypes harvesting a boarder as difficult as the Berlin Wall? I place my plate on the leveled seat next to her play before strolling over to her. She flicks through the Netflix options, waiting for me to pick one.
"How abou' a comedy?" I ask.
"Yes!" She nods vigorously, scanning through the options. "How do you feel about Pitch Perfect? It's the only movie he can watch."
"I approve of ye' choice," I nod. She clicks on the movie before dropping the remote and backing up. I plop myself down on the love seat and putting the hot plate on my lap.
"What's going on with Levi?" I ask, tilting my head in her direction. I push a piece of lettuce into my mouth, blinking patiently for my answer.
"Don't worry about him," she shrugs. "He's just a bit..." she munches away, staring at the roof with eyes searching for an answer, unable to express it in words. "Sensitive, if you could say it like that."
Before I could reply, David waltzes in front of us with Levi on his tracks. Levi plops down on the beanbag chair next to me, unharmed. It's as if he never even got upset over Ashlynn.
It's queer.