Chapter 32: Iliad

I backed out of the doorway. “You don’t have to get off the phone –”

Too late. Benji turned his back, bit out, “Bye. Love you.” and mashed the hang-up button before he could hear anything back.

Lena and I lingered on the balcony until the silence grew too awkward to bear. Then we lingered a little longer.

Lena snapped out of it first. She edged into the apartment. “Go ahead and call back. If you don’t want us here while you talk, it’s cool; we need to make a run to the store anyway.”

Benji shook his head and shoved his phone into his pocket. “It’s your apartment.”

“Yeah,” Lena said, “and I’m saying we don’t need it right this second.”

“We already said what we needed to say,” Benji said.

Lena and I exchanged glances.

Benji caught us doing it. He rolled his eyes. “What? It’s fine. I’ll be out of your hair next week.”

“Dude,” I said. “You really think that’s why we’re upset?”

“Makes more sense than you suddenly taking an interest in my personal life.” He pulled his sports coat off the back of my computer chair and slung it on. “You got your own shit to deal with. It’s fine. I’ll run up to the store. You don’t have any beer, anyway.”

I was still standing in the doorway. Blocking it. I took a deep breath. “If you want to talk –”

If Benji had been wearing glasses, he would’ve been looking over the rims of them. “Sure, little bro. I’ll ask you for advice.”

“Whatever.” I stepped aside and folded my arms.

He pushed past me into the evening air. He reached back for the door handle and I realized I was keeping the door from closing.

I opened my mouth.

Closed it again. Shook my head. Stepped further in.

Benji shut the door behind him.

I stood there staring at it for a minute, then gave another, sharper shake of my head and stalked over to my computer. I thumbed it on, then tore my parka off while I waited for it to boot up. I draped the parka where Benji’s coat had been and stood with my arms crossed over the headrest.

I felt Lena’s hands on my back. “Well,” she said, “that was a downer.”

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes.

She tried to give my shoulder blades a massage like I did hers when she got upset. Rub the tension out. She needed to use way more pressure, though. We didn’t usually end up in this position and she wasn’t used to it.

I normally got my comfort from hugging her the way she did Bernie.

I imagined myself squeezing a plushie version of Lena.

When I turned around and caught her hands, I was smiling. I kissed each set of fingers in turn. “Thanks.”

“For somebody who insists he doesn’t care about his big bro, you seemed pretty upset,” Lena said.

My smile wavered. “I don’t like Benji. I don’t get along with him. That doesn’t mean I want to watch him screw up his marriage.”

“You don’t know he’s the one screwing up,” Lena said. “I mean, obviously he did a bad job with their investments, but it’s like you said. It’s only money. Don’t you think it’s kinda shitty that Sandy basically kicked him out of the house over it?”

“I’m not so sure that’s how their conversation went,” I said. “You don’t know what Benji said when he told her.”

Lena yanked her hands away from mine. “And you do?”

I could guess. I swallowed my retort, though. “I guess you’re right.”

“Obvs.” She examined my face, nodded once, and clapped. “Now chin up. You need to help me compose an email.”

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I knew she meant the one to OdysseyZZ, as Zhizhi had suggested. I tapped my chin. “I don’t know...”

“You still want to talk about family stuff?” Her eyes widened. “If you’ve got a suggestion, hit me with it. We can workshop it and see if Benji won’t listen when he gets back.”

I spread my hands. “Sorry, no. I wish I knew what to say to him, or what he should say to Sandy, but I’ve got no clue.”

“Oh.” Lena tried to freeze her smile in place, but by the time she got her expression locked it had already slipped away. I think she realized it, because she slunk over to her computer and turned it on. Over her shoulder, she called, “Why not help me with the email then?”

I ran my fingers through my hair. “I will. I was just going to make a joke about how I’d normally charge significantly below minimum wage for that service.”

She chuckled. “Hey, that’s right. We’re both basically pros at this.”

Which would’ve been great, if we’d been writing a professional email for some business we’d never heard of and would never hear back from after we saw their money in our PayPal accounts.

I perched over my chair while Lena banged out a first draft. She shared it with me and I poured over every word. I reached forward to change two. If Lena had wanted to edit without sitting down, she’d have done it on her phone; for me, even this awkward position went twice as fast. I made my changes and got an immediate glare.

Her mechanical keyboard clacked. “Are you going to edit it, or not?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I think.”

I looked over her new draft. She’d reverted one of my changes and made four others.

I shot her a glance. “Your grammar is wrong on that line.”

“If I was submitting it for English class I wouldn’t write it like this,” she said. “This OdysseyZZ guy is a techbro; he’s not going to give a shit about grammar.”

“Write to a lot of techbros, do you?” I asked.

Her cheeks puffed out. “I know you’re just winding me up.”

I arched my eyebrows. “Is it working?”

“Fine. Change it. But it read better the way I wrote it.”

I left the line unedited, but made a few additions. I shot the new version back to her.

She read it over and nodded. She swallowed. “Looks good. I’m’a get it sent.”

I strolled back to her chair and patted her shoulder. “Go for it.”

She pasted into Gmail, hit Send, and leaned back to clasp my hand.

I felt like we were acting ridiculous again, jumping at shadows. Like Lena was sending in an application for a job she’d been busting her ass to get for years.

Why give a shit what Omar Jeffries thought of an email we sent him, or whether he saw it at all? Worst case scenario, we never heard back. Oh no. We were in exactly the same situation we would’ve been in if Zhizhi hadn’t suggested we send the email.

I tried to think how to point that out, but I must’ve looked away, because I heard Bernie meep at our feet. Lena reached down and scooped him onto her lap.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we gotta get back on the stick with scouting.”

“Agreed. We haven’t been anywhere new since Chatfield.”

“We’ve been running scared.”

I squeezed her shoulder. “No more. If anybody thinks they can spook us, they’ll find out we can be the scary ones.”

“Hell yeah!” Lena pumped her fist. “Where do you want to look?”

“Tomorrow it’s got to be somewhere we can get to via RTD,” I said. “Unless we’re doing it at night and Zhizhi wants to drive us around.”

“If she doesn’t, we could ask Benji,” Lena said.

“Pass,” I said.

She sighed.

“Lena, I get it, okay? You think we should be one big happy family because that’s how you grew up. I didn’t. We’re not. If you try to push us to have a bros day out, all it’s going to do is push both of our buttons.”

“I just don’t get why you think he’s that bad,” Lena said.

“Years of experience,” I said.

She bent forward and kissed the top of Bernie’s head. “What do you think, little guy?”

He burbled.

“Exactly,” she said. “Maybe he’s an asshole, but right now, he’s our asshole.”

“A ringing endorsement,” I said. “I’m sure Benji wouldn’t want to go with us, anyway.”

Lena’s head popped up. I didn’t need to see her reflection in the dark spaces of her monitor to know she was grinning. “Then there’s no harm in asking!”

“We ask Zhizhi first,” I said, “because we already have an agreement that she gets to film our expeditions when she wants to. Right?”

“Right. Obvs. But it’s Friday night. You really think she’s going to want to spend her evening playing camerawoman for us after a whole day of running –” Lena shuddered. “– printouts around the 9News studio?”

“We’d probably have better luck Saturday, I admit,” I said.

“And we don’t have time to wait for luck,” Lena said. “Between us and the rest of the local members of the wiki team, we’ve checked basically everything along the light rail lines. We’re already down to buses, and even those limit our search patterns. If we get someone to drive us, it opens up new options.”

“Do you expect me to believe,” I asked, “that you want me to ask Benji to drive us around for purely practical reasons?”

Lena glanced over her shoulder. “Does it matter why I want it, if it helps us?”

I pinched my nose. “Fine.”

She spun her chair around and hugged my waist.

My hands dropped to her head and wove gently through the tangles of her hair.

We could’ve stayed like that for a while, as far as I was concerned. But Lena’s phone beeped with a Discord alert.

She let go of me and I extracted my hand from her curls.

She picked her phone up and flicked to Discord.

She said, “Holy shit!”

I already knew why, because from where I stood, I could see the Discord popup on her desktop:

A friend request from OdysseyZZ.