The thought that Elena was supposed to find this entertaining disgusted her, but she wasn’t about to say anything to her sister. Nina loved it. She sucked on a giant candy cane and periodically popped it out of her mouth to click her tongue at the outrages the show paraded across the screen, shaking her head, bugging her eyes at Elena.
“Ay-yi-yi-yi!” she said.
Elena smiled in recognition and checked her AnAmerica page. A new comment popped up. Some guy going by the handle Harlow. “You’re the best artist on this site,” he said.
A grin broke across her face. She didn’t get compliments like this all the time, and it felt good to be singled out. She wondered who this Harlow guy was.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.
“Love the way you reference those seventies posters of big-eyed children.”
She was surprised to see that he had caught the reference. She hadn’t realized that anyone but her even knew those posters existed. Commenting back, she said, “Big-eyed kids. Good catch. So sad and yet so sweet. Thanks for the shout-out.”
“These people!” said Nina, gawking at the TV. “How do they live with themselves?”
Elena didn’t know where to begin answering this question. She looked at the nest of cast-off clothing Nina had strewn around herself, the glass-topped coffee table Nina had crammed with food like a buffet table from hell: takeout tacos, three more candy canes, Diet Pepsi, Cheez-Its, and the pineapple she’d been craving nonstop lately. Elena could see the seeds of a Hoarders episode taking root right here in her own house.
She wanted to say, Nina, look at yourself before you start judging other people. Think about what you’re doing to your unborn child. But this was just too mean. She knew that her sister was in real discomfort today. She’d thrown up all morning. Her ankles were so swollen that she couldn’t even fit socks over them. Feeling bad for her, Elena had made a promise to herself to be cheerful and kind and to baby Nina today in the way she knew nobody else would. Trying to play along with her sister’s mood, she said, “It’s good that she’s getting help. The producers are going to give her a whole new house. I just worry about what will happen to all those cats.”
“The cats!” Nina said. “It’s just too much!”
“Mmm,” Elena said as she scanned an article about Scarlett Johansson on Flavorwire. She tabbed back to AnAmerica to see if Harlow had responded to her comment yet. He had.
“They remind me of the graffiti I saw last time I was in Paris. Big-eyed kids are making a comeback there.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never been to Paris,” she wrote.
“We can change that,” he responded.
This made her smirk. “Oh yeah? How are we going to do that?”
“We’ll take my private jet.”
She smirked again. This Harlow guy was fun. But he couldn’t possibly have a private jet, right?
Before she could respond he shot her another message. “JK.” Then another one. “Who’s the emo boy?”
“Jaybird?”
“Yeah.”
“A friend.”
“Boyfriend?” he asked.
Elena knew he was fishing. Before answering, she pulled up his user profile in a separate screen and scanned it for signs that he might be a creep. There wasn’t a lot there. His profile picture was an aerodynamic cartoon motorcycle with giant jet boosters flaring out the back. Under likes, he’d listed “Cowboy Bebop, Studio Ghibli, getting lost in foreign cities where I don’t know the language,” and, mysteriously, “trouble.” She decided to risk it. She hadn’t flirted with anyone in a long time.
“No. Just a friend,” she wrote.
His response came immediately. “So let’s go to Paris.”
“We’ve already covered this,” she said.
“Right. How ’bout this. I’ll bring Paris to you.”
She couldn’t help but smile at this.
Her sister poked her with a toe. “Elena, you’re missing the best part,” she said. “What’s so funny, anyway?”
“Nothing, just … internet stuff.”
Elena glanced at the television. The shrink and the camera crew were wandering through the cat lady’s house, poking at the six-foot-high stacks of empty litter containers, saying how nauseating the place smelled. “This is the good part?” she asked her sister.
Grinning, Nina shoveled a handful of Cheez-Its into her mouth. “Uh-huh,” she said, dribbling crumbs onto her sweatshirt.
Elena shrank a little bit inside. This family. These people. How had she ever come to be related to them?
When she jumped back to the chat screen, she saw that Harlow had left a new message. “Still there?”
She typed quickly. “Yeah. Sorry. My sister’s annoying me.”
“Why?”
Where to start? She wasn’t sure she wanted to subject this stranger to the craziness of her family struggles just yet, but she knew better than to let the conversation go much further on the public comments board. She suggested they take the conversation into private mode.
“So? Your sister?” he asked, when they’d switched over.
Elena could feel herself chickening out. She didn’t know this guy well enough to go into the gory details of Nina’s troubles. Instead, she said, “Do you ever want to just run as far away as you can get from everything?”
“Every minute of every day,” he said.
“How do you deal with it?”
“I get on my motorcycle and just go, go, go. One day I’ll go and never come back.”
“I want to do that,” Elena said.
“What’s stopping you?”
“I don’t have a motorcycle.”
“I can solve that,” he said, adding a winking emoticon.
“Just like you can fly me to Paris on your private jet.”
“LOL. I really do have a motorcycle.”
She took a closer look at his profile. His location was listed as South Florida, which gave Elena a little thrill. There was no harm in idly dreaming that this witty guy who admired her art and knew how to flirt online might be perfect for her. No harm in imagining that he’d been hiding right under her nose all this time.
Then in a new message, she said, “So your profile says you like trouble.”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“As Marlon Brando said, ‘Whadda ya got?’”
This actually made her laugh out loud. She was brought back to earth when she glanced at Nina and saw her struggling to sit up on the couch and hobble on her swollen feet toward the bathroom.
See, this, this was why she couldn’t run away. Her sister, her father, everyone needed her to be the sane and capable one around here. She didn’t want to turn the TV on one day and see them on an episode of Hoarders or Intervention, or what was the other one? Cops.
“Gotta go. Nice chatting,” she typed, quickly shutting the computer.
Then, hopping