Arthur spoke over the din, a long-suffering look on his face. “Yeah, but tell them why your hair is short. Wait ‘til you hear this, guys.”
They clamored for the story. A camera floated over, then another. She shrugged and gave them an honest answer. “Arthur said he liked my hair, so I cut it.”
“Woooooowwwwww.”
“Scary,” Jungwoo commented in Korean, punctuating with a nervous laugh.
“See? This is what I’ve been dealing with. How long have we known each other, Emms? Eleven years? Twelve? She’s broken my heart so many times. I’ve lost count, to tell you the truth.” He jabbed a finger at the members. “So if you’re getting any ideas, don’t.”
As one, Apollo turned to the camera. In perfect chorus, they said, “We belong to our fans.”
A certain teenager proclaimed this to be creepy. At the register, Jeannie was fuming. “There was more! Tell them!”
“Arthur said he liked my hair and I should never cut it, so I cut it.”
Max paused in the middle of clearing a nearby table. His scowl could’ve been the inspiration for any gargoyle perched on the spires of Notre Dame. “Why were you going around telling her what to do?”
“Hey, I was fourteen. What did I know?”
Ezra rolled his eyes. “I’m fourteen and I’ve never been dumb enough to tell a girl what her hair should look like.”
“Yikes,” said Kazu.
“Embarrassing,” muttered Kei.
Ever the peacemaker, Eunjae tried to redirect the conversation by asking about the artwork. “You drew houses. Was this an art class?”
“No,” Jiyeon answered. “Eighth graders were required to do a service project, so we decided to help renovate the rec room at Golden Grove. It’s a retirement community. They send a bus to Wanna Waffle once a week for bingo and brunch.”
“It was cheaper if we painted the art ourselves instead of buying it,” Arthur put in.
Their teacher had written the prompt on the board:East, west, home is best. She'd asked them to think about the difference between a house and a home. Golden Grove was a place of residence, but was that enough for it to behomein the truest sense? They'd readThe House on Mango StreetandBridge to Terabithia, books about staying home and leaving home and everything in between. Was home a physical place? Was it in your head, or maybe in your heart?
After some debate, the students had voiced their wish to turn that rec room into a happy, comforting space. Something that evoked the homes their new friends at the retirement community had left behind. A house was not the same as a home. On this, they could agree.
Some classmates drew mansions and others drew castles. Her friend Sylvia drew a houseboat. Instructed to draw a place that felt like home, Jiyeon went with… a plain old house. Four walls and a roof, some windows and a door. Straightforward, practical. Overly simple compared to Arthur's three-story townhouse with its neat hedges and rooftop garden, and hemade sure to tell her so. But she'd never understood the appeal of stairs, and why did your garden need to be on the roof? Gardens grew just fine on the ground, too. If she had a garden, or if Dad had a garden, that's where it would go.
Joey would grow all kinds of things, Jiyeon reasoned at the time, but this was her drawing, so she added flowers. And a tree, throwing its long shadow on the grass. On its branches, she built a treehouse for Denny. Well, it was more of an observation deck. A lookout. Her brother had new binoculars, real ones, and he'd love being up there. For Mom, a real driveway and a new car, bright red, super fast. She sketched out a lawn that had enough room for Janie to turn as many cartwheels as she wanted. The latest phase was gymnastics.
For herself, Jiyeon borrowed her favorite thing about Miss Gloria's salon: the door. It used to be yellow. Although they'd painted it a different color the year before, because the landlord insisted, it was always going to be yellow in Jiyeon's memory. That's how it looked when she came to get her hair cut for the very first time. That's how it still looked, in her heart. She didn’t want to copy it exactly, though. To make it her own, Jiyeon colored it orange.
Oh, goodness. Arthur had plunged her into the past again. In the present, he’d moved on to describing the house he planned to buy before he turned thirty. But Eunjae glanced up from the scrapbook to smile at her, and it wasn't the smile he used when others were around, so careful and polite. It was the smile she knew.
“I like your house,” he said, only for Jiyeon to hear.
She smiled back at him. “Thanks. I like it too.”
“Here, on the windowsill. Apple pie?”
“That's what windowsills are for."
"You're right."
The warmth of that moment was short-lived. His brothers were debating where to eat, a discussion that inevitably drew Eunjae into its chaotic orbit. Arthur had produced his curated list of local restaurants, ranked and annotated. As for Ezra, he drifted away, feigning boredom.
He aimed his phone at the light fixture hanging over the register. “It’s a Sputnik lamp,” he remarked, when Jiyeon attempted small talk. “That’s what those are called, with the arms sticking out like that. I looked it up and it’s pretty old.” Then he opened the Instagram app, intending to post the photo.
“Instagram,” she murmured. “I didn’t know you had an account.”
