I can’t hide my surprise. “Sister?”
“Yeah.” He frowns at me. “Why do you look shocked?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were an only child.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“Not sure. Maybe it’s because you seem so…” In lieu of an appropriate word, I do a strange little wave with my hand.
“What does that”—he echoes my action with his own hand—“mean?”
“You know.”
“No?”
“Sort of… floozy.”
“Floozy?!” He looks at me like I’m mad. “Floozy?”
“Yeah. In your own world.”
He throws his head back and cackles. “That’s not what ‘floozy’ means!”
“Floating through life.”
“That’snotwhat it means!”
“Really?”
“No, you dingbat!”
“Dingbat?!” I snort. “Who says ‘dingbat’?”
“Who says ‘floozy’?! ‘Floozy’ is a word they use in, like,Bugsy Malone,to describe someone who sleeps around!”
“Oh. Well, it doesn’t sound like that’s what it means.”
He shakes his head at me in disbelief. “That’s not how language works. You should probably know what words mean before you use them. And for the record, I don’t float through life. And I’m not an only child. I have a younger sister, Layla.”
“What did she do that made your week so terrible?”
“It wasn’t what she did. It’s what I did.” He takes a sip of beer.“We had a fight and now she won’t talk to me. And, on top of that, I dropped a barrel on my toe on MondayandI messed up some admin and had to start all over again. So, if you could cancel whatever curse you put on me that would be great.”
“If I put a curse on you, it would be way more interesting than a barrel dropping on your foot and some boring accounts going wrong,” I inform him. “I’d, like… send some locusts to attack you or something.”
“Very original.”
“You’d keep falling down wells.”
“Okay, that one is actually original. I was being sarcastic before.”
“I promise I didn’t put a curse on you.”
He lets out a long heavy sigh. “Guess this one is all on me, then. The last time I give my sister my opinion on anything, that’s for sure.”
“Ah.”
“What? Why are you smiling like that?”
