Edna opened the door to her home and walked into the living room. To her surprise she found two bickering male teenagers standing in the middle of the room. Jig was sitting in a chair, holding her face with her hands and shaking her head.
"Favorite food!" Isaac yelled at Ephram.
"White rice! Least favorite food!" Ephram responded and challenged.
"Plain chocolate! She likes something in it like peanuts or caramel or something! What are the three signs that Jig's having her period?" Isaac asked. Jig sighed angrily and Edna walked over to her and tapped her on the shoulder. Jig looked up and sighed in relief upon seeing the elderly woman's face.
"What's going on?" Edna asked her.
"My friend Isaac from LA showed up, hence all of the flowers!" Jig informed her.
"She gets aggravated, she cleans everything, and she eats a lot of almonds!" Ephram replied to Isaac's question.
"Yea I know Isaac was here, I helped him set the flowers up. But what are they doing?" Edna asked nodding her head to the two bickering boys. Jig smirked, though obviously not amused.
"They're having an 'I Know More About Jig' contest!" she yelled angrily. Edna chuckled.
"Ha! Wrong! It's walnuts! Not almonds!"
"That's kind of cute," Edna told her. Jig scoffed.
"Cute! It's freaky!" Jig told her.
"No it's almonds!"
"Walnuts!"
"It must be nice to have friends who care about you so much though," Edna reminded her.
"Almonds!"
"Yea well it's also freaky how much they know about me. This has been going on for a few hours now. I didn't know so much trivia about me existed!"
"Jig!" Ephram and Isaac both yelled to her. Jig turned to them sharply.
"What!" she yelled angrily. Her voice had been so angry the two boys fell silent for a moment.
"When you have your period do you eat walnuts or almonds?" Isaac asked her. Jig's face froze half surprised and half panicked. This might have been a question from nuts, but that's not what her answer would be about. Jig's answer right now would determine which one of them won, which one she sided with, agreed with. Her reply would determine who was her best friend.
"Almonds," came the reply, only, it was from Edna. Jig froze again in a completely hopeless pose, scared pretty much out of her wits. The boys too, froze wide eyed.
"Almonds, right? You buy them every month," Edna said hitting Jig's shoulder slightly with the back of her hand. Edna always lacked a certain ability to really understand a conversation, whatever that means… Jig, now, was set in a very difficult position. Now she had to say almonds and agree with Ephram, she could no longer lie, even if she did like Isaac more. But, somehow, Jig could almost always figure a way out of these type of spots.
"It was walnuts in LA, and almonds here," she said and both boys smiled so she sighed in relief. This way both of them felt a sense of victory, and Jig wouldn't be up at night knowing she had hurt one of the two people she cared most about. Jig, even though relieved, scoffed and looked up at Edna.
"What do you mean you helped him set the flowers up!" she demanded. Edna simply chuckled in response and walked into the kitchen, thirst overwhelming her.
Delia sat at her table during art class, frowning as she colored in the picture she had drawn. It was of a horse, and in no way did it, well, look like a horse. But they had to produce something in this time, and a bad horse was better than nothing at all. Murasaki was doing her usual thing, practicing her kanji. She was very good at it, Delia thought, she didn't know why Murasaki had to practice. Murasaki once explained to her that in Japan, writing is more than just a form of communication; it was practically an art in itself. Sometimes Murasaki told Delia what the kanji she painted meant, and sometimes she didn't. One of these days Delia was going to paint in Hebrew, and mess everyone up. She just needed to learn Hebrew…
As the horse's coloring was near completion, and since there was a few minutes time before they had to finish, Delia let her eyes wander around the room to the other students. By now she knew all of the faces as well as the names attached to them. Murasaki had filled her in on the need to know facts about those who had them. But, against all of the odds, there was a face Delia didn't know. He was a black haired boy who sat quietly in the corner by himself. Most of the time, as Delia watched him, he kept diligent to his work, but when he looked for a few brief moments around the classroom at the other kids, never at Delia, she saw something in his bluish gray eyes that made her smile. She turned to her friend.
"Murasaki, who's the new boy in the corner?" Delia asked her making the question known but not acting like she really cared. Murasaki only needed a quick glance to give Delia all of the information she wanted but didn't ask for.
"His name is Torres Villa, and he's not new. His parents are divorced and have joint custody. He spends half of the year with his mom here and the other half with his dad in Spain. He speaks Spanish as well as I speak Japanese. He's nice enough, though, just a little shy. Four years of living two different lives can do that, I suppose," Murasaki told her. Delia turned back to the boy and frowned slightly at his misfortune.
By this time Jig wished she had just said one nut or the other, because that would have shut the two talking nuts up! Ephram and Isaac were so determined to maintain their 'Jig's Best Friend' title they were still testing the other's Jig IQ, even now, hours after it had begun. This was unsettling to Jig for a number of reasons. One, eventually they'd run out of things and just plain ask her who she liked more, and then she'd be in a big pile of dung. Another aspect that was unsettling was the amount of intimate and sometimes meaningless bits of trivia the two had remembered about her. It was weird enough having one person memorize her favorite Beatles in order, but having two people was, well, a little freaky…
"Okay, her favorite Disney Movie," Isaac said to Ephram.
"Mulan," he replied simply, "what's her favorite game in the Myst trilogy?"
"Enough! The both of you! Go home! School's already over with you've been at it all day! Stop it, please! Go away! Leave me alone!" Jig yelled at them both, bolting from her chair and running into her room, shutting the door loudly behind her. The two boys did fall silent for a few moments before there was a knock on the front door. Ephram, having spent enough time at that Harper residence felt at home enough there to answer the door himself. He gasped in surprise upon seeing Desi's worried face in front of him.
"Ephram!" she yelled, walking a few steps into the house and closing the door behind her, "you weren't in school today so I called your house and your dad said you left to walk Jig to school on time! So I came here and HOLY CRAP!!!"
For a brief second Desi had looked past her boyfriend to the boy standing behind him, but due to all of the magazines, and movies, and newspapers, it only took the brief second for her to recognize him. Isaac, upon receiving Desi's shocked gaze, waved his fingers at her in reply. Ephram sighed.
"Desi, this is Isaac de la Vega, he's a friend of Jig's from LA…" Ephram informed her. Desi cringed.
"That's Isaac! That's Jig's Isaac! Oh geez I should have known!" she yelled at herself. Ephram looked at her completely confused.
"How on earth could you have known that?" he asked her.
"Well I knew Isaac de la Vega was from LA. I knew that!"
"Desi, there must be a hundred guys named Isaac in LA…" Ephram told her.
"Maybe, but I also knew he grew up in the, uh…" Desi said not quite knowing how to phrase it.
"Slums? Hi, who are you?" Isaac asked her, smiling. Desi smiled too, walking right past Ephram and over to Isaac. She shook his hand.
"I'm Desi Quincampoix! I'm the mayor's daughter and head of the school newspap- ah! No one knows you're here! Can I get an interview for the school newspaper? It comes out tomorrow but I can get the article in it. So can I-?" Desi asked but was cut off by the sound of Ephram clearing his throat. She looked behind her to the boyfriend she had almost completely ignored. She bit her lip and turned back to Isaac.
"And in addition I am also the caring and loving, and incredibly loyal girlfriend of that wonderful hunk of man behind me named Ephram Brown, or as I call him sometimes, the greatest living being on earth…" Desi said quickly. Ephram sighed and Isaac laughed a little.
"A girlfriend, huh? I bet that complicates things. Tell me Ephram, how weird is it that when remembering every girl you've ever kissed, no matter how nice she was, she was never her? Don't you just hate that feeling?" Isaac asked him, Ephram fell silent, staring angrily at him. Isaac shook his head, grabbed his coat, and headed for the door.
"When Jig comes out, tell her I'm sorry if I caused her any pain at all, and that she has my love, always…" Isaac said and walked out of the house past Ephram. Ephram looked down at the ground and Desi looked around the living room.
"What's with the flowers?"
