Page 76 of Well, That Was Unexpected

“How’d you know?”

“Mostly by being older and wiser,” she says, laughing. “And also because she told me you and Sharlot saw us together.” Her laughter dries up and worry flashes across her face. Just for a moment, but it’s enough to make her look vulnerable. “I’m sorry you had to, uh, see that.”

“No!” I cry. “No, don’t be sorry, please. I mean, it’s awkward because you’re my aunt, but, um. I just wanted you to know that I—uh—I’m proud of you?” Wow, it feels so weird telling someone twice your age that you’re proud of them. “And I’m here for you too.”

It takes a moment for me to figure out the expression onEighth Aunt’s face, because I’ve never seen her look like that before. She’s…surprised. Even when Rina did her takedown, Eighth Aunt hadn’t looked surprised, just furious. But now, her eyes are round and her mouth is slightly open, and it’s like I’m finally seeing the person behind the formidable mask. Then she smiles, and years are shaved off her face and I see her as a teen, laughing and giddy and in love.

“That’s so sweet of you,” she says, her eyes dancing. She reaches out and squeezes my arm. “You’re a good kid, George.”

After Eighth Aunt leaves, I let my breath out in one long, tiredwhooshbefore flopping on my bed. I love that I had that chat with Eighth Aunt, and I’m glad she seems to be okay, but it still doesn’t cancel out the fact that I’ve made a huge mess of things. The worst of my nightmares have come true—I’ve not only messed up everything with Sharlot but I’ve also let my entire family down. I’ve tanked my first-ever company-related event. I bury my face in my hands and squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I could blank out everything. I roll over to my side, and that’s when I feel it. Something hard in my bed.

I open my eyes and reach down for the object. It’s Eleanor’s new phone, one Papa gave her just two days ago. My heart rate doubles, triples, quadruples. I jump up to my feet and pace around the room. Did Eleanor forget her phone here? Or was it on purpose? I’m about to head for her room when I pause. I look down at the phone and hit the Home button. A number pad shows up, asking for the unlock code. My thumb moves as though of its own accord and hits several numbers. It unlocks,and tears rush into my eyes because Eleanor’s unlock code is Mama’s birthdate, and this means that she’s left the phone here for me. She knew that’s the first thing I would’ve tried.

Now that I’m in Eleanor’s phone, I have no idea what to do. I should call Sharlot. Yeah, okay. I look through Eleanor’s contact list until I find Sharlot’s name, and I hit Dial. My heart thrums sickeningly, a guitar string strung too tight. It immediately goes to voicemail. Her phone’s off. My heart plummets all the way down my body into my feet and onto the floor. Okay, maybe that was melodramatic, but, god. I feel sick. I try again. Voicemail again. I hang up without leaving a message and I close the call window and frown down at Eleanor’s phone. Huh. There’s only one app on her home screen, and it’s ShareIt. Okay…my little sister’s not known for subtlety, and her clues aren’t so much bread crumbs as they are entire loaves of bread. I have to laugh at that.

Sure enough, on her ShareIt app, Eleanor’s following only one person. But it’s not Sharlot, because Sharlot has taken down her ShareIt profile. I shudder to think of all the hate messages she must’ve received. Eleanor is following Kiki. Of course she is. I shake my head. The world is not ready for an Eleanor-Kiki partnership. I open up Kiki’s profile and my breath stops short in my chest, because there she is. Sharlot, I mean, not Kiki.

I’d assumed that Sharlot would’ve flown back to America as soon as she could, but here she is still in the city, only a few miles away from me. So close.

And they’re doing everything. Everything that Jakarta has to offer—all the chic, rooftop bars, the hipster cafés, theroadside food stalls, and the swanky restaurants. They hit all the tourist destinations—Taman Mini, where they have a huge display of all the different traditional Indonesian huts and wooden stilt houses. They went to Monas, the national monument commemorating the independence of Indonesia from the Dutch colony, and took pictures of themselves having kue apeh—coconut-flavored pancakes—in front of the monument. They went to all the museums, even the Wayang Museum, which houses one of Indonesia’s most celebrated art forms—the shadow puppet.

I smile at the photos of Sharlot discovering her heritage, but my heart cracks at the realization that she’s doing it all without me. Stop being so melodramatic, I scold myself. It’s not my place to show her around Jakarta. It makes sense that she’d do these things with her cousins. Yep, not singular “cousin,” but plenty of them. I guess Sharlot has reconnected with the rest of her family. They look so happy and vibrant. In one photo, they’re all caught mid-jump. In another, they’ve coordinated their poses to spell out the wordcousins.

Her mom has come along on some of their excursions too. In one photo, it seems they went to Sharlot’s mom’s old school. There’s a picture of Sharlot and her mom, sweaty and smiling while eating ice pops outside of the school, and Sharlot is gazing fondly at her mom, who’s looking at the school with a thoughtful expression. There’s so much love in Sharlot’s face that I feel guilty for trespassing on their privacy and swipe down to close the app. Instead, my thumb slips and taps the picture twice, liking it.

ARGH. Oh no. I double-tap again to cancel out the like, but now that I’ve done it, I realize that’s worse, because Kiki will get the notification about me liking it, and then she’ll see that I didn’t in fact like it and she’ll totally figure out that I canceled out my like, which is passive-aggressive to the max. Plus, I should’ve just let it be because this is Eleanor’s phone, and it’s totally fine for Eleanor to like Kiki’s pictures because of course she would, why wouldn’t she? So now it’s going to look really weird that “Eleanor” had liked it and then disliked it. Dammit, technology! I shut down ShareIt and shove the phone under my duvet as though that would solve anything.

It rings.

OH GOD. IT’S RINGING. An actual ringtone that means that someone’s calling and not texting. Who even calls in this day and age? That’s so intrusive.

I last about two seconds before I pounce on the duvet and paw through it. My hand closes around the phone and I see the name on the screen and IT’S KIKI. A half moan, half whine squeaks out of me. I am terrified of this girl. But. I take a deep breath. It’s time I grow a spine. I hit Accept.

“Ellie, my girl!” Kiki shouts. Why can’t anyone in Indonesia learn to speak in a normal voice? “I was just about to call you. Did you give your phone to your idiot brother yet?”

“Yeah, she did.”

Kiki doesn’t miss a beat. “Hey, idiot brother!”

“Hey.” Despite myself, I’m kind of smiling at “idiot brother.” “How’re you doing, Kiki?”

“Pretty good. Tired. Been traversing the city with your girlfriend.”

She’s not my girlfriend, I want to say, but my heart twists at the wordgirlfriendin a painfully hopeless way and I can’t bring myself to correct her. “Yeah, I saw. It looks like you are having a great time.” I clear my throat because my mouth has suddenly turned into a desert. “Um. Is Shar, um. Is she—”

“She’s good and bad. You know how it is. I hear you’ve been the same. Well, I hear you’ve mostly been moping around in your room like the count of Monte Carlo.”

“I think you mean Monte Cristo?”

“Don’t mansplain to me, George Clooney.”

“I’m not—never mind.” I take a deep breath. “So Shar’s good and bad?” What does that mean, exactly? “I tried to call her using Eleanor’s phone—”

“Oh, she gave me her phone for safekeeping. She was getting really bogged down by all the hate mail, you know how it is.”

“Ah.” The thought of Shar receiving hate mail crushes me. She doesn’t deserve them. As far as I know, I haven’t received any hate mail, aside from, you know, the whole scaring-investors-away thing. But that’s a very different issue from public opinion. In the public eye, I’m just a “normal teenage boy” who pulled some normal-teenage-boy bullshit. All in good fun. “Boys will be boys!” But not so for Shar. I grip the phone tighter. I’ve had enough of staying here and lying low and letting the wolves prowl and lunge and bite at Sharlot. “Hey, Kiki? Do you think you could pass the phone to Shar?”

There’s a pause and I hear whispers in the background—low and frantic like she’s arguing with someone. Just as I’m about to lose hope, someone picks up the phone again and says, “Hey, George.” And it’s her, and her voice sounds exactly as I remember it, soft and low and a little bit scratchy and the smile spreads across my face because I can’t not smile at the sound of her voice.

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