Reckless Hearts. Sean Olin

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      “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 up, she scrambled after her sister. “Nina, wait,” she called. “Let me help you.”

       7

       “Sounding good, brother.”

      Nathaniel was back, leaning against the sliding door that opened out from the cavernous living area onto the massive porch where Jake had been practicing his new song. He’d just taken a midafternoon shower and was wrapped in one of the impossibly plush, massively large towels with which the house was stocked.

      Annoyed by the intrusion, Jake looked up from his guitar and stopped playing. “Thanks,” he said, propping his bare foot on the rail of the porch and slouching back in the chair he’d dragged over.

      He had a gig tonight at Tiki Tiki Java, his standing Thursday-night show, but this one was different because he’d made up his mind to play the new song for Elena. It was finished now. His most honest song ever. There was no way she’d be able to hear it and not know it was about her.

      “You got a title yet?” Nathaniel asked.

      “I think I’m going to call it ‘Driftwood.’”

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