“And print items,” he added. “They’re asking for phone cases, laptop sleeves, and other stuff we don’t have.”
“I thought we had phone cases.” I set everything down on the coffee table and then threw myself onto the couch. The sacrifices I made to travel without a jacket… I was freezing!
“Just for the latest iPhones,” Lane replied.
I wrapped a blanket around myself before I tore up the packaging of the chicken. “Okay, well, that’s your job. Do whatever you want.” I slid him a smirk, then refocused on food. I filled a plate with chicken—I stole most of the crispy skin—and chips. My mouth watered at the mere sight. “By the way, did you get a care package from bedstemor yet?”
“Not yet, but we talked to her yesterday, and she just sent them,” he said.
Aw, yiss. Our grandmother sent the best care packages, all the way from Copenhagen. We visited every summer, and no matter how much I brought home with me, I ran out in a few weeks.
Sometimes Lane and I went to World Market for their limited selection of Danish foods, but they rarely carried the stuff we were obsessed with. Lane and I were both hooked on a soda called Faxe Kondi and these amazing chocolate thins or sheets you put on toast. The way they melted with the butter and… No words.
If we managed to score a package on Amazon or any of the Scandinavian online shops, we walked on clouds for a week, Lane and I. Alva was more into things she could make herself by following a Danish recipe or something.
I chewed around a mouthful of chicken and shook my head. Now I missed Denmark.
Our grandma was another person who’d never made me feel like I was in the way. She had six children and fourteen grandchildren, and she made time for each and every one of us. Most of us were spread all over the world, so we were on a strict FaceTime schedule. If I didn’t talk to her at least twice a month, she got crabby.
I let out a silent chuckle to myself and threw a handful of chips into my mouth. Out of six children, only one had stayed in Denmark. My mom and her twin sister had moved to DC for college and ended up staying—until recently, anyway. Lane and Alva’s parents moved to Providence last year. Two of my uncles lived in Frankfurt. Another aunt in Bangkok, because we had family there too. My grandfather’s mother had been from Thailand, and we visited every other year in the worst season. It was always raining when we were there.
“What’s so funny?” Lane asked, reaching for the TV remote.
“Our family.” I shrugged. “I wonder if bedstemor is more tech-savvy than me just because we’re so far away.” She had a serious setup in her home study in order to stay in touch with us all.
“Anyone’s more tech-savvy than you,” Lane laughed.
Jerk.
But yeah.
Lane and I were so alike in many areas. To the point where some of our family members jokingly called us the twins. He was a year older, a little taller, had lots of ink, and was certainly tech-savvy, but we shared the same greenish eyes, the same nose, the same untamed hair, the same body frames, similar interests in kink and structure, and we were both gay and neurodiverse. Me with autism and him with ADHD.
“What can I do that you can’t?” I frowned.
He answered with his mouth full of chicken. “I can’t draw worth a damn—or get a tan in the summer.”
Oh, great. So that’s what I could thank my dad for, having a father from El Salvador so I could get a freaking tan.
I loved my dad, but he was weird. And that was coming from me.
If I looked up the word loner in a dictionary, I’d find a photo of Dad. He and Mom had divorced as best friends, though not without a bit of resentment on Mom’s end. She wanted a husband; he wanted to study frogs in South America. I guessed that was another thing I’d inherited from him. I loved frogs! I’d bought a bright-green Mini Cooper and named it Froggy.
I pinched another piece of skin off the chicken and tossed it into my mouth. God, that was so good.
“Alva’s thinking about joining Mom and Dad, by the way,” Lane mentioned.
That was a surprise. “Are you serious? After all the kicking and screaming she did last year?”
I’d thought for sure my aunt and uncle would force Alva to move with them to Providence. I mean, come on, she was fourteen. And at the time of the move, she’d also been neck-deep in screenings to figure out why she suffered from bouts of depression. But that same reason for my aunt to hold her close had become the selling point for why Alva would stay behind. She had enough on her plate, she really loved DC, she couldn’t handle that kind of change right then. Lane’s words, not mine. He’d stepped in as her support, and in the end, she’d moved in with him upstairs, and their mom flew down to fret and fuss every other week.