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Devi trailed Rebecca back into the depths of a wholesale fabric warehouse downtown. These places were overwhelming, stuffed with so many bolts, on shelves that went so high up they seemed to tilt over you when you looked up. Some of the aisles were so narrow you had to edge through them sideways, holding your breath, on tiptoe.
And yet Rebecca moved around here like she owned the place. It was amazing.
Today they were hunting for "a halfway decent wool blend", according to Rebecca. Devi had no idea what that would entail, so she followed quietly.
Quietly, that is, until Rebecca mentioned in passing that Paxton's best friend Trent was dating a guy.
Everyone was pairing off. Everyone was also expressing their sexuality in new and surprising ways. It was enough to make a person feel small, and uncool, and very straight.
Devi shoved her phone into her pocket, exhaled loudly, and started ranting. "...Is it me? Am I nuts?"
"Yes," Rebecca replied and wiggled loose a bolt from the shelf above her. "We've been over this."
"Because I feel like I'm going crazy!" Devi continued. "It's like everyone around me's gay all of a sudden. Not just gay! Pan and outside the binary and probably some very satisfying identities I have yet to learn about. They're all hooking up! Pairing and polyculing off! How did this happen? Why did this happen?"
Rebecca unwound a yard or so from the bolt and smoothed it with her hands before stepping back to consider it. "Most everyone is bisexual at heart."
"That's not — wait, what?"
Rebecca glanced at her. "Try to keep up."
Devi scowled. "With what? I'm lost."
"Exactly." She squinted at the fabric and pinched it between thumb and forefinger before sniffing in distaste. "If this has any wool in it, I will eat it for dinner."
In the end, Rebecca haggled with the kid on cutting duty for an extra half-yard on three different purchases, all while Devi fumed and pondered the bafflement that was other people's love lives.
Devi paid with the Hall-Yoshida Style corporate card and took the bag. Rebecca was already making her way toward the exit.
*
"Devi's partner," Kamala said of Rebecca when explaining their entrepreneurial venture, but then she'd always pause and her nose would wrinkle up. (Adorably, of course.) "Business partner, that is, not romantic partner, though possibly that, too, I am not privy to all her secrets..."
"Partner-partner," Devi herself said, but that didn't mean much to anyone over 20. She'd usually add, "I should be so lucky, though!"
Rebecca just rolled her eyes and called Devi her Girl Friday, Go-To Girl, or — when Devi got on her nerves, which was often enough — Ball and Chain and Hobbling Stick.
*
When everyone she knew went off to college, Devi stayed home. She didn't lose valedictorian to Ben, because she had never been in the running. This was not a technicality, despite what Ben said, but an incontrovertible fact. She still had three credits to complete in order to graduate in the LA Unified School District. All those band practices she'd skipped since sophomore year really added up.
All senior year, she evaded questions and changed the subject. She didn't apply anywhere, nor did she try to make up the missing credits. No one suspected anything. She'd been so sure about eventually being caught that she had no plan in place for when she succeeded. Succeeded at failing, that is.
She kept waiting for it all to hit her. No sense of overwhelming shame and disastrous failure, however, ever arrived. Unfortunately, neither did any exhilarating sense of freedom. That would have been cool.
Instead, she felt pretty much the same as she ever had.
Shortly after Labor Day, her mother announced over breakfast one morning that she would be leaving in three days for a year to serve as Dermatologist in Residence with Doctors Without Borders.
"You can't just up and leave!" Devi protested.
Nalini side-eyed her. "Nor can you just sit around the house all day doing your very best impression of a basement-dwelling Reddit poster, yet here we are."
"Harsh," Devi muttered.
"But true," Nalini said cheerfully. "Now here's what we're going to do."
Devi got to continue living — rent-free! This point was very important to her mother — in the house with Kamala. She remained on Nalini's health insurance. But if she wanted to eat or otherwise spend money, she'd have to get a job.
"I can't believe you're abandoning me," Devi said while helping Nalini pack.
"One of us should see the world and experience new things," Nalini replied. "Don't you agree?"
Devi did not reward that with a response.
Devi been hanging out a lot with Rebecca all summer, since everyone else she loved was headed out of state. (Fabiola was going to Berkeley, but everyone knew NorCal and the Bay Area were basically a different world.) Rebecca was third in her class at design school and looking, she said, "for bigger challenges".
They founded Hall-Yoshida Style at the Sepulveda Basin Off-Leash Dog Park while Rebecca's grandma's bichon rolled ecstatically in dirt.
Ms. Hall graciously gave up the cute backyard shed — really, a miniature bungalow — that had housed her pottery studio three hobbies ago. They spent a week renovating it into Hall-Yoshida Style HQ, complete with lacquered floor, airy curtains, and more IKEA storage than many local outlets.
Devi did the driving while Rebecca handled navigation. It was the essence of their partnership, really: road rage complemented by innovative routes. Rebecca was Chief Creative Officer while Devi used her big brain and penchant for argument for behind-the-scenes administration and operations.
Until, that is, the day in late November that Rebecca brought Ben Gross on board.
"He'll be COO," she told Devi.
"Excuse me?"
"He bought a 40% share."
"I have shares!"
"You have 6.75% and I gave that to you because you got mad about not having any shares. Then you got madder because you also didn't have any money to buy them."
Sometimes Rebecca was so chill that Devi could have screamed. Sometimes? More like all the time. "I have 7.5%! For...all those reasons you listed."
"You gave me back 0.75% that time we got build your own doughnuts and your debit card was declined."
"Oh, right." Devi slumped further down. Not even the memory of raspberry coulis swirled with dark chocolate ganache and funfetti sweet cream made her smile. It made her lips twitch, though, in memory of a smile. "Those were delicious."
"No regrets, nope," Rebecca murmured as she checked her phone. "Are you going to be stupid about Ben?"
"Yes," Devi replied automatically. Then she took a deep breath. "No. I'll be good."
"He's just the money guy," Rebecca assured her. "That's all."
Why was it that rich people thought they could just buy their way into things? Besides the fact that they could, that is. She made a mental note to check some mid-level works on sociology of class and wealth.
Frowning, Devi looked up. "But I'm still your go-to girl, right?"
Rebecca laughed at her, which, all right, she deserved. Devi frowned more furiously, however, because she really did want the validation. Plus, it was the principle of the thing.
From behind her sewing machine, Rebecca said, "Sure you are," and depressed the pedal to wind her bobbin thread. Over the noise, she added, "Who else would be?"
Devi sat back up, beaming. "Okay. All I needed."
"And as go-to girl," Rebecca continued, "you need to get back to the ironing. Like, yesterday."
Devi groaned as she dragged herself to her feet. Ironing! It was what had gotten her here in the first place. Who'd have thought that her mom's favorite punishment would have prepared her for entrepreneurship quite so well?
Her mom, for one, but her mom liked to grab credit for everything positive. You'd think she was responsible for Devi remembering to draw breath.
*
She'd always had a knack for understanding external systems of achievement and judgment. Whether that was the SATs or flirtation guides, Devi grasped the principle of how to excel easily.
Without them, however, she wasn't sure who she was. Was she even anyone? Maybe all those invisible systems wrapped around us, bound us up, defined who we were and were not. Like the tomatoes in Kamala's garden, wrapped up in chicken wire that showed them where to grow: without all those systems, a person would just flop around and rot.
*
As a matter of fact, Devi didn't mind ironing, or cutting, or even sweeping up the studio at the end of the day. Her mother had warned Rebecca when they first opened the studio to keep an eye on Devi: "this one will wriggle out of any responsibility, just you watch!"
That she was wrong about that surprised Devi as much as anyone. Maybe she was maturing.
"Or maybe it's simply that you don't have nearly two decades' worth of resentment built up regrading Rebecca," her mother said that weekend during their video call check-in.
"Is that the same as saying I like her better?"
Nalini gave her a tightlipped smirk. "I don't know, does it?"
"Because I don't," Devi pushed on. "Even though she pays me."
"Sounds like you should ask for a raise," Nalini replied.
"Okay, good one, nice burn," Devi said.
Smiling back at her mom was still a fairly novel feeling, but she enjoyed it. Their conversation drifted back to safer waters: Kamala's literature review, the state of gas prices, Nalini's irritation with her fellow volunteers. They didn't even get to the evergreen topic of Devi's hair and how unkempt it looked these days.
Maybe they needed to be halfway around the world from each other to start being patient.
*
Ben was home from Harvard for Winter Break. Leave it to him to ruin the jolliest time of the year with his very presence.
"Here's what I'm seeing," Ben announced at their first meeting. They were sharing a Buffalo blue haystack and two orders of deviled eggs at The Tipsy Cow. Her breath was going to be so rancid. He actually held up his hands and then moved them apart as if he were reading off a blazing marquee: "Big. Name. Influencers."
When he paused and didn't seem to be about to finish the phrase any time soon, Devi circled her hand impatiently. (With the other, she was stabbing another forkful of blue-cheese drenched fries.) "Big name influencers...what?"
Rebecca, however, nodded agreeably and tapped her stylus against her tablet. "Go on."
"Thank you," Ben said, making a point of turning to address Rebecca, and Rebecca only. "As I was saying. We need to get your designs on the backs of the chic and the fashionable —"
"Wow, telling a fashion designer to dress fashionable people," Devi muttered. "This is definitely worth listening to. Priceless advice, right here."
"— the up and comers, the well-established, as long as they have a platform, we want them talking about you."
Rebecca was still nodding along as she took notes. When she finished, however, she set down her tablet and fixed her gaze on Ben. "That sounds great."
"Thank you," Ben said, not at all humbly. "I'm planning an independent-study seminar on political economy for —"
"But what does it mean? How's it going to happen?"
Devi had to sit on her hands to keep from clapping wildly. She settled for biting her lip and kicking Rebecca under the table. Supportively, as a "you go, girl" sort of gesture, that is.
Ben opened and closed his mouth several times. Like a guppy.
A weirdly compelling, secretly sexy guppy, Devi would have admitted to exactly no one later that afternoon when she was lying on top of him, making out furiously next to his pool. He didn't seem to mind her terrible breath.
"Knew you missed me," he said when he had to break for breath.
"Shut up. You're so much more attractive when you're not talking."
He guppy'd at her again.
"Influence isn't just a user name getting @'ed," she told Ben over dinner. His parents were in Guam, or Guyana, or somewhere, so they had the house to themselves. They ate standing up, in their underwear, scarfing down leftover tuna carpaccio and intensely phallic looking gherkins.
"At'ted?"
"Try to keep up," she said. "It's so much more than that. It has to be."
"Oh, really? Enlighten me."
"People can see through the insincerity," she said, leaning into the freezer to dig out some fresh-fruit freezes. "We have to move past the empty branded gesture. It's gotta mean something or it's pointless."
He smirked at her. He was getting ready for the kill; she knew him too well. "Devi," he said, with feigned patience. "Are you actually working up a philosophy of influencing?"
She thought about it, then nodded. "Yes. Yes, I am."
"You're going to seed out here," he said, as if she were stuck in some remote backwater.
"No," she said, and they dueled a little with their fruit pops. "Kind of the opposite, as a matter of fact."
On reflection, she didn't know what the opposite of going to seed would be. Some kind of vegetable Benjamin Button phase? It didn't matter. What mattered was that she'd shut Ben up for the time being.
Now she had to do that, but on a grander, corporate scale.
*
The next evening, Devi had to run some errands for Kamala, then pick up her monthly order at the weed store. Since last spring, Dr. Ryan had her on low-dose THC for anxiety. It might even have been helping, but Devi wasn't sure. She liked the idea of it a lot. Sometimes she pictured herself at a party saying blithely, "yes, I microdose THC and it's been such a life-changer..."
That sort of opportunity had yet to present itself, in large part because Devi didn't go to many parties. Rebecca was always too busy and Kamala's idea of a party was ordering extra cheesy bread with her pizza. If Devi had been going to parties, she doubted she'd have found herself at hip gatherings like the one in her daydream. (There were chandeliers hanging from tree limbs and everyone was barefoot for some reason.)
She didn't even feel comfortable here, in a weed store on Ventura. She'd chosen The Blazin' Asian at first because it gave her the opportunity to support fellow Asian small-businesspeople, but she kept coming back because Marcus the owner was an even bigger dork than she was.
He gave a girl hope.
When he spotted her, Marcus held up his hand for her to slap.
"It's so cool knowing the owner," she told him. "You're a lifesaver."
He pretended to look humble as he counted out her edibles like an old-fashioned pharmacist on the marble slab. "I'm just the manager, Devi."
She snorted. "You're basically the owner."
Marcus's partner was a semi-famous chef who was extending her brand — fusion, but with heart! — into cannabis. That was the marketing line, anyway. Five minutes with Marcus and it was pretty obvious that the store was his playground.
"Sleeping with the owner doesn't make me the owner," he said as he slid her papaya gummies into a pretty little origami pouch. "You're an entrepreneur, surely you get that?"
"Ugh." She slid the pouch into her bag, then leaned forward. "Don't remind me. What's new with you? Distract me."
His grin was so wide she was about to tease him about sampling the product during business hours, but then he held up his left hand and wiggled his fingers, drawling, "Wellll...."
"What?"
Marcus looked affronted. A pout was threatening. "If I were a lady, you wouldn't be asking 'what'!"
Devi shook her head, as if that would clear it. "Use your words, dude."
"I'm getting married," Marcus said and wiggled his fingers faster. "I'm showing you my invisible but highly impressive engagement ring."
She wasn't sure any of that made sense. "Why's it invisible? That's suspicious right there." She lowered her voice. "Marcus, you don't have to settle for being a sidepiece. You're worth so much more than that."
He sighed. "Because I'm a guy. Turns out guys don't get sparkly hand-candy, can you believe that? Even those of us who are basically slacker arm-candy."
Sometimes, a plan just came together. A problem set solved itself. An essay made its own argument with several perfect quotations. And whenever that sort of thing happened, Devi got the same thrill down the back of her neck, like goosebumps crossed with a faint knock on her funny bone, that she felt now.
"You're getting married," she said and grinned and threw herself over the counter to hug him. "This is so great for me!"
*
When she told Ben and Rebecca that she'd gotten HYS a wedding pitch, they reacted just about the way she'd expected. Ben was suspicious, while Rebecca was already pulling out her sketchpad and flipping through it.
Ben crossed his arms. "You did what? Who's Marcus, your new fwib?"
"The hell is a fwib?" Devi asked.
Ben tried to look blase. "Friend with benefits, that's what they're called in Cambridge. What we call them. In Cambridge."
"Oh, you go to school in Cambridge?" Rebecca asked without looking up. Ben frowned as Devi laughed.
"Marcus is like forty years old," Devi said, "and, more importantly, like I just said, he's getting married. So, no, he is not my fwib."
"I love Sasha's chimichurri biangbiang noodles!" Rebecca was basically radiant with excitement. "We're going to rock this!"
"Wait," Devi said later, when Ben had gone and she and Rebecca were tidying up the studio while waiting for Mr. Yoshida to finish grilling dinner. "Am I Ben's fwib?"
Rebecca shrugged. "Aren't you?"
"Eww," Devi said, collapsing into the comfortable armchair. She closed her eyes and groaned some more. "I think I might be. This is terrible."
Rebecca patted her shoulder as she passed. "So hard, being you."
Devi clasped Rebecca's hand and squeezed it. "Thank you," she said as fervently as possible. "You're too kind."
*
Ben was back in Cambridge by the time HYS made their pitch to Sasha and Marcus. They over-prepared, which was not entirely Devi's fault; Rebecca was every bit as nervous and ambitious as Devi. That's why they made such a good team.
"Super-neurotic team, more like," Paxton muttered one morning when he wandered into the studio, scratching his (beautiful) bare chest and draining the last of his breakfast smoothie. "You two been up all night?"
"We napped," Rebecca said shortly, then poked him with her thread snipper before he could tread on the fabric she was laying out on the floor.
"Weirdos," he said and wandered back out.
"He got a new tattoo," Devi said when he was gone.
Rebecca nodded. "Set a butterfly record. Or recorded butterflies. I can't remember."
Their pitch went off perfectly, to the point that it turned out they already had the job.
"I don't have time to hunt down a designer and make decisions and all that shit," Sasha told them over Zoom. Her hair was pulled messily back, her face red and sweaty from the kitchen, and she had to yell to be heard. "Your stuff is wack-ass cool, Marcus loves Devi, we might as well work together, right?"
Rebecca and Devi looked at each other, eyes wide, like if they just looked closely enough, they could discern what to say.
"You still there?" Sasha yelled.
"Yes!" Devi said.
Rebecca, far more calmly, said, "Yes, and thank you. I love your style already. I think this will be great."
Devi gulped and nodded. "What she said, too."
"So what were you thinking of?" Rebecca continued. "Traditional áo dài, or something Western —"
Sasha jabbed a lethal looking knife at the camera. "You've done your research. Nice."
"It wouldn't be a Hall-Yoshida original without Vishwakumar research," Devi put in.
Cocking her head, Sasha said, "Okay, I don't know what any of that meant. Moving on! I don't want anything traditional, white and poofy or a polyester áo dài. It just has to be red and fucking kickass."
"What's your understanding of 'fucking kickass', if you don't mind?" Devi asked sweetly.
Sasha was glaring at something off-camera. Distractedly, she replied, "I don't care, make it red and smashing and we'll call it a day."
"But it's your wedding..." Rebecca began.
Sasha made a jerkoff motion. "If I could, I'd just live in sin for the rest of my life, wearing yoga pants or an Amazon nightgown."
While Rebecca shuddered delicately at "Amazon nightgown", Devi nodded enthusiastically. "I love those things!"
"Right? Ugly as hell and comfier than anything," Sasha said. "Someone's on fire over there, I should probably check on him. We all set? "
"Red and smashing," Rebecca repeated.
"You got it!" Sasha gave them a thumbs up, before the picture zoomed in on her, squinting at her screen to figure out how to turn it off.
Her assistant Veronica gestured frantically for their attention. "Was that enough? I can probably get her to come in person next week if you need her? Maybe the week after?"
Devi looked at Rebecca, waited for her to nod, then said, "No, that's great, we'll get to work and send you something end of next week."
When Veronica looked impressed at that, then said she was, Rebecca squeezed Devi's hand under the table. They were very professional and did not react until the meeting was closed.
When the connection was cut, however, they hugged and bounced and there may have definitely been a whole lot of squealing.
*
The design that Sasha chose was Devi's favorite of the final three. First of all, the silk was scarlet red, such a red that it was almost cold. High-collared, but sleeveless, the torso consisted of two micro-pleated halves in front, turned on their sides so the pleats ran horizontally, with a plunging back. It gave way to an equally narrow skirt, which was slit on both sides like an áo dài. The skirt, however, was composed not of fabric, but tiers of macrame-knotted red silk cord, attached to sheer red chiffon, that looked like rows of waves coming into shore
"That," Marcus said approvingly, as he flipped through the carousel of design mockups, "is the kind of dress a Bond girl would assassinate the leader of the free world in."
When no one said anything, he frowned and rubbed his chin. "Bond woman? We should say Bond woman, huh?"
He'd taken to hanging out at the studio when he wasn't at the store but Sasha was stuck at work. He brought them food and extra edibles, however, so neither Rebecca nor Devi wanted him to stop. Rebecca's parents liked him, too. Mr. Yoshida had been in a band in high school and Marcus's stories about Hello Peril were inspiring him to take up the keytar again.
"If he does that," Paxton texted Rebecca, "I'm holding you and Devi responsible for me changing my name and leaving the country."
*
Ben was far from impressed by the fact that they were devoting most of the company's time to one dress. He had things to say, lessons to impart, concerning sunk costs and opportunity losses. He may literally have used the phrase "all our eggs in one basket", which made him sound more like the old lady he was at heart than she'd ever heard.
"You're coming to the wedding," Devi told him. "So stop your whining."
"Oh," he said, then went quiet. It was a Tuesday night, but the noise of seventeen different parties resounded through his laptop mic and into her ears. You'd think Harvard students — in Cambridge, yes, that Harvard — would be more studious. At least quieter, on account of their rampant nerdery. "Really?"
"Really," she said. "I get a plus one and Kamala has a conference that weekend."
He started to argue with her. It took him a surprisingly long time to notice her smirk, then longer still to trail off to silence.
"Cool," he said. "I'll fly in."
"From Cambridge?" she asked as innocently as she could manage.
"Logan, actually," he replied, not noticing the sarcasm. He was losing his edge, fast.
*
She hated watching Rebecca cut fabric. She used to leave the room when it happened, but Rebecca put her foot down last time. So now Devi had to watch. Worse yet, she had to hold the fabric in place.
"I hate this," she said now, readjusting how much pressure her palms were exerting on the silk.
"Mm-hmm," Rebecca replied.
"You could slip and ruin 85 bucks' worth of organza!"
"Not," Rebecca said tightly, "if you stop flailing around."
"Sorry."
Rebecca leaned in, shears at the ready. Devi's pulse thundered in her ears.
"Sorry, sorry, stop!"
Rebecca groaned, but set down the shears and straightened up. "What?"
"How do you know?" Devi asked. Rebecca circled her hand, like, know what? "Sorry. How do you know you're not going to mess up?"
She flipped her hair back over her shoulder as she shrugged. "Just do."
"But how do you know?"
"You. Just. Do."
"But —"
"Let me stop you there," Rebecca said.
Devi sagged. She was being ridiculous. Why did she always realize she was being ridiculous when it was way too late? "Yeah, sorry. Forget it."
"You go for it."
"Right, right." Devi nodded rapidly. "Of course."
Rebecca picked up her shears. "Better?"
"Not really," Devi said. She tried to smile. "Trying, though."
"Go for it," Rebecca repeated. "Repeat after me."
"Oh, God, you're not going to make me cut it?"
Rebecca snickered. "And ruin 85 bucks' worth of organza? Not on your life."
Devi sat back on her heels, arms loose at her sides. She was grinning, and she didn't know how long she'd been grinning. A while, however. Longer than she had for a very long time: her cheeks hurt and her eyes kind of tingled, but in a good way.
"Here I go," Rebecca said, bending to it. Her shears slipped through the silk like wind through your hair.
*
Seeking an escape from doctoral stress, Kamala had taken over Devi's father's garden a few years ago. Because she was Kamala, and every living thing adored her, the garden flourished. She never used pesticides, nourished everything with biomass, even harvested seeds from one year's plants for the next year.
She was kneeling in the dirt, looking like a princess in disguise, big floppy hat protecting her skin, while Devi sat cross-legged and handed her sprouts.
Devi did not have to be ordered or cajoled into helping these days. She didn't even get paid, yet she didn't mind helping.
"Wait a minute!" Devi yelled when Kamala sat back, cute little trowel in hand, and asked for the methi seeds next.
"What's that?" Kamala asked.
"Seeds are really important," Devi told her.
Kamala beamed at her. "They are! Everything grows from them! They're like little powerhouses of life!"
"Stupid Ben," Devi grumbled. "Doesn't know anything about life."
"All right," Kamala agreed. "May I have the methi, then, please?"
*
Rebecca and Devi pulled eight consecutive all-nighters before the delicate macrame tiers on the skirt matched Rebecca's exacting standards. Devi never wanted to see twine, thread, rope or even a bungee cord, ever again. Her fingers were permanently cramped up and throbbed, no matter how many Epsom salt baths she gave them. She had to admit, though, that the result was stunning. The skirt moved like nothing she'd ever seen, rustling and shifting both laterally and vertically. It was simply incredibly, eye-wateringly sexy.
"I'm going to look like such a schlub next to that," Marcus said. He didn't sound all that upset. Not even resigned, just factual.
"Buck up, dude," Devi said, and clapped his elbow. "So your wedding day will be like every other day."
He nodded. "Start as you mean to go on, right?"
"We won't let that happen," Rebecca said.
Devi glanced over her shoulder. "We won't?"
Rebecca just grinned. "Nope."
"It'll be our gift," Rebecca said.
"Whose?" Devi asked while Marcus said, "I can't let you..."
"Yours and mine," Rebecca said to Devi, then turned to Marcus. "We want to."
Marcus looked at Devi, his expression confused and pleading. She shrugged. "We do," she said, exactly as she realized it was true. Not just that she and Rebecca wanted to, but that she and Rebecca were the kind of unit who did that kind of thing. "Friends, right?"
He cried a little then. It was pretty embarrassing, but sweet.
Thus ensued another two all-nighters, during which Rebecca directed their deconstruction of the tuxedos Marcus and his father were going to wear. When they were finished, the tuxes had red lapels to match Sasha's dress and small cord buttons built up out of the same thread that made her skirt.
Devi was giddy by the time they finished. It was about five in the morning, a day before the home ceremony, and she was vibrating from espresso shots and the snack 'n share bag of caramel M&M's they'd demolished.
Rebecca stretched her arms over her head, cracking her neck a couple times. Devi winced at the sound, but Rebecca just said, "Deal with it. You could use an adjustment, you know."
"Probably, yeah," Devi said. She leaned back on her elbows and kicked out her legs. The door to the studio was open, and a damp breeze was wafting through the screen door. She could hear a plane in the distance, and some very excited sparrows.
After a bit, Devi spoke again. "You ever think about it?"
Rebecca made a sleepy noise, not quite language. When Devi looked over, she was curled up in the big armchair, head pillowed on one arm. Her blonde hair spilled over the chair arm. She looked tiny in a way Devi hadn't ever really appreciated.
"Never mind," Devi said.
"No, what?" Rebecca murmured.
"Marriage. Like. Being with someone for—" She almost said forever, but that wasn't really true, was it? Her own parents were proof of that. "For the rest of your life."
"Monogamy's one path in life," Rebecca said, then yawned really loudly.
"Yeah," Devi said. Her bones hurt, she was so tired. But her thoughts were jitterbugging around her skull. "I mean, though, like —"
"I've got lots of people I love," Rebecca said. "For the rest of my life. Already."
Devi swallowed and knuckled at her sore eyes. "Yeah, you do." The Hall-Yoshidas were more than awesome.
"Including you, dumbass," Rebecca added, as a throw pillow whizzed over and hit Devi in the head.
"Oh," Devi said and did Ben's guppy face for a really long time. "Oh, cool."