When I first got here—I biked over and arrived before Raj did—Zach opened the door, out of breath from running up the stairs. We smiled shyly at each other and then Zach said, “My parents aren’t home, but you’ve met my dad. Kevin will come down in a second, and in the meantime, I can introduce you to everyone else.”
We rounded a corner into the hallway, and Zach stooped down to pet a gray Persian cat slinking along the wall. “This is Macy,” he said. She stared at us, tail raised, with judgmental green eyes.
“Hi, Macy,” I said.
“This is Diego Maradona,” he said, pointing up at a framed poster of a soccer player on the wall, next to a picture of two elderly couples I assumed were Zach’s grandparents. The poster had a hard-to-read black signature on it andLA MANO DE DIOStyped underneath it. “The first person my dad would save in case of fire.”
I laughed. “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met a famous person before. Your dad likes soccer?”
“His parents were first-generation Irish immigrants, so that would be a yes.”
“My dad is a soccer fan, too. He claims North Americans are the only people on earth who take it for granted.”
“Hey, now. Mexico appreciates the beautiful game,” Zach said. “And don’t let my dad hear you call it soccer.”
Dad has tons of stories of growing up playing soccer indoors, on the streets, in random fields with his brother, Uncle Mark, who died before I was born. Their parents let them because that was what they had grown up doing in Vincy. He doesn’t tell me these stories anymore; now we talk about furniture.
We walked a little farther into an open-plan dining area, and I followed Zach to a rectangular fish tank with a bluey-green tinge and a bevy of plants and rocks on the bottom. He squinted a bit and then pointed to the glass. “There’s Goldie Hawn, Kevin’s fish. My mom named him.”
An orange tail flicked out from behind a leafy green plant. I imagined it was waving hello.
“Him?” I asked.
“Hey, Goldie’s a gender-neutral name for goldfish.”
We both laughed.
“So, do you live with anyone who actually talks back to you?”
“I swear I do,” Zach said. “Kevin’s around somewhere. You’re just early.”
We went down the stairs off Zach’s kitchen into a living-room area in the basement littered with camera equipment and made small talk while we waited.
Now, with everyone present, Zach hands me and Raj about ten stapled sheets of paper each. “Here’s the final script. Sorry, we were out of blank paper, so I printed it on lined.” Raj sighs heavily as he receives his. I read the copy Zach emailed yesterday, and on first glance, the opening scene looks exactly the same.
“Kev!” Zach calls, and I’m shocked when a skinnier version of Zach—precisely the same color hair, but shorter and not as bouncy—appears.
“This is my brother Kevin,” Zach says.
Kevin grins at me, a smile from the same family of smiles as Zach’s but—how to put this?—greasier.“Heeeey,”he slurs. His greeting is met with a whack to the back of his head so swift that if I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.
“He’sfourteen,” Zach says pointedly, and I smile, kind of enjoying Zach’s protectiveness of me, despite being weirded out by his brother’s creepiness.
“Fifteen almost,” Kevin says, which instantly makes him seem even younger. In trying to bargain for more freedoms, I used to say stuff like that to my mom all the time, and it’s only recently I figured out how dumb it is to remind your parents that you can’t count (nine months is not “almost”) and that you’re Not Even [Insert Age] yet.
“Nice to meet you,” I tell Kevin, then turn back to Zach. “How many siblings do you have?”
“Three brothers. Two older—both of them live a few hours away. You have just one older brother, right?” Zach asks.
I nod. “It must be nice having a big family. I would love that.”
“Believe me, sometimes I would rather just have one brother.”
Zach goes to sit on the couch, bits and pieces of camera equipment around him.
I sit on the other end of the couch from Zach, who says, “So I think we need a schedule for shooting and editing this time.”
“I thinkwe need to get paid. I won’t work for free like last summer,” Kevin says, flipping through the pages of the script. “Now that I have a real job.”
