she’s your old boss trying to get you back in the game.”
“I feel like you’re missing the point.”
“Sorry, like, it’s your life and all, but do you not hear how badass that sounds?”
And it is August’s life. But Myla is looking at her like she doesn’t care—not in the way people have for most of August’s life—but like how she looks at Niko when he recites Neruda to his plants, or Wes when he stubbornly spends hours disassembling and rebuilding a piece of Ikea furniture someone put together wrong. Like it’s another inconsequential quirk of someone she loves.
The whole story does sound kind of ridiculous. One of Myla’s traps snaps shut and flips itself off the counter, skidding across the kitchen floor. It stops at the toe of August’s sock, and she has to laugh.
“Anyway,” Myla says, turning to open the freezer. “That sucks. I’m your mom now. The rules are, no Tarantino movies and bedtime is never.”
She wrenches a tub of cotton candy ice cream from one of the overstuffed shelves and plunks it on the counter by the sink, then opens a drawer and throws down two spoons.
“You wanna hear about my mom’s second graders?” she says. “They’re nightmares. She had to get one off the roof the other day.”
August picks up a spoon and follows her lead.
The ice cream is a radioactive shade of blue and horribly sugary, and August loves it. Myla talks and talks about her adoptive mom, about her clumsy but well-intentioned attempts at cooking waakye for Myla growing up so she could feel connected to her birth heritage, about her dad’s woodworking projects (he’s making a guitar) and her brother back in Hoboken (he’s making his way through residency) and how their main family bonding activity is marathoning old episodes of Star Trek. August finds it soothing to let it wash over her. A family. It sounds nice.
“So … all these mousetraps…” August nudges the one on the floor with her foot. “What exactly are you making?”
Myla hums thoughtfully. “The short answer? No idea. It was the same with the frog bones, dude. I keep trying to figure out what the piece is for me, you know? The point-of-view piece. The thing that sums up everything I’m trying to say as an artist.”
August glances across the room at marshmallow Judy.
“Yeah,” Myla says. “I have no idea what the point of view of that thing is.”
“Um,” August attempts. “It’s, uh. A commentary on … refined sugars and addiction.”
Myla whistles through her teeth. “A generous interpretation.”
“I’m a scholar.”
“You’re a bullshitter.”
“That’s … true.”
“Here,” she says, “I’ll show you what I’m working on.”
She turns on her heel, hair swishing after her like the cartoon smoke of a fast getaway.
Myla and Niko’s room is like August’s—long and narrow, a single window at the end. Like her, they haven’t bothered with a bedframe, only a double-sized pallet on the floor beneath the window, a mess of linens and shabby throw pillows shot through with late afternoon sunlight.
Myla belly flops onto it and reaches for a crate overflowing with records. As she digs around, August waffles at the door, eyeing the desk covered in paint tubes and epoxy cans, the round table loaded with crystals and dripping candles.
“Oh, you can come in,” Myla says over her shoulder. “Sorry it’s such a mess.”
It is, admittedly, a mess, and the clutter makes August’s skin prick with memories of magazine stacks and file boxes. But the walls are covered only sparingly with sketches and Polaroids, and August only has to step around one abandoned sweater and a tin of charcoals to get through the door.
On a dropcloth in the center of the floor, there’s a sculpture slowly coming together. It looks almost like the bottom half of a person, nearly life-sized, and made up of crushed glass and computer parts and a million other fragments. Wires overflow between the cracks like vines eating it from the inside.
“I have absolutely no idea what this is going to be,” Myla says as August circles it slowly. Up close, she can see the bits of embedded bone, painted gold. “I’m trying to wire it to move and light up, but, like, what does it mean? Fuck if I know.”
“The detail is incredible,” August says. This close she can see all its tiny parts, but from across the room, it looked like an elaborate, shimmering work of delicate beading. “It’s more than the sum of its parts.”
Myla squints at it. “I guess so. You wanna listen to