I kept my best professional smile firmly in place and tried not to answer through gritted teeth. Another hour of this and I could wash the heavy makeup from my face, get in the waiting car, and finally escape to the airport. I took a deep breath and began to respond.
“Well, Mira, you saw how Celeste gave me such a great match.”
The biggest relief of finally making it to Los Angeles wasn’t just that I got to spend a few weeks in the place I considered home, but that I arrived there alone, to a completely empty house.
My mother had stayed behind in Stockholm to deal with the divorce proceedings, and I was glad to be out of the house, which felt strangely empty without my father’s presence. I had called him a few times, but each conversation had been brief, even by our standards.
The house echoed on my arrival, and once the driver had set my bags down for me in the foyer, I wandered around like a visitor for a few minutes. The fridge was stocked, the fruit bowls filled, and despite the fact that I’d been away for weeks, there wasn’t a speck of dust or a thing out of place.
Sometimes I forgot how well looked after I was. Some would call it spoiled, though maybe not to my face.
Grabbing my personal bag from the stack by the door, I jogged upstairs to my bedroom. Now that, sadly, was even less disturbed than the other rooms. The lack of action practically announced itself in the crispness of the sheets and the stillness of the air. Rather than let my own furniture silently mock me, I went to wash off my lingering bad mood in the shower.
I’ve never understood people who can spend hours in the bathroom. Maybe it’s because I usually showered two or three times a day, my one-woman quest to ruin the environment, but a necessary evil when your whole day is spent working up a sweat. It might have been nice one day to stand under the spray and zone out, sing whatever I’d heard on the radio that morning, but as soon as I was squeaky-clean, I jumped right out of there.
Just before I sank completely into a depressive funk, my phone rang to save me from myself.
“I need a really big plate for my dinner party Friday,” said a familiar voice. “Gold, ideally. Know anyone who has one of those?”
“How many times do I have to tell you that we don’t keep the trophy, huh? You’d know that if you ever watched my matches.”
“Oh, I plan on blagging some tickets for… Is it next month? I know I want to come to New York, anyway. Glad to be home, big sis?”
Alice did like to come with me for the US Open, even if the very thought of tennis bored her into a coma and always had. With five years between us, I had just about picked up my first junior racquet when she came along. Between hitting balls against the garage wall and a screaming baby, there was no contest when it came to my attention.
She always said it was just as well. Those first few years, she wasn’t interested in tennis or any of my athletic activities. Quite by mistake, my parents had announced that they were raising a son, my little brother. As soon as Alice learned to talk and dress herself, we were well on our way to finding out we had been wrong about that. It would be nice to say that the world had always been so easy, accepting Alice for who she really was and is, but that wasn’t my story to tell.
All I knew was that I loved my sister, now a fancy sculptor and artist in her own right, and we frequently drove each other nuts. She would housesit for me sometimes but had bought her own place in Silverlake. Close enough to drop by, far enough that we could pretend not to live in the same city when it was convenient.
“Please tell me you have fun dinner plans you’re going to drag me along to?” I answered. “Because this big empty house is bumming me out.” Unlike with my parents, we never slipped into our native tongue with each other. Alice had found her home in America even before I had and defaulted to English whether I wanted to or not.
“I don’t have plans, yet. Can we go somewhere that isn’t the smoothie bar at a gym?”
“I don’t want to see a gym this week,” I half-lied. I’d be working out and training at home, so that didn’t count. “So it’s all up to you.”
“I always said I should have absolute power,” Alice fired right back. “Okay, let me clean up and I’ll come get you. Or did you want to drive?”
“That sounds good, actually.” I did spend most of my life being driven around, since tournaments usually supplied cars and drivers. “Is that your way of telling me you want to go out in the convertible?”
“Well, if you’ve bought something else boring, I don’t want to know about it. Pick me up at seven?”
“Got it.”
I smiled as I hung up the phone. Real food, fun company. Someone who would understand the weirdness of our parents divorcing—oh God, had they even told her yet?—and mock me for my new crush. If I told her about that, anyway.
After opening the closet, I took my time picking out something that wasn’t made for playing sport in.
On a perfectly sunny LA evening, I switched off the engine outside my sister’s house. Knowing her as I did,
