Eleanor, 18 and sort-of kind-of in college, stuffs her apron into a locker and checking her face in the magnetic mirror stuck to the inside door, smudges her daytime precise rim of eyeliner into a blur with a cotton swab from a makeup case shaped like a cat’s head. A quick hit of plum gloss, and several zippers later—boots, hoodie, cat head, bag—she clicks the padlock in place and leaves work through the rear exit.
Glancing around the parking lot, she spots Ellie jumping down from the brick wall surrounding a couple of wobbly young trees the mall planted last spring. “Hey Ells”
“Lenore! Lenore! What took you so long?” asked Ellie, still six or was it actually six now?
“This is the usual time, you’re just more impatient today,” she pats the smaller one’s head. “Pizza tonight?”
“Pizza evvvvery birthday! Pizza every night! Forever and ever!”
Forever. And ever. Lenore and Ellie cross the lot to the payphone to call in an order. The usual. Twenty minutes, enough time to swing into the rental joint before picking it up. They discuss the pros and cons of slasher flicks (pros: scary, not scary / cons: not scary, scary) on the way and leave with a giant animal flick from the 50s—the usual way of things. This time it was a tarantula (scary / not scary, like these things always are and aren’t.)
Walking into the corner pizza shop, Ellie is doing a pizza chant with a little cha-cha accompaniment. The teenager at the counter smiles, “Large, extra cheese for Ellie J and her lovely sister.”
Ellie grins. “OoooOooo! Simon and Lenore sittin’ inna treeee.”
Lenore wrinkles her brow. He was the only person in school who still bothered with her by graduation, so the closest she’d gotten to a friend who wasn’t permanently a child but it wasn’t, couldn’t be like that. She couldn’t muster even a quarter of the feelings for him that she felt for…
“Simon, be a little less obvious. You’ll scare that birdie away,” says the most perfect fox in the history of human foxiness as she slides a paper bag across the counter. “These too; a birthday treat.”
“Oh! That’s right. We should do something. Are you doing something?” Simon starts, then turning to the fox, “Whatchoo doin’ later, sis?”
“We got plans to eat pizza and watch a scary spider movie! Birthday twins only. Sorry!” Ellie says, taking the bag from Amira. “Fries!”
“Cheese fries,” Amira answered, “with jalapenos.”
Four identical eyes lit up with a duet of thanks.
“You two are definitely related. It’s super weird how you share a birthday,” says Simon. “What a strange coincidence.”
Lenore sighs. “I guess. Never really thought about it.”
Fidgeting Ellie says, “This super weirdo is super hungry. I’ll tell you guys all about the giant tarantula next time.”
“But no spoilers,” he says, then looking up at Lenore, “I finish up at 11 if you wanna spoil it for me though.”
She turns keeping her frown to herself. If he thinks she won’t be as cold to him in front of Amira… he is correct. “I dunno if I’ve even got the energy to keep up with her. Thanks again for the food you guys,” she says pushing the door open over Ellie’s head. The smaller one resuming her pizza dance, hop-skips out to the sidewalk. “Yeah! Yeah! Thank you! Thank you!”
Around the corner and two blocks down, they stop at the mailbox next to the Spin Cycle laundromat and bike repair shop they live above. Lenore pulls a pink envelope out and propping the pizza on a small lip on the building’s facade unlocks her apartment door.
“We’re home!” sings Ellie, her greeting acknowledged by a thump from the next room and the click of claws on the wood floor. “And we got fries, Philip!”
“Do not give the cat jalapeno fries!”
The cat narrows his eyes at Lenore and jumps into the chair to be closer to Ellie, leaning into her side. “He don’t mind! You don’t even wanna think about the stuff he ate before we found him, but I’ll say this—sometimes it was alive.”
“I guess he won’t eat what he doesn’t want.”
Philip maybe nodded. Or maybe he was just nuzzling. Lenore was never quite sure what was real and what was a child’s imagination. Or her imagination. She’d given up being sure about most things six years previously.
“Do we need plates?” she asked … herself.
Ellie poked her head into the kitchen. “Hrm?”
“Let’s do something totally wild for a change,” Lenore says, taking a couple plates from the dishrack and passing them to Ellie. “Let’s use plates like some fancy grown-ups.”
“You are a fancy grown-up now, Lenore. You’re 18 and got your own place that you pay for on your own and you have a velvet chair and a dressing table with a mirror and that is fancy. And you have two tea sets. One is grown up. Two is fancy, especially when one of them is Gramma Jane’s.”
“You make a solid point, little me.”
“I know it,” she says, setting the plates out on the coffee table and sitting on the floor between it and the sofa. “Bring out some forks if you wanna be real adult about these fries.”
Lenore twisted the top on a bottle of ginger ale protecting her hand with the edge of her skirt and then opened one more, carrying both in one hand, she lifted two forks out of the caddy next to the sink for some adult fry handling.
Having set the table like a grown-ass woman, she sits on the arm of the sofa unlacing her boots and pushing them off with a toe wedged into the rim of the lugs and the leather, first the right, then the left. Wiggling socked toes freely, she glances at the clock. Almost 7. “Here, you’ll want this,” she says, tossing a throw pillow over to Ellie, and sliding down the front of the sofa next to her.
Ellie divvies up some pizza and Lenore hits play on the remote.
“How come the tarantula’s only got two eyes on the box?”
“Someone drew it wrong, is all. The one in the movie has normal spider eyes.”
“Didn’t anyone notice before they put it on the box?”
“That’s not the half of it. Wait until the movie is over and you’ll have even more questions.”
7:03. A man fumbles through the desert in Texas-but-really-California and dies.
“His face! Ewww! This is already good.”
7:04. Lenore leans closer, resting her head on Ellie’s shoulder, “Happy birthday.”
“Yeah yeah! Happy birthday!”
In the flicker of the television, a new shadow wavered across the open pizza box. “Thanks!” said the new old Eleanor.
“Holy shit,” says Lenore, scrambling for the lamp. It’s happening again? Again?
“Hi!” said Ellie, jumping up, “I’ll go grab another fork.”
Lenore tilts the lampshade for a better look at her younger self. This one is… “How old are you?”
“Twelve. How old are you?”
“I’m six,” says Ellie, coming back in, pointing the fork at herself, then turning it toward Lenore. “She’s 18 now. So it makes sense you bein’ twelve.”
“Hey Ellie,” said the new one. “What’s with the forks and the plates?”
“Oh, we’re trying something new.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah yeah. Bein’ fancy.”
Collapsing back into the sofa, Lenore’s speeding heart collided with her brain and accelerated through the grief chapter of a psych textbook: No. Not again. This isn’t real. How is this real? Why is this happening? Will this keep happening? What did I do? What can I do to make it stop? But what’s the point? Why bother when nothing can be done? It’s happened before. I’ll deal with this too. We’ll deal with it. We. Us. All of …me. Finally at Acceptance, it lost its steam. She sits up, focusing on the two mysteries in front of her. “Well. This is happening I guess.”
“So what’ve I missed?” asks the twelve-year-old, scooping up a slice of pizza.
Ellie’s gotten up and is walking around her, peering at her from varying angles and distances. She beams and the room gets brighter, a newish development in things-Ellie-can-do. “We live on our own and got a cat now. His name’s Philip. What’re we gonna call you?”
“Noni I guess. We’ll call you Eleanor now,” she says, turning to the oldest.
“Lenore. Everybody calls me Lenore these days,” she moves from the sofa to the floor to get a better look herself.
“Lenore’s real into bein’ grown-up. She’s gotten real good at it too! We have real meals and fold the laundry and go to work with no skippin’.”
Noni leans in, squinting up at her, she reaches for a handful of Lenore’s hair. Long and inky blue-black it drips through her fingers. “This is cool.”
“Thanks,” Lenore says, not really expecting the approval of her middle school self.
“Your clothes are funny though. You’re like if an old-timey doll listened to The Cure a lot.”
Lenore shrugs and hugging her knees rests her head on them, looking at Noni sideways. “What do you remember? I’m trying to remember being twelve.”
Ellie, excitedly luminescing from orange to yellow to orange to pink to red now bursts. “I remember everything! We spent the summer walking dogs for money for comic books and snuck into the Faith No More show, and painted ghosts all over that tunnel. It was so much fun!”
“I only remember turning twelve. Well, and stuff before that—like being eleven—but nothing after that night Ellie showed up.”
Lenore takes a sip of her ginger ale. “Where’d Philip go?”
“I dunno. He didn’t say he had anywhere to be tonight.”
Noni’s eyes grew along with her open mouth. “Philip can talk?”
“Mmhmm. All cats can talk,” stated the smallest as the leading authority on Facts in the room.
Lenore still wasn’t really convinced Ellie and Philip were having conversations, but couldn’t deny all of the other things Ellie was able to do; luminescing, disappearing, and lately it seemed like she’d been able to alter people’s senses or maybe that was the whole trick. She sat upright, her legs now a lazy pretzel, dropping one fist onto her open palm. “Ellie can do all sorts of cool things. I wonder what you can do, Noni.”