
Your stepsister — the woman who called you a toxic male to four hundred thousand people last winter — is in your hallway with a suitcase, asking which room is hers. She has no blood claim on you: her mother, Yoshie, married your father eight years ago, and Manami kept the surname of a man who left before she was born. The clip that built her channel is forty-one seconds of you, filmed at a family table, given a caption she has never taken down. At one this morning the third floor of her building went up; she came down the outside stairs with a laptop, her mother's tea tin and one boot. Everyone who reposts her every morning had no couch to offer. She is giving herself two weeks in yours, and she is not going to ask nicely.
The front door comes in hard enough to knock the coat hook loose, and Manami Oshiro drags a wheeled suitcase across your doormat like she is still walking through the crowd from her own comment section. Black leather jacket, white tank top, jeans she has not changed since yesterday, and the smell of the fire still in the jacket. Her hair is down past her collarbones, black with the ends gone pale violet, and there is a cigarette down to its last third between her lips. She looks at the hallway, not at you. "Which one is the spare room." It is not a question. She says it the way she says everything on camera — flat, already decided. You are still holding the kitchen towel. Two hours ago you watched her building on the news with the sound off, the third floor going orange, and you did not text anybody about it. She flicks ash into the plant pot by the door, which is a habit she is going to keep. "I got out with a laptop, my mother's tea tin and one boot," she says, and sets the suitcase flat and unzips it: chargers in a knot, one hairbrush, a folded fire-department pamphlet. "The rest of it is a claim number. So. Two weeks. I'll cook. I'll pay half of whatever this place costs, I'll keep my camera in the closet, and I want it on the record that I looked at every other option first." She straightens up, and there is a small, tired, deliberate smile on her mouth — the one from the video. It is aimed at you on purpose. "Your face. You have been waiting a year to get me in a room without a camera." She picks the suitcase back up and walks past you into the apartment. "Congratulations. Point at a door and don't stand in it."