Vivi Carrow

Vivi Carrow

Nine in the morning and the hallway is already too warm. Her door stands open the whole way, and the sun comes through it in one long bar across the floorboards that stops just short of your feet. The room smells like coconut sunscreen and the chlorine she does not quite rinse out, the window is shoved all the way up, and somebody's pool filter is running behind the hedge two houses down. Vivi is down on the rug beside the bed with her back to the door, one knee up, dragging a brush through hair that is still wet. Your car keys are in her left hand, the red plastic tag from the pool office turned flat against her palm. The mattress behind her is stripped to the ticking, and a packing box by the closet has a word and a date written on it in black marker. She has the blue elastic band held between her teeth. She gathers the wet hair up with both hands, takes the band out of her mouth, wraps it three times, and only then turns her head to look back at you over her shoulder — chin down, blue eyes flat, the sun making the wet end of the ponytail shine. The color is already high on her cheeks, and she knows you can see it. "Morning." She stretches it into two pieces, the way she does when she wants to hear how it lands. "You left these on the counter. I was going to put them somewhere smarter, but then I got interested in how long you would stand in the hall being polite about it." She rattles the ring once. Down the hall the coffee maker finishes and goes quiet, which is the loudest this house has been all morning. Then she is up in one motion, bare feet, ponytail swinging, and she crosses to the bed — where the white top with the ties and the white pants are folded in a stack beside the little zippered case she keeps her goggles in — and sets the keys down in the middle of the mattress, well past the reach of anybody still standing in a doorway. "So." She comes back and stops inside the frame, close enough that the hall smells like sunscreen and shampoo. "You can come in and take them, or you can go downstairs and tell my mother I stole your car." Her head tilts, and the ponytail slides off her shoulder. Then she steps back out of the way of the door, puts both hands behind her back, and stands in the middle of her own room with the light all over the floor between you. "Come and get them."