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hospital. They’d find me in the maternity ward and take me right back here, and nothing would be different … except I would have seen her.”
    He finished his work as I drove the last nail in. “If you do this for me, it will make up for turning me in.”
    He stared at me, thinking, weighing. His hazel eyes were really quite striking. There was a bright splotch of green in his left eye, and a rim of black around both irises. His long, hooked nose was elegantly dramatic. His bone structure was good. His skin had just a hint of olive from the sun. It all worked well together, but in an unusual way—a way that made you want to study him. My insides churned with irritation; he was such a lucky bastard.
    I smiled hopefully at him.
    He went over to the phone on the wall and punched a button.
    “She needs to go back to the hospital,” he said into the receiver.
    Who’s easy to read now? I thought, sticking my tongue out at his back.

 
    On Fire
    Before Ciel and I were assigned apprentice jobs, we lived on Poppu’s pension alone. We patched clothes instead of buying new; our vacations were camping trips; we didn’t eat at restaurants, we cooked together at home. It was pretty idyllic, really.
    When the weather was good, we’d walk to Wooded Island after dinner. It was a small lagoonlike park with willows along the shores, gnarled live oaks and scrub in the woods, and an improbable, beautifully manicured Japanese garden in the middle of it all.
    Poppu called our after-dinner trip “un digestif,” since walking sometimes helped his fussy stomach to feel better. He always brought his ukulele, too, because the island was as close to being in the wilderness as you could be in the city, and his music wouldn’t violate the nighttime Quiet Ordinance the way it might in our apartment.
    Poppu had taught Ciel and me how to swing dance, which is how he danced as a teenager, and Ciel was great at it. He was one of those guys who wasn’t afraid to use body parts like hips and shoulders and wrists in fluid, graceful ways, and he had a lazy coolness to his syncopated steps. Since we only danced with each other, we got to be pretty good partners, and I was just a slip of a thing, so Ciel could toss me around in dips, flips, and jumps that had daring names like Waterfall and Cannonball and Shin Buster.
    Whenever Poppu started plinking on his ukulele he’d eventually come around to a tune that a Smudge quartet called the Ink Spots covered in 1941. The song became hugely popular even with Rays, making the Ink Spots some of the first crossover musicians.
    One time when I was twelve and the moon was full and Wooded Island was so magical the owls were calling, I led Poppu to a bench, and he started on his ukulele, and within minutes he launched into that song, his voice rich and gravelly:
“I don’t want to set the world on fire
I just want to start
A flame in your heart
In my heart I have but one desire
And that one is you
No other will do”
    I swooped in on Ciel and grabbed his left hand with my right, leading him into a slow Lindy Hop. When he didn’t put his right hand around my waist, I took his arm and made him do it, and I started crooning the second verse:
“I’ve lost all AMBISHUN for worldly acCLAIM
I just wanna be the one you looove
And with your ADMISHUN that you feel the SAME
I’ll have reached the goal I’m dreaming of”
    And Poppu finished:
“Believe me
I don’t want to set the world on fire
I just want to start
A flame in your heart.”
    This was the point in the song where Ciel usually jumped in with a spoken solo, like the Ink Spots did, while Poppu and I hummed the tune in the background. It was corny, but Ciel was good at it. He’d extemporize some heartfelt thought on why the only important thing in life was winning someone’s love, not being famous or saving the world. Or he’d go totally off-topic and chant dirty things about how hot the girl was whose heart he wanted to set aflame. Sometimes he made