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He leans his head on his hand. “What time were you born?”
“I… don’t know?” Remembering the flyer, she adds, “I think I’m a Virgo, if that helps.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely a Virgo.”
She manages to keep her face impartial. “Are you… a professional psychic? Like people pay you?”
“He’s part-time,” Myla says. She floats into the room, graceful for someone with a blowtorch in one hand, and drops into the chair next to his. The wad of pink bubblegum she’s chewing explains the bowl of gumballs. “And part-time very terrible bartender.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Sure you’re not,” she says, planting a kiss on his cheek. She stage-whispers to August, “He thought a paloma was a kind of tumor.”
While they’re bickering about Niko’s bartending skills, August sneaks a gumball out of the bowl and drops it to test a theory about the floor. As suspected, it rolls off through the kitchen and into the hallway.
She clears her throat. “So y’all are—?”
“Together, yeah,” Myla says. “Four years. It was nice to have our own rooms, but none of us are doing so hot financially, so I’m moving into his.”
“And the third roommate is?”
“Wes. That’s his room at the end of the hall,” she says. “He’s mostly nocturnal.”
“Those are his,” Niko says, pointing at the drawings in the windows. “He’s a tattoo artist.”
“Okay,” August says. “So it’s $2,800 total? $700 each?”
“Yep.”
“And the flyer said something about… fire?”
Myla gives her blowtorch a friendly squeeze. “Controlled fire.”
“And dogs?”
“Wes has one,” Niko puts in. “A little poodle named Noodles.”
“Noodles the poodle?”
“He’s on Wes’s sleep schedule, though. So, a ghost in the night.”
“Anything else I should know?”
Myla and Niko exchange a look.
“Like three times a day the fridge makes this noise like a skeleton trying to eat a bag of quarters, but we’re pretty sure it’s fine,” Niko says.
“One of the laminate tiles in the kitchen isn’t really stuck down anymore, so we all just kind of kick it around the room,” Myla adds.
“The guy across the hall is a drag queen, and sometimes he practices his numbers in the middle of the night, so if you hear Patti LaBelle, that’s why.”
“The hot water takes twenty minutes to get going, but ten if you’re nice.”
“It’s not haunted, but it’s like, not not haunted.”
Myla smacks her gum. “That’s it.”
August swallows. “Okay.”
