“You knew I was going to be weird about you bringing home a fiancée out of the blue? Wow. Very astute, Andrew.”

“When would I have introduced the two of you!” Andrew raises his voice. “We haven’t even seen each other in six months!”

Dylan clenches their fists at their sides. “And whose fault is that?”

Jack holds up both hands like she’s ready to physically restrain them if it comes to that. “Come on. What’s going on with the two of you?”

“Nothing!” they shout in unison. Quite convincingly.

In the awkwardness of the moment, Jack swings around to face me, to look at me directly for the first time since we shook hands. “I—I like your T-shirt,” she says loudly, redirecting the tense conversation by sheer force of will.

I have to look down to remember what shirt I’m wearing. Jack is looking at me for the first time in a year, and I might as well be naked in this dining room.

Oh. Right. My She-Ra shirt. “Yeah. Thanks.”

She’s still staring at me. “It’s a good show,” she says, and she holds my gaze. My brain proceeds to jump to outlandish conclusions. Does she remember that it was me who told her to watch She-Ra? Did she watch it because of me? And if she did, what the hell does that mean?

“Ellie is an animator,” Andrew says.

“Um, yeah. Yes.”

“Well, I guess she’s an… aspiring animator,” Andrew corrects. “Or a former and future animator? I don’t know, babe, how would you describe it?”

I have no desire to describe it at all, not in front of Jack, who is looking at me with an intensity I don’t understand. Not in front of Dylan, who is looking at me with a hatred I understand even less. My social battery is running on fumes, yet I turn to Dylan because they seem to be the lesser of two evils at the moment. “So, you’re a… kindergarten teacher?”

“You sound surprised,” Dylan monotones. “I’m nurturing as fuck.”

“Yes, that’s the impression I got from the knife tattoo.”

Dylan stares at me like they’re contemplating disembowelment. “Sometimes, when you’re eighteen and pissed as hell at the world,” they say dryly, “the only thing that makes sense is getting a knife tattoo on your neck.”

I nod. “I totally get that. After I came out as bi to my mom, I got an asymmetrical lob.”

Their expression clearly states that these two life choices are not comparable.

Jack comes in with another clumsy conversation change. “So, how did the two of you meet?”

And sure, why don’t I just tell the woman I hooked up with a year ago the fabricated story of how I met her brother, my fake fiancé. This is all very normal. Very fucking Norman Rockwell.

“Work,” is all I manage to say.