The GEEKs

The neighbour's skylight, right. I turn around on my heel and hide my apartment key in my jeans pocket again, stepping over to the door opposite to mine. To be honest, the only reason I remembered about the window is that the entire floor smells of sugary baked something and that mouth-watering aroma is coming from Kat's apartment. My hand loosely balled into a fist freezes mid-air when the dirty green door flies open and I find myself face to face with a short, brown girl and I can practically see her belly button down her blouse from up here.

"Lizzy." I give her a toothy smile and step away to let her through while it takes her another moment of staring blankly at me before she mirrors my expression.

"Oh, hi. Hey, Kat, look, Mark's here, he can open the window and you can still come with Gwen and Eva." She shouts back into the apartment and her words summon the fiery-haired girl.

"But I don't wanna." Kat stumbles out through one of the doors, hooking her fingers around the edge of the frame for balance, and shoots Lizzy a pained look before giving me a brief smile. "Come in, Arm."

I do as told while their residence seems to be overcome by some sort of feminine chaos when the other two girls emerge from their rooms, and all I get from their flailing around and shooting of sporadic phrases at each other and looking for a shoe or a key, is that three fourths of them are going out tonight.

"I'll see you guys tomorrow." Lizzy waves at no one in particular declaring her departure while I remain to be stood in the middle of their room of questionable purpose like a lost kid in as shopping centre.

"Are you really sure you're not going? I mean, Stone invited you, not me and not Gwen..." Eva looks over at Kat.

Wait, what? "Stone?" I ask curiously.

"Just a second..." Kat holds up a finger at me and then points another finger at Eva, and when she speaks again her voice is quieter but the words are more pronounced. "I told you, I don't feel like going tonight. I'll see you tomorrow."

Whatever the fuck that means, it seems to get the point across efficiently and the two girls leave. The apartment becomes enshrouded in a kind of eerie silence and when I look over at Kat she's still staring at the door with a look on her face that clearly says her mind is totally someplace else.

"Novak?"

"Oh, sorry. Yeah. The window..." She points at one of the doors and leads the way into her bedroom.

For some reason, I expected it to be more...I don't know, girlier? Not that I gave much thought to what Katie Novak's room would look like, but actually seeing it makes me realise it's somehow not what I expected. The only pieces of furniture are a double bed with an old wooden frame, a bookshelf, and one of those closets with sliding mirror door built into a wall. The thing that serves as a nightstand and a record storage is a simple cardboard box turned on the side, then there's a record player on the floor in the corner, a guitar and a small Marshall amp, a tower of books, at least six feet tall, some other stuff scattered all over, and the room itself is kind of the shape of a pentagon which only makes it look more erratic. One of the walls, the one in front of the bed, is partly covered by all sorts of clippings and pictures, and it takes me one glance to notice that it's mostly images of musicians and postcards from different places and random pictures from magazines, but there's a handful of actual photos mixed into the collage.

"Do you think Jesus turned out the way he did because he was an only child?" Kat drags me out of my analysis of her room with a totally random question and I notice she had grabbed a kitchen knife from somewhere.

"You don't have many friends, do you?"

"Who needs friends that can't have a discussion about Jesus anyway?" She holds up the knife for me.