Nadia chuckled. “I’m always in the mood for something sweet. Lead the way.”

  Someone had already absconded with the blueberry muffins, so the two of them split a poppy seed one instead. With a touch of bitterness, Helena noted this was the closest thing she’d have to a birthday treat today. Oh well. At least someone was eating it with her.

  They sat down in the lounge area with their backs to the sunny window. The sunlight revealed even more freckles hidden underneath Nadia’s ponytail. They chatted aimlessly for a couple minutes before Nadia asked, “Are the projects here always this—how should I say this—commercial?”

  Helena glanced around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “If you mean disappointingly frivolous, then yes, a lot of them are.”

  “Well, I guess they have to fund their little science projects somehow.”

  “I have no clue how I’m going to market these products though. Who would honestly waste inches of their luck line to fix their hair?” Helena cursed her mistake before she even finished the sentence. Why was she talking about “wasting” luck lines with someone who had already spent hers? “Ah, I mean…I guess it would seem worth it to some people.”

  “Dumb people,” her companion quipped. “Why throw away your line on a problem that could be solved with some cheap hair dye?”

  Helena relaxed. “Exactly! Your hair’s going to turn gray eventually. Luck lines can’t fix the inevitable.”

  “True.” Nadia absentmindedly fidgeted with her thistle necklace, twisting it in her fingers. As her wrist turned, her forearm flashed its nakedness to the world. “It’s nice we’re given the chance to try though.”

  HELENA HAD BEEN mixing paint in her small apartment, taking advantage of the Saturday-morning sunshine coming in through the window, when a muffled ringing came from across the room. She’d hung her purse by the front door of her apartment, and now it vibrated on its hook. She set her palette down on the stool, stepped around the easel, and dug out her phone. “Michael.”

  Her brother’s voice sounded scratchy through the phone. “Helena! How’s my favorite sister? Are you doing okay in the big city?” He had the overly friendly tone of someone who needed a favor but hadn’t kept in touch enough to deserve one.

  “I’m doing as well as I expected to.” She put the phone on speaker and set it on her craft table. She wouldn’t need to focus much for this conversation. “How are Iris and the kids?”

  Michael rambled about how the twins had started kindergarten and Soren had won his last soccer game and Iris had finally gotten her social worker license and so on. Helena occasionally responded with a “hmm” or “that’s nice,” but he did the heavy lifting conversation-wise.

  Helena mixed Cherry Red with a scoop of True Black to get a rich scarlet hue. She’d already painted most of the canvas full of silver and white flowers. The last and most important flower would be red, a shock of crimson on an otherwise monochrome canvas. She’d initially planned to paint a rose, but some strange urge overtook her to paint a thistle flower instead.

  This style wasn’t an original idea by any means: the famous Chiassuro had done a similar series of paintings with yellow umbrellas in all-blue panoramas. If Helena’s college professor were here, he’d scold her for being derivative, even borderline plagiarist. But this painting wasn’t for public viewing. It was a meaningless way to kill time on a weekend.

  “That’s why I’ve got to fix the roof soon,” Michael explained, “or else Soren’s bedroom really will get flooded.”

  Helena painted a few more thistle leaves before she noticed her brother was waiting for a response. She sighed. So, this was why he’d called after three months of radio silence. “Let me guess. Mom and Dad refused to lend you the money.”

  “They wouldn’t even listen! They told me to quit the janitor gig and get a better job. I mean, what kind of job am I supposed to get with a blank arm and a high school diploma?”

  Helena thought back to Nadia. “If you got the right degree, that might convince employers to overlook the luck line situation.”

  “But getting a degree takes years. I need my roof fixed now.”

  “So…what? You want me to convince Mom and Dad to change their minds?”

  “No, I’ve given up on them. Actually, I…” For once, her brother hesitated. “I thought you could help. When Dad was lecturing me about ‘good jobs,’ he mentioned your current salary. It’s, uh, quite a big paycheck for somebody who doesn’t have kids yet.”

  “You couldn’t be bothered to wish me happy birthday, but you have time to ask me for money?” Her paintbrush slipped. One of the thistle spines transformed into a red gash across the canvas.

  “I apologized about the birthday already! And Iris sent you a card.”

  “My sister-in-law shouldn’t be the only person who bothers to send me anything!” Helena firmly set down the phone. Unbelievable. Her brother was seven years older than her. She should be mooching money off him, not the other way around.

  She wetted a sponge and tried to wipe the mistake from her canvas. Most of the paint came off, but the background flowers now had a pink tint. Even if Helena painted over the stain, the pink would still show through. The flowers would never match their perfectly white neighbors.

  She picked the phone back up. “…wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate. The banks won’t approve me for a loan and Iris’s folks are broke. If you don’t help me, I’ll have to sell a kidney or something.” A raggedy sigh came through the phone. “And I know, I know, I should have saved up money for emergencies like this, but between the slow work season and the kids’ school supplies, I haven’t had a lot of spare—”

  “Luck?” she responded icily.

  “Cash,” he snapped. “God, this family is never going to forgive me for that day, are you? I made one stupid mistake as a teenager, and you all have blamed me for every bad thing that’s happened since.”

  “Maybe bad things would stop happening to you if you made better decisions!” She ended the call. She couldn’t throw her phone without breaking it, so she grabbed the ruined canvas and slammed it dramatically on the table. Her water cup tipped, spilling pink backwash on the canvas.

  “Damn it.” She grabbed another sponge to wipe the water away. Now the bottom left corner of the garden was a pink blur. The whole painting was an irredeemable mess. It was a pity, too, because Helena had gotten the details of the thistle perfect. If Michael hadn’t distracted her, the painting might have been good enough to hang on her bedroom wall.

  “Off to the reject pile you go,” she muttered, stacking the canvas atop her other failures underneath the craft table. She’d recycle those canvases eventually.

  If only she could recycle her brother. Nobody had forced him to waste his luck line. Yes, Iris had been pregnant, so they’d needed money, but the couple wouldn’t have been in that situation if Michael had worn protection. He’d chosen to give up college to help raise Soren. He’d chosen to buy a house close to Iris’s job instead of renting someplace affordable. His naked arm was proof of all his shortsighted decisions. He deserved to be judged for them.

  Helena mopped up the rest of the water. Her gaze wandered back to her picture. The paint of the thistle was still wet and raw. Even Nadia’s metal pendant didn’t look as hostile as that flower.

  Guilt settled in Helena’s stomach. She assured herself this wasn’t like when her coworkers had mocked Nadia at the cafeteria. Michael was asking for handouts. Nadia had been minding her own business.

  Helena didn’t know what Nadia had spent her luck line on, but it likely wasn’t as pointless as a horse race. Plus, Nadia had made up for her past by getting herself a real job through her own hard work. She wasn’t drowning in self-pity or…or begging for help…

  Helena picked up the phone and hit Redial. Her brother picked up on the fourth ring. “Michael, I’m sorry. That ‘luck’ comment was out of line.”

  “No, I’m sorry. You were right. I haven’t been a good brother lately. I shouldn’t expect favors from you.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Helena, I mean it. You don’t have to do this for me.”

  “I’m not. I’m doing it for Soren so he doesn’t have to sleep on that hideous couch of yours. How much?”

  “…Five hundred.” He gasped a little when she wired him the money from her phone. Unlike her brother, Helena had a nest egg saved exactly for these kinds of situations. “Thank you so much. I mean it. I’ll return the money as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Fine, fine. But don’t get used to it, okay?”

  AFTER THEIR CHAT over muffins, conversations with Nadia quickly became a feature in Helena’s routine. The programming and marketing suites shared the same coffee maker, so it was easy to exchange groggy small talk while they waited for the pot to brew. She learned Nadia had been an only child raised by her grandmother, currently lived alone in a nearby apartment, and owned a ferret named Phantom. Helena had no pet to brag about, but she did get Nadia to laugh a few times with stories from her boarding school days.

  A few weeks passed, and the caffeinated small talk evolved into full conversations over lunch. Helena and Nadia both preferred to take late lunches. The cafeteria was much quieter after 1:00 p.m., and it was possible to converse without leaning across the table.

  They weren’t doing much talking today. Both their departments were in the middle of a crunch week, so they’d taken their work to the cafeteria with them, typing quietly as they ate. Nadia had ordered the spicy meatballs, while Helena had ordered the ham sandwich provided for less adventurous diners.

  Helena ate her sandwich with one hand and tapped her tablet with the other. She needed to draft a marketing brochure by tomorrow, and she couldn’t pick which color to use for the border. She propped the tablet toward Nadia. “Which looks better, navy or cyan?”

  Her friend glanced up from her laptop. “Cyan.”

  “You’re sure? It doesn’t clash with the gray?”

  “It’s not like there’s a wrong answer. They’re both blue.”

  There were wrong answers though. Most people couldn’t see it, but good design was more science than art. There were rules about which elements to use when. If you used this font at this size in this color, you could get that reaction from the customer. Like a chemistry formula, it was paramount to have each element in the right amount.

  “This isn’t like coding, where you have a blueprint of what the end product is supposed to look like,” Helena explained. “I won’t know if my design’s any good until the client says so. You can type out your code and immediately see if it works.”

  “Mmmf.” Nadia swallowed a meatball and laughed. “You’ve never programmed anything in your life, have you?”

  “I—I know some HTML.”

  “Oh, you’re adorable.” Nadia closed her laptop. “Sorry, but there’s no blueprint when you’re coding from scratch. It’s more like fumbling around in a dark cave, borrowing equipment from the dead spelunkers you find along the way. Something’s guaranteed to break.” She waved her finger in the air. “Good coding isn’t about avoiding mistakes so much as sleuthing out what the problem is and solving it before anyone else notices.”

  Helena took another bland bite of sandwich. “That sounds…stressful.”

  “Well, when chaos is inevitable, you learn to take it in stride. That’s why Dylan doesn’t put much stock in these.” Nadia tapped her left arm. Most of her skin was dotted with freckles, but the skin the luck line had once occupied was blank. The void snaked twenty inches down her arm before running into a wall of freckles. “If our team relied on luck lines to prevent every catastrophe, the company would go under in a month.”

  Helena smiled weakly at the joke. She’d avoided talking about luck lines with Nadia since she didn’t want to embarrass her, but if Nadia brought up the subject herself, then perhaps it was okay to ask. “Is that why you chose to be a coder, then? Because it was the easiest way to get a full-time job?”

  Nadia frowned disapprovingly at her question. “No, it wasn’t a last resort. I’ve always enjoyed programming.” She grabbed her thistle pendant and turned it around in her fingers. “I like layering patterns on top of each other, seeing how all the parts harmonize. It’s a lot like making music.”

  “Music? Do you sing?” Helena set down her sandwich. This was the first time she’d heard of Nadia being involved in anything artistic.

  Her enthusiasm soothed Nadia’s irritation somewhat. “Piano, actually. Grandma got me one of those portable keyboards when I was eleven so I could play my own songs.”

  Helena remembered her own artistic debut, when Iris had given her that beloved paint set. “What kind of songs?”

  “Mostly punk rock—all my friends in middle school were obsessed with it. Then in high school I graduated to more improvised, jazzhop stuff.”

  “You mean a mix between jazz and hip hop?”

  Nadia looked impressed. “I’m surprised you knew that. I assumed you were like everyone else at this office and listened to the same ten pop songs on loop.”

  “I’m not that basic,” Helena lied. She tried to recall what little she knew about the music scene in this city. Hadn’t she seen some festival flyers on the bus to work? “In fact, there’s a local music festival this weekend. If you like jazzhop, I’m sure you’d enjoy one or two of the artists there.” There, that was specific enough to sound knowledgeable, right?

  “This weekend, hm?” Nadia stared at Helena as if trying to read an answer to some unspoken question. “Do you want to go together?”

  A blush burned its way into Helena’s cheeks. “What?”

  Nadia’s full lips curled into a familiar smirk—the one she wore whenever she was trying not to laugh. “Do. You. Want. To. Go. Together?”

  Memories of boarding school gossip and affectionless jokes rose in Helena’s mind. Was Nadia teasing her again? She didn’t seem that cruel. Helena tried to regain her composure. “Do you mean as friends, or…”

  “I’m asking what you want.”

  Helena considered her options. One, she could bet on Nadia liking girls and ask for a date. But Helena didn’t feel like gambling with her dignity. Two, she could go as friends and get to know Nadia better. That option could help her fish for more insight into Nadia’s orientation, but there was a significant risk of Helena making a fool of herself. The third and safest choice was to refuse entirely, but that would be awkward…

  Nadia laughed. “You really are stubborn. Fine, I’ll do it.” She grabbed Helena’s hand and looked her in the eyes. “That music festival sounds like a great place for a date. Can I take you?”

  So, Nadia was interested in her? The wheels in Helena’s mind spun away as she processed this information. Thankfully her head already knew her answer and nodded.

  “Fantastic. When should we go?”

  HELENA ARRIVED AT the park ten minutes before the time she was supposed to meet Nadia. She grabbed a schedule from one of the vendors while she waited by the hilltop gate. The Thirteenth Annual Festival of Fusion Music did, in fact, feature jazzhop. It also had folktronica, ska punk, and other made-up-sounding genre names. The music was real though—a flute weaved in and out of hearing as an electric beat punctuated the air.

  It was a humid night, so Helena wore a breezy dress that flattered her legs. She’d also braided some daisies in her hair in what she hoped was a casual bohemian look and not an I-don’t-know-any-hair-styles-other-than-braids look.

  “Looking for someone?” A gentle hand tapped her shoulder. Helena spun 180 degrees to find her date right behind her.

  Gone were Nadia’s work blouse and jacket, replaced with a vintage T-shirt and artistically ripped jeans. Her heels had been switched out with expensive-looking sneakers. The only thing left over from Nadia’s usual outfit was the thistle pendant, now resting on bare skin instead of cloth. Inky-black lips smiled at Helena. “You looked lost.”

  “I’m the one who told you where this festival was!” Helena countered.

  “I know. I was shocked when you brought it up. You really are the queen of mixed signals.”

  Helena tugged at her braid. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, sometimes I was sure you had a crush on me. But when I flirted back—” Nadia startled Helena by leaning into her. Her soft, freckled arm pressed against Helena’s bare skin. “—you’d get jumpy and flustered, like you are now. I couldn’t understand you at all. It wasn’t until that lunch period I realized you might be shy.”

  Helena cursed the warmth on her cheeks. She stubbornly leaned into the touch, weaving her arm around to grab Nadia’s hand. “You aren’t exactly easy to read either, Miss Poker Face.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing for both of us this is a music festival and not a card tournament.” They walked into the park, exchanging the paint-by-number small talk common on dates.

  As they strolled, Nadia began twisting her necklace, letting the metal spikes prod her finger pads. Helena worried if the pendant was sharp enough to cut. Nadia’s teasing voice interrupted her thoughts. “Hey, I haven’t even taken any clothes off yet, and my body’s already distracting you?”

  “I wasn’t staring! I mean, I was looking at your pendant, not…underneath it.”

  Nadia looked down. “Oh. I hadn’t realized I was fiddling with it.” She dropped her hand to rest awkwardly at her belt. “It’s a bad habit. I’ve done it since I was a kid.”

  “Is it an heirloom, then?” It didn’t look fancy, but maybe its value came from its age. “Like an antique?”

  Nadia grinned. “Absolutely not. Grandma bought this at the hospital gift shop. She had gotten a new kidney, you see, so her shopping options were limited.”

  “But you wear it everywhere.”

  “Well, it was the last birthday present she got me before the cancer took her, so…yeah. You get the idea.” The smile grew strained. “Let’s skip the gloomy stuff and go get a seat already.” She dragged Helena toward the stage without leaving any space for a response.