Jeffrey’s smile was free of trickery and as sweet as honey. I smiled back in heartfelt relief and began running through a mental checklist of the names of notable individuals. Would this one do? Or that one? I fear I was a tad predisposed to favor Japanese names or those belonging to fictional characters in classic literature, neither of which suited Jeffrey. Eventually, I opted for something simple.
I looked up and met my cousin’s eye. “…James.”
“James?” he repeated.
“Yes. James.”
Jeffrey chuckled. “Right you are, Edward. James it is. Wait, what’s my last name? I’ll take anything but ‘Bond.’ I can’t stomach martinis, see.”
“…You drink, Jeff?”
“We’re talking about James right now. Forget Jeff.”
Jeffrey plucked the straw from his lemonade and brandished it like a magic wand. I was transfixed, as if admiring a jewel.
My cousin was brilliant. He could do anything. There was no one else quite like him on Earth, and yet, this august individual cared for me so. Better than that. He treated me like he had a special place in his heart just for me, like I was a treasure which had no equal anywhere on the globe. So, too, was Jeffrey a treasure that could not be traded for anything, not even an ancient king’s elephant bearing a load of pearls, rubies, and emeralds. Whenever he fell ill, I thought that if I were ever to lose Jeffrey and never see him again, I would cry something fierce. It was never long, though, before he would reappear in my life and dispel those dreadful dreams.
To give such a figure his name—certainly, it was an honor. My heart swelled with quiet emotion that eventually spilled over into words: “…Ya’aburnee.”
“Come again?”
I repeated it for Jeffrey’s benefit. Ya’aburnee. The apostrophe marked the pause between words; the accent rested on the first vowel.
“Ya’aburnee, huh? That’s pretty. Has a funny ring to it.”
“It’s Arabic.”
“Look at you, learning another language. What are you, a genius?”
“Hardly, I should think.”
“Okay, Mr. Hard-Working Genius. Fine. My secret name will be James Ya’aburnee. So, what about Edward?”
“Pardon?”
“What’s his last name?”
I was rather taken aback, but it only lasted for a moment before I slumped in my chair.
“What’s the matter?” said Jeffrey.
I looked up with temerity. “Erm…James and Edward are brothers. They share the same last name…”
As my voice dwindled to nothingness, Jeffrey’s eyes widened slightly. Then he gave me the most emphatic of nods and a grin. The adults in our family often struggled to discern whether Jeffrey’s smiles were real, but I could spot a real smile in a heartbeat. The trick was the dimple—a dimple on Jeffrey’s left cheek signified a real smile. After all, Jeffrey had said so himself.
Presently, there was a dimple on his left cheek as he exclaimed, “Oh! Well, all right.”
“Yes.”
“James and Edward are just like us, then.”
“…Er, how so?”
“They’re brothers. At least, that’s how I see us.”
The clerk at the counter shot us a nasty glare as Jeffrey slurped up the last of his lemonade through his straw in a fashion entirely devoid of manners. A headline danced across the front of her magazine: “How to Land Yourself a Guy with Money.” I had half a mind to tell her the scamps she was scowling at were far richer than any man in that magazine. At any other time, this would have been an impossible notion. But now, I felt like I could do anything. My heart was singing. I felt warm and full of light.
When words failed me, Jeffrey laughed and ruffled my hair. “Ready to go back to school?”
“…I was hoping we could spend a bit more time together, actually.”
“Sure. Why not?”
Jeffrey took me, his “brother,” by the hand and escorted me to a hotel not far from the dormitories. Before we rented our lodgings for the night, he placed a call to the school and requested on behalf of my parents that I be allowed to stay out overnight.
It turned out to be a rather inexpensive hotel, a popular abode for skiers in the winter. The two of us stayed up quite late, lying on the same bed and talking—about home, about our family, our friends, Jeffrey’s business course at school, dramaturgical interests… Once, Jeffrey recounted, his coursework required him to write a speech pretending to be the prime minister of a country who had failed to reclaim 50 of 300 civilian hostages from terrorists. It’d been so stressful that he’d almost thrown up. Later, as he told me with great amusement, he performed it so well, a perfect chameleon in his acting class, that his schoolmates claimed no one would ever trust him again.
He had an endless supply of stories, each wittier than the last. One tale after another lodged in my heart as a brightly sparkling gem.
In return, I told Jeffrey of my idyllic life in a Swiss boarding school—bright sunshine, a warmer climate than we had back home in England, white-capped mountains always off in the distance, jolly and athletic teachers. Not many friends, no, but I chalked that up to my less-than-childish mannerism. Really, so long as I had Jeffrey, I didn’t mind about all that.
Jeffrey, lying sideways propped up on his elbow, ruffled my hair again. “Aw, crumbs. You keep this up, and I’ll never want to leave.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“Yeah. When you get tired of me, you’ll think, ‘I hate this guy! He never leaves me alone!’”
“Don’t be daft. I could never hate you.”
“Double crumbs. But you know, Richard…everyone goes through a rebellious phase someday.”
“Not me. I don’t seem to have a rebellious bone in my body.”
“The later the rebellious phase shows up, the worse it can be. That’s what I read in an article.”
“Yes, well, I simply won’t have one.”