Of course Kijra didn’t answer this. She was planning her next song selection, and it wasn’t from the Rolling Stones album with the cake on the cover.
“Why do they have a cake on the cover of that?”
Now this, this got Kijra’s full attention. For a moment. She looked over, past the albums she was thumbing through, and looked at the cake.
“It’s great,” she said, nodding her dark jangling head at the cake. Then she went back to thumbing through the handful of records she had picked out and set in a vertical stack in front of her where she sat, cross legged on the floor. She was wearing black leotards, army boots, and some kind of rust red colored dress with black stitching all over it. She could have made it herself, were that ever the kind of thing she would do.
“Half the clothes Siggy lends me are things I suspect she made herself,” I observed.
“I know. She’s such a freak,” Kijra said, pursing her lips a little to the side in a benign gesture of indifference.
“And then she hands them to me, like I want them or something, and then I end up in trouble with her because I either lost them or tore them or spilled something on them. I swear I think she does it to obligate me to her in some way,” I said.
Kijra put on the next song, and instructed me to pay special attention to how great the lyrics were. Something about stupid happy people.
“It really bugs me that she does this, and it bugs me that she sews,” I said.
Kijra laughed and said she’d always been like that. “She designs her own clothes. I think she thinks she’s artistic or something like that. She’s just trying to be eccentric and special. She’s trying to be Ziggy. But she can’t be. He’s so great.”
“You and her were really good friends at one time weren’t you?” I asked her.
She shrugged, and said, “We were just together all the time, that’s all. Our moms walked us in baby carriages together. We lived three houses away from each other in Virginia.”
I sat up from my laid back position on her cloth hamper like chair.
“That’s what I mean. That’s weird. Why did you both move here together?”
