My best friend

I heard the door slam. Jonathan must be home. “Hey Anthony!”, he yelled. Instead of walking into my room, like he usually did, he walked down the hall and closed his door. I grinned. This could mean two things: he either had company, or he had seen a very pretty girl on the street and wanted to think about that a little while longer. However, I realized he had told me his little sister Ava would be coming over today; they would probably both come over in a minute or so, considering I was good friends with both of them.

Jonathan, though usually referred to as Johnny or in my case Jona had been my best friend since we met in high school. It was obvious we got along from the very first moment; we had the same interests, we both wanted to study psychology and everyone thought we were gay. This, of course, wasn't true. Though I had found out I was bisexual (the only thing I had never discussed with Jona, because I had never been in love with a guy) I had no reason to believe he was anything but straight, judging by the many girlfriends he had had. No surprise, because he was damn handsome, had a great deal of humour and was easy to talk with, these last things being the reason we had been friends for so long now.

I was making my bed when Jona came in, Ava right behind him. I hadn't seen her in a couple of months – texting now and then had been enough – and was surprised at how much she had changed. Ava was 18, only one year younger than Jona and me, I realized now. I had always seen her as Jona's little sister; now she suddenly seemed to be a whole personality by herself. She had grown a couple of inches, which now made her just a bit shorter than me. I didn't have much time to dwell on this, though, because Jona slammed me on the back and asked how my day had been, whilst helping himself to some orange juice. “Good”, I answered him, before I asked Ava “Would you like something as well?”, already walking towards the fridge. “Yes, please”, she said, bowing her head and smiling innocently, at first leaving me confused why she was so polite, until I saw the corners of her mouth twitching. Of course she had been joking. I poured her some orange juice as well and we went to sit by Jona, who was already watching TV from my bed. Jona was rather tall and looked startlingly like his sister. They both had black hair and green eyes with yellowish spots in them, they both had almond shaped eyes that formed curves like the top half of a circle when they smiled, which was almost cartoon-like. They both had a straight nose, high cheekbones and long eyelashes, and to top this already pretty picture off, they were both slim and elegantly built. The only exceptions were that Ava was of course a couple of inches shorter, and her hair reached down all the way to her lower back, where Jona's hair came down to his shoulders at its longest point. All these factors actually made Jona look kind of... feminine. I had seen many confused guys get lost in Jona's features, before they looked down and realized he had no breasts whatsoever and wore men's clothes. We laughed together at their disturbed faces and at the thought of the mechanisms of their brains having a meltdown. You could almost see them think: “It's got no breasts... but it's got pretty long hair and its body seems to hold the middle between a slender boy or a slightly muscled girl...”. In the end, they usually decided to let it go, which we regretted, because secretly, we would have loved it if he would have started flirting with him. In the beginning I sometimes wondered if he wasn't afraid of scaring some girls away with this. But in fact, Jona didn't care one bit about whether he looked like a girl – his androgynous face seemed to be irresistible to girls and he even used it to his advantage sometimes (for example, he would get in during a “Women Only” night at the local club and stare shamelessly at all the actual females). It was no wonder he never got caught; with his clothes on he might have passed for either an underdeveloped woman or a very handsome man, and to make things even more complicated, he could easily imitate a sweet, girly voice. Yes, all of this scared me sometimes, but thank God he hardly ever did it with me around.