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“Don’t forget your clarinet,” she warns.
“I won’t,” I mumble.
There’s a boy at the table giving me an evil look. Leslie’s brother, I assume—and then confirm it. Owen. A senior. My ride to school.
I have gotten very used to the fact that most mornings in most homes are exactly the same. Stumbling out of the bed. Stumbling into the shower. Mumbling over the breakfast table. Or, if the parents are still asleep, the tiptoe out of the house. The only way to keep it interesting is to look for the variations.
This morning’s variation comes care of Owen, who lights up a joint the minute we get into the car. I’m assuming this is part of his morning routine, so I make sure Leslie doesn’t seem as surprised as I am.
Still, Owen hazards a “Don’t say a word” about three minutes into the ride. I stare out the window. Two minutes later, he says, “Look, I don’t need your judgment, okay?” The joint is done by then; it doesn’t make him any mellower.
I prefer to be an only child. In the long term, I can see how siblings could be helpful in life—someone to share family secrets with, someone of your own generation who knows if your memories are right or not, someone who sees you at eight and eighteen and forty-eight all at once, and doesn’t mind. I understand that. But in the short term, siblings are at best a hassle and at worst a terror. Most of the abuse I have suffered in my admittedly unusual life has come from brothers and sisters, with older brothers and older sisters being, by and large, the worst offenders. At first I was naïve, and assumed that brothers and sisters were natural allies, instant companions. And sometimes the context would allow this to happen—if we were on a family trip, for example, or if it was a lazy Sunday where teaming up with me was my sibling’s only form of entertainment. But on ordinary days, the rule is competition, not collaboration. There are times when I wonder whether brothers and sisters are, in fact, the ones who sense that something is off with whatever person I’m inhabiting, and move to take advantage. When I was eight, an older sister told me we were going to run away together—then abandoned the “together” part when we got to the train station, leaving me to wander there for hours, too scared to ask for help—scared that she would find out and berate me for ending our game. As a boy, I’ve had brothers—both older and younger—wrestle me, hit me, kick me, bite me, shove me, and call me more names than I could ever catalog.
The best I can hope for is a quiet sibling. At first I have Owen pegged as one of those. In the car, it appears I am wrong. But then, once we get out at school, it appears I am right again. With other kids around, he retreats into invisibility, keeping his head down as he makes his way inside, leaving me completely behind. No goodbye, no have-a-nice-day. Just a quick glance to see that my door is closed before he locks the car.
“What are you looking at?” a voice asks from over my left shoulder as I watch him enter school alone.
I turn around and do some serious accessing.
Carrie. Best friend since fourth grade.
“Just my brother.”
“Why? He’s such a waste of space.”
Here’s the strange thing: I am fine thinking the same words myself, but hearing them come out of Carrie’s mouth makes me feel defensive.
“Come on,” I say.
“Come on? Are you kidding me?”
Now I think: She knows something I don’t. I decide to keep my mouth shut.
She seems relieved to change the subject.
“What did you do last night?” she asks.
Flashes of Rhiannon rise in my mind’s eye. I try to tamp them down, but they’re not that easy to contain. Once you experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and wants to be every word you say.
“Not much,” I push on, not bothering to access Leslie. This answer always works, no matter what the question. “You?”
“You didn’t get my text?”
I mumble something about my phone dying.
“That explains why you haven’t asked me yet! Guess what. Corey IM’d me! We chatted for, like, almost an hour.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” Carrie sighs contentedly. “After all this time. I didn’t even know he knew my screen name. You didn’t tell him, did you?”
More accessing. This is the kind of question that can really trip a person up. Maybe not right away. But in the future. If Leslie claims she wasn’t the one who told Corey, and Carrie finds out she was, it could throw their friendship off balance. Or if Leslie claims she was, and Carrie finds out she wasn’t.
Corey is Corey Handlemann, a junior who Carrie’s had a crush on for at least three weeks. Leslie doesn’t know him well, and I can’t find a memory of giving a screen name to him. I think it’s safe.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I didn’t.”
“Well, I guess he really had to work hard to find it,” she says. (Or, I think, he just saw it on your Facebook profile.)
