“Our love is true, it’s meant to be…becauseit’s me, I’m the guarantee!” I sang, but only in my mind. I had never thought about a career as a lyricist, but hey, maybe I had a hit on my hands.
“Arsch mit Ohren. If he says that one more time, I guarantee that I’ll smack him.”
I looked over at Morgan, shocked. I hadn’t caught everything she’d just said, but I got the last part. Had she really just whispered that to me? It was a funny comment she might have made a few years before, but I must have misheard her now. I turned to look again at my brother’s laptop screen and in my head, I continued my musical composition. “My favorite snack is crackers and Brie, andit’s me, I’m the guarantee!” Or how about, “Someday I’ll go to Tennessee?” I did want to travel.
“Max.”
Oh, damn. I snapped out of my stupid daydream and I felt my breath catch. My sister audibly swallowed.
“Max,” my dad said again. His face was losing the blandness as it coalesced into a more familiar expression: anger.
“Dad, I’m not done. Here are the profit projections.” But when my brother went to switch to the next slide, he hit something else and closed the presentation by mistake. His graphs disappeared and there was his wallpaper, which was a picture of him and awoman. They both held bottles of beer and she was licking hers in a way that…well…
“What the fuck is this?” my dad asked. But he seemed less angry. “Is that your girlfriend?”
“Uh, yeah,” Max mumbled. He had closed his laptop and the slideshow seemed to be over.
“What’s her name, hon?” my mom asked. “You haven’t talked about her.”
But my brother wasn’t ready to talk about her now, either. He hurried up the stairs, his computer under his arm. My dad, chuckling to himself, went toward the kitchen and my mom followed. It left me and my sister in the living room.
“Did you recognize her?” Morgan asked.
“I think they went to high school together, but I didn’t get a great look,” I answered. I had been focused on that girl’s tongue caressing the neck of the bottle so I’d missed some of her other features.
“Does Max really have a girlfriend?”
“Ask him,” I suggested. That would have involved my sister making an effort, though. She’d have to stay out of her bed and engage in human interaction without being harassed into it by our mother.
But I didn’t say any of that and I went upstairs to my bedroom. We were lucky to have a house big enough that we all got a separate place to sleep (thanks to my grandpa, who had built it with the idea that it would be afamilyhome, shared andmaintained just like ourfamilybusiness). We were also unlucky because it was a lot of area to maintain, even if everyone worked on it and split the cost. For example, if you needed to do repairs on the foundation (and we did), there was a lot of foundation to fix.
Although it was my room, I didn’t have a lock on the door and I didn’t think to wedge a chair under the handle so that no one else could enter. My sister did enter, right behind me, and she sat down on my bed as if we were going to have a cozy chat. That was something we hadn’t done in at least ten years, so my reaction of staring with my jaw hanging open made sense.
“At least Dad didn’t call us names,” she remarked, making herself comfortable. She looked around the room and she was probably impressed. It was significantly neater than hers, because I picked up my dirty clothes, washed them, folded them, and then put them all away. It was also significantly cleaner, because I dusted, changed the sheets, washed the windows, and vacuumed the old carpet. Maybe it was giving her ideas about how to keep up her own space.
“Why are you in here?” I asked. No, I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was genuinely curious about her answer.
She only shrugged, though, and then sat in silence. So I continued to do what I had planned, which was to go to my little desk to work on a “group project” for school that had become a solitary, me-only project. I opened my laptop, which was five years older than my brother’s and was inching daily toward a total crash-and-burn situation. Now, the screen flashed green three times before it finally showed something recognizable,and the whole process took much too long. However, my sister was still sitting on my bed as it finished, like she wasn’t going anywhere. I continued to ignore her.
“Do you think Max’s business idea will work this time?” she asked me.
“No.” How many of his presentations had we sat through? He had come up with idea after idea, and none of them had ever bloomed into success. They had all lost money, in fact. “Have an iced tea, don’t you agree?It’s me, I’m the guarantee!”
“I wish he hadn’t done that course.”
I turned away from the laptop, which was struggling to open my project. “What course? How do you know about it?” As far as I was aware, she didn’t talk to him, either.
“I could hear him from my room,” Morgan said. “He did this online business thing that was supposed to help you optimize your…” She stopped and thought. “They said a lot of words but none of them made too much sense to me. Mostly they wanted you to repeat that you were the guarantee. Things couldn’t fail because you were going to make them happen.”
“It’s me, I’m the guarantee, now I have to go pee,” I hummed out loud. “Basically, they were selling self-confidence.”
She nodded and yawned. This had probably been the most extended period that she’d been awake and ambulatory in several months and it was definitely the largest number of words that she’d spoken. “I can hear everything from his room if I have my closet door open. He puts the laptop speaker up against the wall and he won’t use his headphones since they hurt him.”
Our brother had always complained about his delicate ears. “I would have kept the closet door shut,” I remarked.
She started to change color. Not blue, like she wasn’t getting oxygen, but a funny, mottled red that was very obvious because her skin was so deathly pale. “I don’t mind hearing people,” she said.
I turned back to the screen, which now showed that my three groupmates had still not done one damn thing on our project. “If you want to hear people, you don’t have to eavesdrop. Just get out of your room,” I told her.
