Page 92 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Thank you.”

“But also, Isak, stop hoarding it,” my dad said, and turned a page. Declan howled.

This was the part of my family I’d spent my whole life standing slightly outside of. The noise. The way eight people who came out of the same house could fill any room until there was no air left for the only move I knew, which was waiting to be noticed.

I’d built a life eleven hundred miles from this exact noise because I’d decided the noise didn’t have a frequency for me. I was the seventh of eight. By the time anybody got to me they were tired.

And now they were all in the building I’d bought and renovated and never once told them was mine, eating Cincinnati chili dogs off my plates, and not one of them had asked, because they assumed Chris’s draft gift was all I’d ever need.

And I let them assume, the way I let everybody assume everything. Because being underestimated had become so comfortable I’d built a whole personality inside it.

Clover was on the couch with Trixie and Kelsey, and she was laughing.

That’s the part that got me. Not that she fit in. That she’d stopped checking whether she fit in. I’d watched her walk into a room of professional athletes and their famous wives doing the thing she does, reading it for the edges, finding where she was allowed to stand, and I’d watched Trixie hand her a glass of wine and Kelsey ask her a question about the squad’s routines and within twenty minutes Clover had forgotten to guard the door. She was just there. In my family. On my couch. Being funny.

I had nine wheat and I could not have cared less about any of it.

Chris found me on the balcony later, because it was the quarterback in him. He reads the whole field and then walks to the exact spot the play is going.

“Nice building,” he said.

“It’s a good building.”

“It’s a great building. Twelve units, the historic brick, the brewery bones.” He leaned on the rail next to me, both of us looking out at the river doing its river business below. “I bought you the penthouse. You bought the other eleven units and never said a word. Dad thinks the management company’s some firm out of Columbus.”

I didn’t say anything. Chris let me not say anything for a while, which is a thing he learned from Dad and I never did.

“I’m not going to tell him,” Chris said. “It’s yours to tell. I just want you to notice that you did it again. You built something huge and beautiful and you hid it so nobody could clap for you, and then you got mad that nobody clapped.”

“I didn’t get mad.”

“You’ve been a little mad your whole life, Isak. It’s okay. You’re the seventh of eight and the loudest people in your family ran out of attention before they got to you and you decided the answer was to become a man nobody could see clearly enough to disappoint.” He said it gently.

That’s the unbearable thing about Chris. He says the worst true thing about you in the kindest possible voice. “I’m asking you a real question now, and I want a real answer, not a bit. The girl on the couch.”

“Clover.”

“The one who forgot to guard the door.” So he’d seen it too. “Is it real?”

And here’s where I could have done the thing I do. The deflect. The joke. I had one loaded, something about cats. I felt it come up.

I let it go past.

“It started fake,” I said. Out of anyone in the world, Chris would understand that. “There’s a problem named Tiki and we made a deal to look like a couple so Tiki would leave me alone and Clover’s ex-boyfriend whom her parents just love would leave her alone. That part was real. The deal was real.”

“And now?”

“Now I bought her a helmet.” I heard how it sounded. I kept going anyway, because Chris had asked for a real answer and the real answer was a helmet.

“Before I knew I was going to. I paid the kid who worked at the store a hundo to bring it to me like pizza. I ordered her a helmet in her size in the color I thought she’d pick, and I told myself it was for the bit, and Chris—” I stopped.

“I don’t order helmets for women. I’ve never ordered anybody else a helmet in my life. I order a helmet for one woman and she doesn’t know the most important thing about me and I keep not telling her because the second I tell her she has all the information and she gets to decide, and I’m scared of what she is going to decide.”

Chris was quiet.

“What’s the most important thing about you,” he asked.

Not the building. Not the gaming money. He knew those.