and the fights he picked with our parents, he couldn’t be bothered with guilt or concern.
If we had the kind of relationship where we could talk about things, real, serious things, I might ask him. I might want to know for myself. It’s not like I enjoy worrying this much every day. It’s that I don’t know how not to.
But we don’t have that relationship, so I don’t ask.
I drop into one of the chairs facing the window. Lewis speaks up again. “How about you? Any girlfriends yet?”
I hate this question coming from Lewis. It doesn’t bother me when it comes from Mom—which it does every time I give a girl a ride home from school or work with one on a group project—or even when it’s Ben and Cooper ribbing me at lunch. From Lewis, though, I understand the question for what it is. Judgment. It’s the disdain and comedy with which Lewis has long viewed my choices. My whole personality, really.
I do my finest impression of my brother’s nonchalance. “No.”
“What about girls in general? You got your eye on someone?”
“Not really.” I shift uncomfortably in my chair.
I don’t mention I pretty nearly did have a girlfriend once, four years ago. Cara Bergen. I talk to her every now and again. It’s not awkward. No way, not awkward at all. I asked Cara to the winter dance when we were in eighth grade. I knew her from English, and we’d gotten to be friends once I noticed the Walt Whitman collection she was reading outside of class. She said yes, and we had what was honestly one of the happiest nights of my life. We hung out often after that, and I kept noticing new things about her. How clever she was, how unbelievable her charcoal sketches were, how her nose would wrinkle up at the very mention of cilantro.
I was going to ask her out for real, which she knew, in the way everyone just knows inevitabilities in love. Then my mom got her diagnosis.
I disappeared. I didn’t answer Cara’s texts, and then her phone calls. I didn’t run into her at school because it was winter break. I did feel awful. I just knew I could barely balance my schoolwork with the new fears in my home life. If Mom had worsened, I wouldn’t have been able to handle everything, especially a relationship. Cara would have been caught in the middle. It’s what I feel with every other girl I’ve noticed since. I have every reason not to bring new, complicated questions of dating or breaking up into my life.
Lewis doesn’t know that, of course. He probably never will.
“Well,” Lewis says, closing his computer and jumping up from the table, “this trip could be a game-changer. I bet we could get you a hookup before we hit New York.” I shrug. “You’re a man of few words,” Lewis observes, watching me. “We can work that angle.”
“Pauciloquent,” I mutter. From the way Lewis tilts his head uncomprehendingly, I wish I hadn’t. It was a stupid slipup, an invitation for exasperating questions. Fifteen minutes in, and I had to give my brother something to tease me for.
“Huh?” he says.
“It’s a word for that—using few words in conversation,” I explain hesitantly, knowing what’s coming.
Lewis’s expression tightens. “You’re still doing the dictionary thing.”
I fidget with the buttons on my coat. “Aperiodically.”
“Doesn’t sound aperiodic.”
I scowl.
With a hint of humor in his eyes, Lewis says, “I guess it makes sense. If there’d been a girl, you wouldn’t have spent your evenings with Merriam and Webster.”
I look up, feeling a flare of anger in my chest. I know there’s a gulf between our degrees of experience, but I don’t need Lewis belittling me for it. He knows I’m the one who’s there for Mom while he’s here doing whatever the hell he wants—too busy even to come home and visit. If he’d had more than a fleeting thought for Mom in the past three years, he might not have had the time to notch his bedposts with Prisha and whoever else.