boy and a girl.”

Oh, God no. Please let a terrorist come along and gag my mother right now.

“From the sonogram, they could tell Luke was a boy,” my mother explained. “But from the way Finbar was positioned, you couldn’t even tell he had a—”

“Luke!” I exclaimed.

I’d never been so ecstatic to introduce my good-looking, athletic brother to a girl I liked.

Luke pounded down the stairs as usual and jumped the last three. He extended his hand.

“You’re Kate, right?” Luke flashed his non-creepy blue eyes at the girl I liked. “Thanks for coming over.”

My mom steered them to the dining room, and I went upstairs to my room because I didn’t want to hang around. But I was so anxious about how Kate and Luke were getting along that I even crouched down and pressed my ear to the floor. Too bad my mother’s vacuum was sucking out all possibility of eavesdropping. Acting like Luke, I jumped around the room and then lay in his bed and threw his Nerf balls at the ceiling. I hit a spiderweb and it fell on my face. Gross.

I tried to tell myself I had nothing to worry about. I mean, really. Sure, Luke’s good-looking. Sure, Luke’s in pretty good shape. He could probably bench-press an elephant if he had to. But to be honest, my brother doesn’t have a whole lot of game. He has the pickup skills of a hurricane. Sure, he’s big and exciting and energetic, and sure, everyone talks about him on the local news, and maybe some girls get all caught up in him and follow him wherever he’s going, but Luke is a wild and unpredictable force. Not even he has control over his own power. If he set out with the intention to seduce a particular girl, he wouldn’t have the skill for it. He wouldn’t have the attention for it. He wouldn’t succeed.

Would he?

Under the very sneaky pretense of having an apple, I went downstairs. An apple would give me an excuse to spy on Kate and Luke and would prove to Kate that I was healthy. In biology, we learned that a lot of “attractive” traits are actually biologically alluring because they mean we’re healthy as potential mates. I’d just stroll in, apple in hand, wordlessly bragging about my mating ability, my strong teeth and fast-moving bowels…

But they were laughing. From the staircase landing in the front hall, I could hear them laughing. Shit. Laughing? What was funny about Math B, I wondered as I walked back to the dining room. I’d never taken Math B, but it was math, and math was never fun. Even that show Numb3rs, which tries to make math cool, is on every Friday night, because people who like math are always home on Friday nights!

Oh, no. I bet it was Luke. Luke had made Kate laugh.

“Done!” Kate cried from the dining room.

“Done! No, you beat me!” Luke cried right after her. He laughed.

I entered with the caution of a crime scene investigator. Luke and Kate were sitting side by side, but their chairs were turned more toward each other than toward the table, where the books, notebooks, and things they should have been focusing on were.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “So… what’s going on here?”

Luke snatched Kate’s paper and looked rapidly from hers back to his.

“Dammit!” He slapped his head, then slumped in his seat, pretending to drop dead. “I forgot to say that this thing equals that thing. But I know it does. So why do I have to say it?”

“You just do,” Kate said. “All the obvious stuff. Otherwise you can’t get from step one to step two. Which means, I am the champion!”

She threw both hands in the air.

“Champion of what?” I asked.

“We’re racing through proofs,” Luke told me. “Kate beat me three times in a row.”

“And loser has to copy the proof over,” Kate said. “Three times.”

Luke groaned, and Kate passed him an empty notebook and a pen. “There ya go, sucker,” she said.

While Luke copied the proof in his manic handwriting, Kate looked up, winked at me, and smiled. I smiled back genuinely and leaned against the doorway. It seemed somehow natural, Kate here in my dining room, at the table where we ate corned beef every Tuesday, below the childhood pictures in which Luke and I were wearing matching reindeer sweaters. In the second picture, he stuck his finger in my ear and in the third picture I had my face so scrunched up you