I paced across my bedroom. Forward, backward, and again. Then a third time.
My brother and I used to share this room, and it still feels too big for just me. My twin bed is shoved up against one wall, with my dresser across from it. There isn’t much in between except a desk I never use and a laundry basket that’s always overflowing, because Mom says I’m old enough to do my own laundry, but I always forget.
My walls have posters tacked on them, but they’re old posters I barely notice anymore—Fonzie and Charlie’s Angels and the Jackson 5. I should take them down, but I don’t know what I’d put up instead. When I was younger, it was easier to know what I liked. Lately, I keep changing my mind about everything.
I waited until I heard Mom come out of the bathroom, her footsteps fading down the hall, before I cracked open my door. Peter’s room is right next to mine, but his door was firmly shut—no hint of light shining around the cracks. I checked to make sure Mom was definitely gone before I twisted the knob.
The tiny lamp perched on his windowsill was dark. The room’s only illumination was a pale yellow stream coming from the streetlight in the alley, filtered through the old yarwood tree that bumps up against our house. The echo of light crept across Peter’s floor as the wind shifted the branches.
His bed took up three quarters of the floor space. Peter’s room is so tiny we used to use it as a storage closet, until one afternoon when I was in third grade and he was in fourth, and I came home from Girl Scouts to find his half of our shared room empty. He’d hauled all the musty old boxes of baby clothes that had filled the storage room up to our tiny attic, then hung his 49ers pennant on the wall and jammed his bed in across from the window.
Mom tried to argue with him about it, but she didn’t try very hard. That night when I got up to get a glass of water, I overheard her on the downstairs phone, telling Dad to come visit.
“Peter needs a man in his life,” she was saying in a low, shaky voice.
Her words sounded strange then, and they seem utterly absurd now. Peter needed a lot of things as a kid—we both did—but our dad wasn’t one of them. He never did come visit after her call, but he sent his check on time for once.
I turned around in the tight space, then shut Peter’s door and perched on the corner of his bed, my eyes adjusting to the dim light. The pit that had formed in my stomach when the anchor first announced the vote results was growing.
I couldn’t just sit there, waiting. I couldn’t shake the fear that Peter had done something dangerous after he heard the news. He’s never been great at being careful.
We’re opposites in a lot of ways, my brother and me. When our dad’s parents took us to Disneyland, I stuck to Dumbo and Peter Pan, but Peter went on the Matterhorn Bobsleds so many times, he threw up in the bushes outside It’s a Small World. If that had happened to me I’d have hidden under a palm tree and refused to show my face for the rest of the day, but Peter just got in line for the roller coaster all over again.
He’s never seemed to care if he stands out. I asked him once if it bothered him when the boys teased him at school, and he just shrugged and pointed to all the Xs on the calendar hanging on his wall. He crosses off every day, he told me, counting down until he gets out of high school and can start his real life.
I wish I knew when my real life would start. There’s never been a single place where I really fit. I try to act as if I do, of course, but it always feels like exactly that—acting. Even with my friends.
It’s that way with Kevin sometimes, too. We’ve been together long enough now that being with him