you’ve got to stop letting your imagination get away from you. How many times do I have to tell you that it’s all in your head? You are paranoid, it’s part of your illness.”
I crept down the hall and knocked on Benny’s door and didn’t wait for him to answer before I slipped inside. He was lying on the floor in the exact center of the area rug, arms and legs spread-eagled so that he looked like a pale, scrawny version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. My brother hadn’t slipped comfortably into adolescence; it was as if his growing body had outstripped the child that he still was, and left him rattling loose inside this strange, oversized vessel. He lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling.
I sat down on the rug next to him and tugged my skirt over my knees.
“I don’t get it, Benny. You had to know that was against school rules. What did you have to gain from it?”
Benny shrugged. “Kids are nicer to me if I give them drugs.”
“You know, there are other ways to make people like you, stupid. Like, maybe make an effort sometimes? Join the chess club. Spend your lunchtime actually talking to people instead of sitting in a corner drawing creepy pictures in your notebook.”
“Well, it’s a non-issue now.”
“Oh, please. Dad will offer to build the school a new auditorium or something and everything will be forgiven.”
“No.” It alarmed me, how limp and motionless he was on the rug, how affectless his voice was. “Dad wants us to move to Tahoe. They’re going to send me to school up there. Some progressive academy that’s going to turn me into Paul Bunyan or something.”
“Tahoe? How ghastly.” I thought of that huge, cold house on the West Shore of the lake, cut off from everything I considered civilization, and I wondered what leverage my father had over my mother to convince her to move there. Since my father had inherited the house the previous year, we’d been up only once, to go skiing over spring break. Maman spent most of our stay wandering around the rooms, gingerly touching the spindly old furniture with a pinched expression on her face. I knew exactly what she was thinking.
Benny’s arms and legs swept slowly up and down the nap of the rug, like he was making a snow angel. “Not really. I hate it here anyway. Can’t be any worse up there. Probably better. The kids at our school are so full of themselves.”
I watched my brother scratching at the crop of pimples that had recently erupted, red and angry, on his chin. They matched the color of his hair, which made them even more obvious. My oblivious brother didn’t realize how much harder he was making life for himself; he seemed determined to shrug off all the advantages that came with being us. Back then I still believed that Benny’s issues were mostly of his own design, like he could just choose to stop sitting in his room drawing cartoons and acting weird, and then everything would be OK. I didn’t understand yet.
“You don’t give anyone a chance,” I said. “And stop scratching your pimples or you’ll get scars.”
He gave me the middle finger. “Anyway you’re going to be off at college, so stop acting like you give a shit where we live.”
I ran my own hand across the nap of his rug. It was thick blue pile that the decorator had put in to disguise the ink stains from Benny’s abandoned Sharpies. “Maman’s going to go crazy up there.”
He sat up suddenly and looked at me fiercely. “Mom’s already crazy. Didn’t you know that?”
“She’s not crazy, she’s just moody,” I said quickly. And yet, there was a whisper at the back of my mind, an awareness that her moods went beyond your average midlife ennui. Benny and I never really discussed our mother’s swings but I saw him watching her sometimes, as if her face were a weather vane and he was using it to predict the coming storms. I did the same thing, awaiting the moment when the switch inside her would flip from on to off. One