The first time I told my dads about Uncle Trev, they exchanged a long look and then had a talk with me about Red Flags and What to Watch Out For and Adult Men and Grooming Behavior. And I’ve watched out for all the red flags—but honestly, Trev is just a nice guy. I talk to Marcelina about it all the time: how much it sucks to have to be suspicious of a grown man just because he’s kind and thoughtful and listens. But then again, Marcelina and I also talk a lot about grown men we were right to be suspicious of. The kinds of grown men who pretend to be interested in our lives and then start texting us late at night. The kinds of grown men who ask for hugs. The kinds of grown men who say they want to be our friends, who try to tell us secrets because they think we don’t know what it means when a grown man tries to tell a teenage girl a secret. Uncle Trev isn’t like them, and I know that, but it’s awful to be constantly watching just in case he turns out to be that kind of guy.
It’s exhausting.
Anyway.
I go through the mudroom to get out, because Handsome and Fritz would never forgive me if I left without saying goodbye. I sit down and let them bombard me with dog-dreams and news and sheer unbridled affection. They both try to shove their noses into my backpack. Even though they listen when I tell them to leave it alone, I get up and go pretty fast. It doesn’t feel right, sitting there with Josh’s head and his all-wrong heart and letting the dogs tell me how great I am.
Nothing feels right.
I walk home. It’s only about a mile, and the fresh air is nice. It’s early enough that not many people are awake. I pass the places where Marcelina and I used to ride our bikes around when we were kids, before we knew that magic was more than just a game we played. Houses that we’d decided were haunted, or where we said a murderer probably lived. Sidewalks that we dusted with chalk rainbows before rainstorms, so that when the weather started to turn, we could watch the colors run.
I wonder when the days stopped feeling endless. It was definitely long before I had a backpack full of body parts to dispose of.
My house is just like all the other houses on the block. It’s squat and square and has a big window in the front and a little yard next to the driveway. It’s light blue, and the one on the left of it is white and the one on the right of it is brown, and that color pattern repeats over and over for about eight blocks in every direction.
The only thing that makes my house stand out is my dads’ garden. It’s one of the many Couples Hobbies they’ve taken up together over the years in an attempt to stay “connected.” It’s not that their relationship is bad or anything—it’s just that they’re both trial lawyers, which means that they’re both always busy. I guess when you’re that busy, it doesn’t matter if you’re madly in love with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with—it’s still easy to drift apart. So my dads have golfed and tennis’d and biked and run marathons, and now they’re gardening. The front lawn is a patchwork of garden beds that are exploding with flowers—mostly orange and pink ones right now, although they put some blue hydrangeas in for me.
I feel weirdly guilty whenever I see the hydrangeas, even though I know that they planted them to make me happy and it’s not a big deal. I don’t like feeling like I disrupted their color scheme. But then, if I ever told them I felt bad about it, they’d make a big deal about how it’s not a big deal. So I don’t say anything, and I tell myself that it’s not something I should feel guilty about.
I walk inside as quietly as I can, thinking I’ll be able to sneak into my bedroom without getting noticed or talked to, but as soon as I step inside, I’m thwarted by my little brother. Nico’s wearing his soccer uniform and he’s got his cleats on, even though he’s not supposed to wear them in the house and Pop will definitely kill him if he sees.
Nico looks nothing like me, which makes sense since we were adopted from entirely different families. Where my hair is brown and curly, his is black and straight and stands up in every direction even when he doesn’t put too much gel in it. We both have brown eyes, but mine are dark and his are light in a way that I’m sure girls his age think is dreamy. He’s two years younger than me, and he goes to a STEM magnet school that’s annoyingly close to my school. He’s getting taller every half hour or so, which means that his elbows are pointy and his neck is weirdly long and he’s developing horrible posture because he doesn’t know how to be tall yet. He’d be really good-looking if it wasn’t for the slouch. And if he wasn’t my little brother. And if he wasn’t constantly underfoot, like he is now.
“What are you doing up?” I ask. He looks down at his soccer cleats and then raises his eyebrows at me like I’m ten cents short of a dime, which … fair.
“Dad said you weren’t coming to my game today because you’d probably be hungover from prom,” Nico says.
“He did not say that,” I snap back at him. I want to yell at him to stop slouching, just to annoy him. I don’t have that many months left to be an annoying older sister who yells at my kid brother.
He rolls his eyes
