At the Edge of Vision Michael Hicks

AT THEEDGEOF VISION

MICHAEL HICKS

“Hurry, Livi! We have to fnd Abby before she falls of of that clif!” Eli whispered to the empty space beside him. Te hot noon sun had transformed the black asphalt of Sequoia Court into a vast, barren desert. Wiping away sweat that wasn’t there, the hero stood on tiptoe, peering warily around his family’s Camry for any sign of desert predators.

His relief at being alone turned to sudden fear as the fre hydrant beside his leg sprouted legs and a tail: the giant poisonous lizards had come at last. Dashing around the car, he fed from his foes, one hand held rigidly behind him to pull Livi along. Leaping over the harrowing chasm of Doom (hidden so cleverly underneath a pile of leaves) with a silent, heroic bellow, he landed in a perfect crouch, right next to his neighbor, Mr. Byrnes.

Under the camoufage of long dark bangs, he glanced up at the old man, looking with dread for the expression he knew would be there. Yep, there it was: the smile of Adults. When he told Mom that he would have to marry both Olivia and Abigail because the one lef out would be lonely, the only answer he got was that smile.

So, with a formal nod, he lef Mr. Byrnes to Adulthood and returned to his World. Glancing perfunctorily at the massive trees overhead, locked in an endless wrestling match of bark and branches, he lef the T-Rex and King Kong to their own devices—their battle was no concern of his. Eli walked toward the building a few blocks down the street, its image fickering in and out of his mind like a mirage.

Reaching the front of the MLKJ library building, Elijah and Livi slipped inside the door just as the dinosaur’s teeth slammed against the metal—Kong must have lost, the useless ape. Slipping past the librarian,

Ara, at the front desk, he dashed up three fights of steps, now sweating in earnest. Together, he and Livi reached the edge of the balcony, leaned over the harrowing drop, and pulled Abby up to safety together.

“We did it, Livi. We saved her. You’re safe now, Abby,” Elijah said aloud, smiling proudly at their accomplishment. Tey had set things right. And then, he put the two of them out of his mind, and they were gone.

He looked back down below to the foor 23 feet below and, no longer distracted by his fantasies, became painfully aware of just how far 23 feet was. He stared at the endless rows of red and black diamonds and saw black sea snakes weaving through ominously red waters—or maybe they were hundred-rung ladders ascending the Grand Canyon at sunset, or a massive checkers board before the pieces have been sent out to die—until he shut his eyes tightly, trying to think of the foor as just a foor, colorless, harmless. But he couldn’t, because he knew with unsettling clarity exactly what would happen to him if he fell.

He felt a claw pull resolutely on his shoulder, and felt annoyed that he had lost control of his imagination again and let the lizards come back. But no, it was just Ara dragging him away from the edge. She pushed him hard against the opposite bookshelf, glaring.

Pursing her lips, she motioned, “Hand to forehead-twiddles middle fnger-points at Elijah-rotates palms upward clockwise?”

“I just wanted to check out a book, Ara,” he signaled, the picture of innocence.

“Points at Elijah-jabs downward with hooked index fnger-touches chin with inverted thumb-moves curved hand from chest toward the groundpresses four fngers down on other palm,” she retorted sternly, delicate fngers weaving a symphony of words into silence. “Pushes palm outward twice-points thumb to chin and forehead with palm extended-pounds fst against palm with thumb and second knuckle extended-points at Eli.”

“My parents are worrying way too much over nothing. Tey don’t need to know, so don’t call them, ok?”

She raised an eyebrow, smiling innocently. “Tumbs up pointing from chest to ceiling?”

“I know you’re the one calling Olivia somehow. I don’t know how you’re talking to her but I know. Just stop it ok?” She smiled innocently, but her subtly twitching hands spoke volumes. He’d have company soon.

Ten again, he was counting on it: to save Livi.

He looked back up at the bookshelf and plucked out the magazine Abby had been looking for. Turning back, Eli watched as Ara motioned shooting dual pistols at him. What did that mean? He had only started

taking lessons at the beginning of November and hadn’t gone since the 22nd, so obviously he had missed this sign. She sighed and spelt out, “H-U-R-R-Y-U-P,” at which Eli grinned impudently. She turned, “rubbingher-nose” at Eli. Of course, he didn’t know for certain if she was calling him a “brat” this time, or Abby and him the dozens of other times: maybe she was just allergic to books, or had caught a bad cold 11 months ago when she started working here and hadn’t recovered since. But only he and Abby seemed to have noticed that she existed at all, so he was pretty sure that she didn’t mean it.

Trudging downstairs, Eli kept his eyes downcast, thinking about not thinking. He put each foot squarely in front of the other in the stair’s exact middle, making two 90º lef turns at each landing. At the bottom he sighed quietly, eyes still fxed unblinkingly on the patterned foor, and walked toward the front desk, trying not to step on any cracks. Of course his lef toes inevitably pressed on that intangible edge, so then he tried to step with his right foot on the same spot but ended up stepping more on the back part of his toes, so then he had to tread on another line for each, except then he lost his balance and stepped on another crack with his heel. So then he just gave up and started jumping up and down randomly until his feet were covered in so many lines that he couldn’t distinguish between them anymore. Knowing how his impromptu tantrum must have looked to passersby, he cleared his throat and walked the remaining distance with head held high, his feet cringing at each additional crack.

To his annoyance, when he reached the front desk Ara, phone in hand, shooed him away disdainfully with the back of her hand—she called signals like those “pigeon signs” since people who didn’t know sign language could still understand them, and had been using them more and more recently. He sighed, tapping his chest absentmindedly with his fngertips (“Grouch”), and slogged back toward the reading lounge, purposefully ignoring the curious expressions of a class of preschoolers and their smiling guardians. A few of them imitated Elijah’s dance across the foor behind him, but quickly got bored: the game was much easier for their little feet.

At last, he arrived at his sanctuary: a nest of armchairs and loveseats bordered on three sides by the “Literature of the World” section no one had touched or looked at in years, and on the fourth by a wall-length window overlooking the local playground. Eli plopped down onto their favorite chair, pressing hard against one side to leave some room, and pulled out from his backpack a black-and-white composition notebook with “JOURNAL” on the cover. Placing the National Geographic edition on

Komodo dragons in the empty space beside him and the notebook on the chair arm, Eli copied down his favorite paragraph:

Dear Diary,

As the dominant predators on the handful of islands they inhabit, the komodo dragon will eat almost everything, including carrion, deer, pigs, smaller dragons, and even large water bufalo and humans. When a victim ambles by, the dragon springs, using its powerful legs, sharp claws and serrated, shark-like teeth to eviscerate its prey. Dragon saliva teems with over 50 strains of bacteria, and within 24 hours, the stricken creature usually dies of blood poisoning. Dragons calmly follow an escapee for miles as the bacteria takes efect, using their keen sense of smell to hone in on the corpse. Love, Elijah

Eli grinned evilly, picturing his parents’ reaction when they sneak into his room tonight, not quite sofly enough to escape his notice, and look at his daily entry. Tey asked him to start writing down his thoughts afer the 22nd, but he knew how long that would take. So he started writing random facts from books instead, and found it hilarious that they seemed to be panicking over what they meant. Didn’t they keep telling him that, “Grown-ups don’t pretend to see things that aren’t there”? Ten why were they acting like him, pretending that a bunch of lizard facts and accident statistics meant something?

Te sun was falling quicker than usual, a bleeding heart obscured by porous gray clouds dripping down toward the top of the valley, bathing the pale faces of the children outside a dark orange. By this time he could only wait and accept his punishment, so he settled deeper into his couch and pulled out Bridge to Terebithia, morbidly curious if the ending would make him cry like it did the last three times. Afer all, his teacher had told him once that books matter because they make you feel something,

“Eli are you there?” not because they mean something. So he decided he would keep reading any book

“Hey, Eli!” as long as it could keep letting him be someone else, even for a moment. But

“ELI!” his moment as Jess Aarons was broken when Olivia plucked the book out of his hands.

“You’ll read your eyes out, kid.” He looked up into Olivia’s blue eyes, shining catlike in the darkness, framed by long bangs plastered onto her tanned forehead. A light rain was washing away the bright colors of the deserted playground. A few days before the 22nd, Livi had barged into their room at 2:20 in the morning, scattering Abby’s thirty-two beanie babies she had enlisted to guard the door, and confscated their fashlights. “Do you want to end up like me?” she had asked, gripping the brittle rim of her glasses between thumb and forefnger. “Yes,” they had replied, snatching the fashlights back.

Only now he could not look back and see Livi’s lopsided grin anymore, hear her exasperated response, or feel Abby’s warmth as she glued herself to his side. Now Olivia was glaring at Ara, telling her not to call anymore unless it was an emergency. And when she dragged Elijah outside, she dropped his jacket onto his shoulders without any warning and it collapsed limply to the foor.

To Eli, books and movies were mostly diferent, but the same in one key way: when he was reading or watching one, he could turn of his mind and just soak things in, becoming a setting for the action instead of a character. And so, sometimes, he would treat the world as if he were watching it through a screen, dreading the moment when he would be drawn back into the action.

Act I Scene 2: Te Father and Sister sit at the table arguing, while the Mother is of-screen cooking. One seat and its matching table space are conspicuously empty. Lighting is jarringly bright and cheerful, with “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” playing sofly in background.

Father: I got a call from your coach again. He says you’ve ditched practice four times in the last few weeks. Last time you just peeled of in the middle of an interval and lef. Sister: (Not looking up from her salad) Coach can be a busybody and call you all he wants, but this is between him and me, not you. Drop it. Father: It’s all of our business. Ever since…what happened on the 22nd you’ve been neglecting your studies and you aren’t speaking to Eli anymore.

Sister: (not looking) I’m treating him like an adult that can be on his own for ten seconds. Father: Well obviously he can’t, Olivia. Mother: (walks in holding roasted chicken) Come on you two, let’s end this for now and just have a normal, nice dinner, ok? (Hesitates, looking at the empty space on the table, and then crams the pan in-between the other plates instead) Father: Yes, yes, that’s right, dear. Eli, how was your day? Son? Son, are you—

“—ignoring me?” Dad snapped. Eli sighed. Te world had been turned back on, and he had to think about how furious Dad was that Eli was still going back to the library, and that the unfortunate boy that Olivia wasn’t speaking to was, in fact, himself. But it was time to get back into character.

“My day went just great, Dad. I aced my two tests and I assisted two goals during lunch break. And I made friends with a girl in class, Jasmine. Sorry, I was a bit distracted.” Eli spoke mechanically, his body language rigidly casual, waiting for Dad’s response.

“Tat’s my boy,” Dad said, leaning forward and smacking him jovially on the arm. “I guess you’re reaching that age, huh? Your mother and I may need to give you ‘the talk’ soon.” Mother smiled, murmuring something indistinct. Not that he was listening to her anyway.

It annoyed Eli that he wasn’t sure what that meant. “What talk?”

“Oh, you’ll understand when you get older.” What the heck did that mean? Eli didn’t know how there could be a single thought he hadn’t thought of yet. Wasn’t that his problem?

“Oh, I don’t know. Te way he looks at Ara seems pretty old-mannish to me.” He caught the specter of a smile haunting Olivia’s face.

“Ara?” Dad hesitated. “Tat’s that…retarded Indian girl, right?” Mother looked over disapprovingly at Eli.

“Dad!” Olivia hissed, furious.

“She’s not retarded. And I think she’s Arabic.” Eli kept his voice steady, recalling how

“Nah, she’s got to be Indian…” she had stood still as stone, not hearing the violent insults

“…we beat all the Arabs in Kuwait…” some teenagers were attacking her with,

“…so why would they come here aferwards?” but reading every word on their lips.

“Well, you won’t be going to that library anymore, heaven knows how

painful it must be for your sister to think about that place. And Olivia, you just stop this nonsense about skipping practice. I know things have been bad for you since Abby fell, but the best thing we can do is just make things normal again.”

Olivia imitated Dad’s smile. “Oh? And how will that happen, do you think? Go back in time maybe? Or just turn of gravity with your incredible optimism?” Eli shivered.

“None of that talk, Livi. Tings will become normal again soon, you’ll see,” Mother echoed faintly. “Why don’t you take Eli and read to him like you used to? Cheer each other up?”

“I never used to read to him. Besides, he’s not a little kid anymore. He can read to himself.” She rose, ladling extra food onto her plate. She swallowed everything in front of her

“Young lady you sit down right now…” and never gained an ounce of weight, which had made Abby jealous

“…Listen to your father dear…” until Livi told her solemnly about how boys rejected her

“…Now, Elijah…” because she was too tall and skinny for their tastes.

“…it’s too late for today, but tomorrow come straight home and take your and Abigail’s things downstairs to your new bedroom, all right? Remember, no going to the libra—”

“Don’t call her Abigail,” Eli and Livi interrupted him in unison, without thinking. Tey stared at one another, until Mother and Dad laughed a bit too loudly at this little fash of nostalgia. Olivia turned, plate in hand, and dashed out of the room. Elijah watched her until she disappeared from sight. Te light was of in the hall, but he imagined she was standing right there just at the edge of vision, waiting for him to run afer her and ask her to read to him, except he wouldn’t, because he knew she didn’t want him to, and besides, she wasn’t actually standing there anyway.

HANDICAPPED

Eli stared transfxed at the word, his facial expression somewhere between exasperation and hilarity. Mr. Z had made the word large enough to take up the entire chalkboard.

“Ok class, I know you all probably already know these things, but today I just want to quickly go over a couple things with you about the, um, unfortunate people who are handicapped and how we should treat them.

Now, thee firrsstt ttthhhiiinnnggg wwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeee sssssssshhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuulllllllldddddddd doooooooooooo—”

Sigh. Normally Eli was able to last a lot longer than this. Tat is, until he got so incredibly bored that Mr. Z’s voice slowed to a soothing crawl, his voice losing the recognition of words and entering his mind only in its change in pitch, a melody locked into the tempo of the classroom clock, tick-toock-tiiick-toooock-tiiiiick-tooooock. He keyed in on Abby’s name a couple of times, and his own, but otherwise he didn’t hear anything, and was glad of it.

Ignoring his classmates, who kept glancing over at him to see how he was reacting to Mr. Z’s spiel, he whipped out some construction paper and started sketching the class’s pet iguana Kermit. Initially, Mr. Z had constantly confscated his drawings and writings, annoyed that this brat wasn’t even pretending to pay attention. When he continued to receive top grades in everything, however, the two of them had reached an unspoken truce: as long as he kept not needing Mr. Z for anything, Mr. Z would do his utmost to pretend Eli did not exist.

And so Eli kept sketching Kermit, and then Abby strapped on top of it dressed in cowgirl attire. Her legs, spanning about halfway down the lizard’s fank, dangle lifelessly as the pair gallops toward a clif edge, pursued by a stampede of cattle. Surveying his work, Eli frowned and tried to erase the clif, since his parents had started stealing his sketchbook and analyzing it too, but his eraser sucked and the lead smudged around the still-visible line.

Elijah was not half of a person with Abby gone.

Tey never spoke in unison, except for the one time when they covered their faces and shirts in Hawaiian punch and Halloween makeup and, when Livi walked into the hallway, chanted, “Come play with us, come play with us, Livi!” She screamed so loud Mr. Byrnes called the cops.

Te only hobbies he had in common with her were drawing and horror movies. He thought she was plain and loud; she thought he was adorably juvenile. He was not more mature than her even though he was born two minutes earlier.

No one ever got the two of them mixed up, even when Abby had the barber give her an identical haircut. When he tried sitting in her class, they called him a fag for wearing girl’s clothes. Abby refused to tell him what his classmates had called her.

Tey did not have the same friends except for the lame neighborhood ones their parents forced on them. Tey were not friends either. Tey were brother and sister.

He did not need to surpass her or separate himself from her. Tey were separate to begin with. He had never been able to tell what she was was thinking without asking, no matter how hard he tried. In all these years, he hadn’t been able to guess what number between 1 and 10 she was thinking of, though he suspected by her evil grin that she just kept changing the number.

He did not miss sleeping above her, when a single jerk of her head or sof mumbling in her sleep would jolt him awake instantly for another hour of useless, jumbled, unending thought.

But he missed her. A lot. He missed holding her hand when they thought they were a safe distance from school; he missed her tone-deaf singing of “My Heart Will Go On” in the shower; he missed boosting her up to the ledge by Livi’s window to whisper lines from the Exorcist.

He missed her the same way his Uncle Hank had missed his leg afer Vietnam. He never complained once. He seemed happy enough. But inevitably he would feel that tingle of the routine, try to walk to the fridge for something, and collapse to the ground—again and again.

At least with Abby, this would never be a problem.

As he sat there, Mother walked in and reminded him how his father wouldn’t be happy that he was sitting there lazing about, so he put Abby out of his mind, grabbed the next box of dolls and fake weapons, and marched downstairs. Sliding silently past the two workers, who had seemingly fnished installing the ramp to the front door and were now inside helping themselves to Mother’s blueberry mufns, he walked into Dad’s old study and set the box down, frowning: the room was much larger than before but it didn’t have a closet. So he gently kicked Abby’s basketball out of the way and set the box down in the corner. Te ball rolled away along the hardwood foor, bumping to a halt against the freshly laundered sheets on Abby’s mattress.

He picked up the ball. He had brought it with him to the hospital, but Abby had ordered him to bring it back. “Do you really think I’ll be playing basketball anymore?”

“But you were always complaining how everyone beats you even though you’re a better shot because they’re taller. If you join the new league everyone will be the same height as you so you’ll kick their butts.”

She laughed at this. “Are you saying I’m lucky?”

“Well, there are other good things too. Like, you can cut to the front of

the line at Six Flags, and we’ll always get to park at the front of the parking lot, and remember how Livi told you that guys think shorter girls are cuter, and I’m being a total jerk right now aren’t I? I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m glad there’s one person who doesn’t care so much about trying to make things normal again, or…Eli, there’s something wrong with Sis. Why is she acting like that? Is she still angry with me?”

“I’m not sure, but don’t worry about it, ok? I’ll make her go back to normal again by the time you get back. Don’t worry.”

He had lied. He knew exactly what was wrong with Olivia, but it looked like she just wasn’t going to let him help her. She had reached a place where he could not reach her anymore.

Afer he was fnished moving their things and had eaten dinner, Eli snuck outside into the twilight hours and headed for the library, hardly caring if his parents noticed. On the way, he once again fought the lizards with Livi and saved Abby from the brink before she fell. Again, he triumphantly announced, “We saved her Livi. Abby is safe.” And again, he had ended the dream there, because he could not imagine Olivia’s expression and he was beginning to know more and more that there wasn’t a point to it. He felt like he had reached the point in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where he had just run of of a clif onto thin air, and that the only reason he hadn’t fallen yet was because he was refusing to look down.

Very slowly, Eli pushed the library door open and peeked inside. Somehow, Ara was standing right in front of the door waiting for him, hands on hips, her face cartoonishly annoyed.

“Taps forefngers and thumbs together with puckered lips and furrowed brow?”

“Why do you keep asking me that? You know this is a library, right? I’m here for a book,” he motioned, smirking. She rubbed her nose vigorously as she turned back toward the front desk. “You’re not going to call Livi again, are you?” he asked.

She shook her head, beckoning him to join her behind the counter. When he got there she pulled out a 100-page notebook, and fipped about halfway through, the previous pages flled with writing in English and what he guessed was Persian. She picked up a pen and wrote, “You need to stop worrying your sister like this.”

“Why are you writing now? Is my signing that bad?”

“You learned sign language just to speak to me. Te least I can do for you is to speak to you in your own language for once. Just for this last time.

But you should go home.”

“How do you do it Ara? How do you tell Olivia that I’m here?”

She smiled. “I don’t say a word Eli, I just call her, she sees my number and she comes running every time. I know you’re mad at her but even though I like seeing you here you shouldn’t come here anymore.”

“I’m not angry at her.”

“Ten you need to make up with her, because I’m not going to be here to help you anymore starting tomorrow. I don’t work here anymore. I was just collecting my things.”

“Why do you need a new job? Are you leaving? Why weren’t you going to tell me?”

“I could collect my foster care and disability checks until I turned 18, so I could work here and not worry about money, but now that I’m an adult I have to worry about rent and marketable skills to get a job.”

“So where are you going to work now?”

She clenched the pen as though she was getting ready to stab downward, and then wrote, “I’m not staying here, Eli. I’m going home, to my own country.” He felt his insides breaking into two pieces, crumbling, trembling at the foundations, but he kept smiling, faking as always. But unlike everyone else Ara wasn’t fooled, and drove on ruthlessly. “I wish I had never come here, Eli. I had hope. I ran here because there was supposed to be a home for everyone here. But there wasn’t one for me.” He couldn’t hold himself up any longer and his smile fell, frst one side and then the other.

He tried to hide the trembling desperation in his hands. “I’m here for you. I learned sign language for you. I can be y—”

She shook her head before he could fnish. “You’re a person, Eli, not a home. And you’re going to fgure out sooner or later that everybody leaves. Tey support you and they resent you for your dependency, because they don’t know, like you and I do, that we want to be independent a hell of a lot more than they want us to be. We don’t want help; we need it. So all I can do now is hope that my old home is still waiting for me. ”

“Ten why do you keep telling me to hang on to Livi?”

“Because she is too important to you to lose over something as stupid as a simple misunderstanding. Hold on to her for as long as you can, and then be ready to lose her without any warning. You can’t keep relying on thinking, Eli. People leave faster than you can think of a reason for them to stay.”

Eli noticed that the library clock was showing 10:01 p.m. So did Ara. She smiled, tapping her wrist with her fnger. She grabbed his face sofly

with both hands and mouthed, “Goodbye Elijah.” Ten she reached onto the desk and thrust a few books into his hands, their barcodes removed, roughly turned him around, marched him outside, closed and locked the door, ficked of the lights, and sat back down in her chair before he had fnished thinking Please don’t go.

He knew then that he would remember this image of Ara, bleak and faceless in the dark, just out of his reach, long afer all of their happier moments together had plunged into the void.

Elijah had hoped to blend in on campus until he found Olivia, but he was as shorter than some 4th graders at Sequoia, let alone high schoolers, and by the time he reached the track feld he had a small following of giggling freshman girls asking him where he was going. He noticed her immediately, half a head taller than any of the other female sprinters, leaping at the crack of the starting gun and running away from Eli. She fnished a close second.

She didn’t wear glasses while she ran, so he had to walk right up to her to get her attention. She jumped. “Eli…I thought I told you that I would pick you up at your school.”

“I wanted to see you run,” he replied. She looked annoyed but then her coach came up asking if this was the mystery Casanova that she had been ditching practice for, and she grabbed his hand and dragged him away, cheeks reddening even further at her teammates’ jovial laughter.

When they reached Olivia’s old Camry, she reached into the glove compartment and handed him some Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, since he ofen got carsick while reading. When she started the ignition, she immediately turned of the radio, knowing that a catchy chorus of a song Eli hated would drive him crazy for hours. She even drove the speed limit for once.

Of course, she didn’t say a single word while all this was happening. But Eli fnally had the advantage, since the hospital was a twenty-minute drive and Olivia had nowhere to run to. And for once his stupidly smart brain was doing him good, since he had rehearsed this scenario about a hundred times. He knew he had to get her mad.

“You know it’s my fault that Abby fell of the balcony in the library, right?” Hooonk. Te SUV to their lef swerved away as Olivia jerked into its lane, then corrected herself. He continued before she could protest, “I’m older than Abby and I should have known better than to let her play near the edge. She was my responsibility and I let her down. I’m sorry.”

“You—you just quoted me, you little—” Olivia looked as if keeping

her eyes on the road and her clenched fsts on the wheel was causing her intense pain.

“Well, aren’t I right? Mother told me that I’m the smarter one and that I need to look—”

“Tat woman would say anything to get out of being an actual mother. Abby was my responsibility, not yours. Stop distracting me, you’re going to get us killed.”

Eli maintained his calm, cheerful demeanor. “Would you like to hear another quote? Or are you going to leave to visit Abby again? Oh, wait a minute…” He didn’t need to see her face to know he had her exactly where he wanted her. He continued, sofly, “Please tell Livi that it was my fault, not hers. She’s the one that told me to grab that lizard book and come straight back down. Ask her to please not be mad at me.”

Olivia silently moved over to the shoulder, put her car in park and turned on her hazard lights. She turned to face him, looking stunned. “She…said that? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Because you wouldn’t let me,” Eli said, real emotion seeping through for the frst time, “and she was afraid you hated her for being an idiot and getting you in trouble. I kept getting Ara to call you over but…She doesn’t blame you and neither do I, but I will blame you if you keep making Abby feel bad about it. Don’t you think she’s sufered—”

“ALL RIGHT…all right, already. I get it.”

“You shouldn’t drive when you’re crying.”

“Shut up, you little brat, I’m parked. And I’m not crying,” Livi muttered, wiping away nothing from her eyes. “Now it’s my turn to give you advice: stop thinking so much. What kind of 6th grader are you? You won’t need me as an older sister much longer if you keep this up.”

He had, of course, noticed the college application forms strewn beside him on the back seat. “Don’t be like that. You know you’ll never get tired of bossing the two of us around.”

“Maybe not,” she laughed. “But you’ve shown me that I can’t treat you like immature little kids anymore. You’ve done great on your own without me. You’ve grown up.”

He knew Livi was wrong. He knew that he couldn’t change himself so easily, and that people and places would pass in and out of his life as a rock is warmed and abandoned by the sun day afer day. He knew that the structures of his life were collapsing, leaving an empty space where nothing could ever be rebuilt. He knew that none of them could ever go back to how things were, because “how things were” never really existed in the frst place.