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if you release the episode because I don’t text back, I will personally make sure you end up back at that camp

And I thought Alyssa was nervous.

Instead of dealing with whatever their response will inevitably be, or answering Daniel at all, I put my phone on silent and join the Hanover family in the kitchen.

Alyssa used to spend a lot of time talking about the downsizing her family went through after her dad was coerced into resigning and her mom skipped out—but since this is the kind of town house they downsized to, I always rolled my eyes at her. It’s all towering ceilings and exposed brick, with a second-floor balcony and state-of-the-art kitchen. Alyssa is deboning a rotisserie chicken while pasta boils on the stove, and Leah sits at the breakfast counter, frowning at her Pokémon book.

“It’s wrong,” Leah declares.

“What?” Alyssa says over the whirring of the stove fan. “It’s an official sticker book. How is it wrong?”

Leah pushes it my way as I come up to the breakfast counter. She’s got her usual baggy pajamas and emotional-support plushie, but the Band-Aids on her nose and hands are new. Must be what Alyssa was referring to when she mentioned school’s been rough. I’d recognize self-injurious behaviors, that childhood staple of mine, anywhere.

“See?” Leah says, visibly distressed. “It’s wrong.”

I inspect the sticker book. Looks like the point of it is to take stickers from the back and place them onto silhouettes in premade scenes. She’s worked her way through the first couple pages without a problem. Seems easy enough.

Leah impatiently taps one of the empty spots. “That one.”

“Okay,” I say as I take it from her, “hold up, give me a second.” Then: “Well, fuck. It’s wrong.” Alyssa glares at me over her shoulder. “What? The sticker’s too big for its spot. They should be doing quality control for this shit.”

“Please stop swearing,” Alyssa says. “We’re already getting notes home from her teachers. And, I don’t know, put the sticker there anyway?”

Leah and I both look at her in barely concealed disappointment.

“Or not,” Alyssa says.

The timer on Alyssa’s phone goes off, and she carries the pot of pasta over to the sink to drain. I suggest that Leah find every incorrect sticker in the book and document them in an email to the publisher, because there’s nothing better than complaining to a big company. Leah gets to it as Alyssa puts dinner together and shoves it in the oven. It feels … borderline familial.

The three of us were close to being siblings. We spent so much time in this house together, unpacked boxes from the move stacked in the living room months after the trial ended, watching movies while the grown-ups “talked” upstairs. Mom drank Warren Hanover’s wine and cried on his shoulder, and I think she loved him as much as she’s capable of loving anyone. He made her feel safe or whatever. So I learned to sidestep Warren’s technophobe bullshit—sneaking phones under blankets, smuggling Nancy Drew computer games to play while no one was watching—and how to work around Leah’s caretakers. It was a life that could’ve been mistaken for normalcy, almost.

Mom’s little rebound didn’t work out, obviously. And I know, I know Alyssa and I hooked up at that party. I know we fumbled around in the dark in someone else’s bed. But we should’ve been brother and sister, because there’s no other relationship that encompasses this. This combination of history, proximity, obligation, frustration. The way I despise her pity but seethe when she walks away from me.

And also, how dare she get to transition when I can’t. How dare she get to avoid the blood when I never had a chance.

Sometimes I resent her so much it makes me sick.

Once dinner’s ready, Leah insists on pacing the kitchen as she eats, so we let her wander as we perch on stools around the breakfast counter. I pick through my food for a minute, overturning noodles and inspecting globs of sauce, before Alyssa sighs.

“I didn’t use onions,” she says. “You literally watched me make it.”

I put a full bite in my mouth. Considering the fact that Alyssa cooks with salt, and butter, and real ingredients that have fat and calories, it’s easily the best thing I’ve eaten all week. Still, because I’m a petulant child, I raise an eyebrow: Happy?

She doesn’t take the bait. “Anyway, what’s your bio project on?”

Trying to catch me on the lie from yesterday, then. I shrug. “Photosynthesis. Some sort of experiment where we’re bullying plants, messing with their sun intake or something.”

“Or something.”

“I didn’t read the instructions.”

Alyssa seems to take this as a viable answer, though not a satisfactory one. We finish most of our plates in a weird quiet, the only sounds Leah’s socked footsteps and the scrape of cutlery on dishware.

I break the silence with “Question.”

“Answer,” Alyssa says, “depending.”

“Do you have the key to your dad’s office?”