Kiana’s bedroom was now mine. We switched. After her dad went to jail Kiana moved in with my mom and I moved over to Go-boy’s place. Mom and Kiana didn’t want Go living alone. They were worried about him—about why he’d disappeared for so long and why he wouldn’t tell anyone where he’d been—and Go refused to live anywhere but his own house. So the end result was me moving over to his place. To keep an eye on him. At least, that was how Mom and Kiana saw it.
After I told the police what had happened to Sean, Go-boy’s dad didn’t protest. He said if that was what I’d seen, he believed me. He knew he’d blacked out that morning. He didn’t remember anything and was devastated to learn he’d hurt Sean. He told me I’d done right by telling the truth—even though Kiana was now furious with me—and he went to jail just a few days before Go came back to town.
Her bedroom was green. Green walls. Green curtains. Green bits of fabric covering her dresser and bedside table. All the greens were different—from olive to pine—and in a few places she had something orange that stood out—a lampshade, a woven rug. I knew I wouldn’t touch or rearrange anything. I would set my duffel bag in the corner. Pull clothes out when I needed them. Maybe clear a space on an end table for my wallet. It would still be her bedroom.
There was a mirror on top of the dresser, framed by pictures of Kiana and her girlfriends, arranged between magazine cutouts of the famous skyscrapers she hoped to someday visit. I saw myself there, in the mirror, with Kiana looking back at me and Kiana’s room all around me. And every morning, for the rest of the year and into the next, this would be the first thing I’d see.
“Well, what do you think?” Go said, standing in the doorframe behind me. “Bring out your feminine side?”
I thought it was better than sleeping in his dad’s room.
Kiana was now doing the same thing at Mom’s place—standing in my room, looking around at her new digs. But her first reaction wasn’t to set her bag in the corner and rearrange an end table so she could have space for a book or two. Her first reaction was to get a box and clear out my dresser. She packed my magazines, old CDs and tapes, notebooks, anything I’d left lying around, and stashed them in a closet. She ripped posters off the walls. She hauled a pile of my shoes to the porch. She changed the blankets. And then, a day or two later, as if that shit wasn’t good enough, she pulled everything else from the room and repainted the walls a light color. A green-beige.
Kiana now had two bedrooms.
In her original bedroom, I sat on the mattress. Go had left me alone. He had just started a new project—putting together a proposal he said would change the world. He was working in the living room. The whole house had now become a studio for his endless projects.
The one thing I didn’t leave in my old room was a picture frame that had two photos of Wicho and me. Mom had given it to me for a birthday present five years earlier, right after Wicho had gone to prison. The first was a photo of us bathing together as little kids. Wicho must’ve been six and he was laughing, trying to stay out of the water by putting his feet and hands on the edge of the tub, elevating his body. I was in the water, laughing because Wicho was laughing. The other picture had been taken a month before Wicho had gone to jail, at my elementary school graduation. The school I was attending at the time made a big deal out of our leaving for middle school. They dressed us up in gowns and put us through a ceremony. In the photo Wicho was in a nice button-up shirt and tie. It was a typical grad photo. Big brother with his arm around little brother. Sunny day. Grassy field. Scatters of people behind. But this photo was weird because Wicho and I weren’t looking at the camera. He was glancing past, as if he were watching a movie he’d seen before and was anticipating what was next. I had turned my eyes without moving my head, like I was trying to look at him.
I put the picture frame on Kiana’s dresser. So when I looked in the mirror and saw only her and her images and her room all around, I could look down and at least see Wicho.
I thought about my old room. I remembered sitting on the bed while Kiana sat on the floor, just a couple months before all of this. It was the day after Sean was knocked into a coma. Go was missing. Kiana was getting ready to ask me to lie about what her dad had done. She was twisting a loose string in the carpet. I remember feeling a jolt, like a small electrical wave, when she told me she had heard everything that had happened that morning. She knew her dad had been drinking. She was lying in bed, wide awake, nervous, almost panicking, not quite sure what to do. She heard Go and me talking in his bedroom. She heard her dad scream. I remember feeling connected to Kiana when she told me this—she could be vulnerable. And by telling me she let me into her life just a little more. It was the place where I wanted to be, and the place where I needed not to be. I remember feeling good about the talk, glad that Kiana and me could talk. And yet, I was afraid. Kiana was a dangerous person. Kiana wasn’t a passive observer. Kiana was the type of girl who could change everything.
I remember sitting on my bed in my old room, watching Kiana twist the loose string with her index finger, with the tension of all the things that had happened and the tension of things yet to come, and I remember feeling ready to try. I was ready to let Kiana be Kiana. I was ready to let myself be me.