I TELL MYSELF TO be brave, be bold, be honest, one more time, as I press my finger against the glowing doorbell next to her front door. And after a pause I hear this muffled chiming from inside—ding-ding-dong.
Caroline’s car pulls out of the driveway slowly.
I wait. But no one’s coming. I ring the bell again. I hear footsteps. A girl answers the door. Not Dani. But I recognize her from the pictures in Dani’s room. Her sister. She looks different in person—shorter than Dani, more like their mother’s height. And her hair is long and flowing.
She greets me with a “Hey, you’re not our Chinese food.”
“Oh, no,” I say with a laugh. “I guess I’m not. Is—is Dani here? I’m Brooke.”
She opens the screen door to let me in. “Yeah. I know who you are. I’m Tori.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I offer.
“Same here, come in. Dani, you have a visitor,” she calls out over her shoulder as I step inside.
“So, I guess your semester’s over?” I ask as we stand there.
“Yeah, I got in yesterday, actually. We’re catching up on sister time. Movies. Takeout. You know.”
I smile, hoping that one day it can be like that between me and Callie again.
“Hey . . . ,” Dani says slowly, stopping abruptly as she enters the room, “what are you doing here?”
“I don’t want to interrupt you guys, I—I wanted to see if we could talk for a minute?”
Dani looks at Tori, who looks at me. “I don’t mind,” Tori tells us.
“Okay, come on.” Dani leads the way through the house and up the stairs like she had that first time, except she doesn’t speak a word until we reach her bedroom. “Fine. I’m listening,” she finally says, turning around and crossing her arms.
“I’m sorry,” I begin. “I’m so sorry about the way I acted, the way I treated you.”
She stares at me—clearly, that’s not going to be good enough.
“You were the first person to make me feel like I could be myself, that I could have a life that didn’t revolve around what everyone else needed me to be. And I don’t think I knew how to handle that.”
I stop, waiting to see if she has anything to say. But she doesn’t.
“I guess I wanted to keep you separate, outside of all the chaos. I didn’t want all the other stuff going on in my life to touch what we had. ’Cause it was so good. It was so good and I can’t believe I screwed it up, because all I wanted was to protect what we had.”
She sits down on the edge of her bed and stares somewhere around my knees. I don’t know if she’s hearing me. If I’m being clear.
“I was afraid,” I admit to her.
“Afraid of what?” she asks, finally meeting my eyes, and I see all the hurt that’s still there, the pain I caused.
I shake my head. “Of being honest, being happy. Afraid of letting you in. Afraid you wouldn’t love the real me, with all the drama and baggage.”
“Well, so what’s changed now?”
“Everything.” I hear a laugh behind my words. “Everything’s changed and . . . I would really love to have you back in my life, but really in my life this time.”
There’s this unbearable silence.
“Listen,” she begins, “we were about to do this whole sister movie-marathon, junk-food thing, so—”
“Oh. Okay, I’ll—I’ll go.”
“No, I was asking if you want to stay?”
“I wouldn’t be messing up your sister time?”
She shrugs. “I have her for the whole summer,” she tells me, a very small smile beginning to emerge. “But this doesn’t mean we can just pick up where we left off, you know.”
“I know,” I tell her. I don’t think we could even if we tried.
I get home from Dani’s that night feeling so full of something—gratitude, maybe? Hope? Or maybe a little bit of both. I open my bedroom window and climb out, making my way up to the roof. I take my phone out of my back pocket.
Looking out over our neighborhood, I realize that this is the last time I’ll ever be up here, the last time I’ll ever see things from this vantage point again. I try to memorize it all. The moon is full and low in the sky and looks so much bigger, so much closer than usual, more gold than silver tonight. And I think about how the moon’s gravity affects the tides of the oceans, pushing and pulling at the water, and I wonder if it has a similar effect on people, too.
I dial his number. It rings and rings—I expected nothing different.
An automated message answers, telling me, in yet one more way, that my brother “is not available. Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Aaron, it’s me. I promise I’m not calling to yell at you. I wanted to say that I’m thinking of you. And also . . .” I pause—I want to ask him if he’s looking up at the sky like I am right now, but I don’t. “You were right. I have to leave. And I am. I’m moving in with Caroline. Just wanted you to know. I hope you’re okay. I hope you’re doing better now.” I can feel my voice trembling, so I let the rest of the words tumble out quick and messy: “Okay, Aaron. Call me when you can. Love you, bye.”