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My hands aren’t really clean until I’ve washed them twelve times, one for each year of my life. I soap-rinse-one-soap-rinse-two-soap-rinse-three-soap-rinse-four-soap-rinse-five-soap-rinse-six, open my palms to scalding water, and repeat. I do it quick, so no one notices, and I’m usually done in about the same time it takes Joel and Jake to spray water at each other and throw towels on the floor, which is what they call washing up.

This time I gotta go faster because Gram’s already yelling from the driveway, “Charlie, get your bee-hind out here! Your father’s waiting!”

But he’s not really waiting. Dad never knows if we’re in his hospital room or not.

Gram does something my sister, Davis, calls sideways swearing. Gram says words like bee-hind, flipping, heck, and gosh-dang. Davis, who’s fifteen and a half, says, “Gram, just curse normally like the rest of the world.” Then Gram says, “Davis, I ever hear that kind of talk outta your sassy teenage mouth, I’ll swat your dang bee-hind so hard you’ll think twice about talkin’ in general.”

I used to be scared of Gram. Davis says that’s just Gram’s way, tough love, but I don’t get how tough equals love. Dad’s love wasn’t tough. He never lost his temper, or freaked out with worrying, or tried so hard to control everything we did. Or sideways swore. Still, I have to admit I’m no expert on love. Or hate. Or really anything that has to do with feelings. I rely on what Davis tells me—she’s the expert on that kind of stuff.

The doctors are supposed to have some news for us today about Dad’s condition. So when Gram crams us all into her little MINI Cooper to go visit the hospital, the sideways swearing really cranks up.

“Finally, here’s our Lysol Louie,” says Gram when I open the back door and wait for Joel and Jake to scoot over.

“My name isn’t Lysol Louie; it’s Charlie,” I say.

Joel and Jake say, “You think we don’t know your name, Droid?”

“My name isn’t Droid; it’s Charlie.” I say it quietly and hope they’ll drop it. My twin brothers are up to something. I’m not the best at reading people in general, but I know evil when I see it in those identical pairs of eyes.

“GET IN, CHARLIE! DAD’S WAITING!” yells Davis from the front passenger seat. Meanwhile, the twins snicker, waiting for me to sit down in my spot.

“Dad’s not really waiting,” I say, taking a Kleenex out of my trusty supply pack and brushing away the dead flies and clumps of dryer lint my brothers have strewn over my seat. I used to get upset at their little booby traps of contamination. But Davis told me that’s exactly what they want. She told me not to react, not to give them the satisfaction. So I just shoot the twins a dead-fish-eye look and sit down carefully, making sure no part of me touches any part of Joel.

“Dad’s not really waiting, because he doesn’t know whether we’re there or not,” I explain.

Davis and Gram don’t like hearing this. But if something’s a fact, it’s a fact, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say it out loud. Dad’s got a brain injury, and he stares straight ahead like he’s looking at something really far away. He doesn’t say much, or seem to see us. Gram says that brain injuries like Dad’s are unpredictable things, and we don’t know anything for sure. She says we have to treat him normally, tell him about our day, even if he just sits there most of the time.

She says, “Charlie, that’s how we got you to start talking when you were little. You were just like your dad, in a way, all sealed off in your own little world. But we broke through to you, finally, didn’t we? We talked your gosh-dang ears off. We talked and talked, and we made you do stuff, go to therapy. We wouldn’t let you off the hook. So now we won’t let your dad off the hook either.”

Off the hook is a weird expression. I imagine being a really little kid, just wanting to be left alone. And there’s a big fishhook holding me up by the back of my collar while I dangle, and a whole crowd of people—my family, therapists, doctors—watches me squirm. Is that how Dad feels in the hospital? Inside, where we can’t tell what’s going on, is he squirming, too?

Dad got hurt in Afghanistan. He’s not in the military, though. He’s an English teacher and a part-time journalist. He was over there to do a profile on some soldiers, to write about what their life was like. But a bomb went off while he was riding around in a jeep. The doctors said Dad was really lucky, because he got thrown into the air away from the explosion.

Gram covered her eyes and said “Holy Jesus!” when the doctors first told us that. But I asked them more questions. I needed to picture what that moment was like, with my dad flying through the air like a bird. I tried to draw it once—how high the flames could have reached, which direction Dad flew (up high, and then straight ahead into the road, they think). I drew him flying. I wish I could have drawn him a better place to land.

Dad sustained a head injury. That’s the word they used, sustained. It means you’ve had to withstand something. But it also means something is stretched out, like a note of music, just played and held constant for a long period of time. That’s what it’s like now, with Dad in the hospital. Like this strange invisible hum is in the air around us, and Gram and the twins and Davis and I just have to keep listening to it, and none of us know how long it will go on.