My sister’s red coupe sits at the curb but as I let myself inside, the house is dark and still. My bag lands with a thunk at the door and something rolls out onto the floor but I’m already on my way to the kitchen, pulling the first bottle of beer I can find out of the fridge.
I’ll clean up the mess of this day later.
The cap pops as I twist it off, lean against the counter in the dark room, and tip the bottle back. It’s not so much the alcohol that calms me but the taste, the fizziness on my tongue, that takes me back to summer days, literal years ago, drinking a beer with my sister and Jeremy.
I set the bottle on the counter and let my head fall back. The house is quiet and still. I try to mimic that stillness. I crave it. But my skin crawls with the need to move. I could call Jer right now and ask him to get a beer. We haven’t spoken since Mom’s funeral—and then it wasn’t about much more than condolences—but best friends should be able to pick up right where they left off.
Every excuse I can think of rolls through my head: he’s busy; I should make dinner for Amy instead; the toilets need cleaning. My phone is a lead weight in my pocket that I don’t reach for.
The last time Jeremy and I really talked he was applying to law school. He was thinking about proposing to Angie. He was even MVP of his rec baseball team, for god’s sake. I can’t call him up and tell him about my crappy day, my crappy boss, my crappy demotion.
A thump comes from overhead, pulling my eyes up. The thump comes again. “Amy?” I call.
Something hits the floor above my head, rattling around on the hardwood. It sounds like a cell phone set to vibrate.
“Amy?” I bark. Still no answer. “Fuck.” I sigh, setting my bottle down. This isn’t the first time Amy has forgotten her phone at home.
I climb the stairs slowly, checking my room at the top, then the bathroom just in case. But the rattling that was definitely coming from Amy’s room has stopped and now there are no sounds from behind her door. I pause. My gaze falls on the room at the end of the hall.
The door is closed but I don’t need to open it to see clearly the hospital bed in the center of the room and the support rails on the bathroom walls. Her closet, with her out-of-fashion work clothes pushed to the back, her drawers stacked with pajamas. She’s been gone three months but it feels like she’s been gone forever and like she just left us, all at once. We haven’t done anything with her room yet but the idea of it, empty and lifeless—like her—pulls a rope tight around my lungs.
I spent two years caring for her and I wouldn’t change my decision to stay home for anything. But I thought that this internship was going to be a fresh start. A step toward figuring out me, my life, and what I want to do with it. Now it feels like a failure. I spent two years being my mom’s nurse. The years before that, I was “Amy’s brother,” or “loser.”
This was my chance to figure out who I want to be.
Now, I’m just Corrine Blunt’s assistant.
A scream, a strangled, tortured sound, comes from behind Amy’s door, ripping me from my sullen mood.
“Amy?!” I yell, turning the knob and shoving my shoulder into the door.
“Get out, Wesley!” My sister screeches but I can’t move, my body locked in abject horror.
Hovering, her lily-white ass in the air, completely naked, in between the brown legs of another girl—who is also completely naked oh god—is my sister. I slam my eyes shut, scrub my fists into the sockets. Maybe if I do it hard enough I’ll wipe my eyes clean.
But no, there are some things I can’t unsee.
“Ahhhhhh!” I yell, because my nervous system is having a hard time dealing with how exactly to react to seeing my grown sister’s bare ass. “Why? WHY?”
“What the fuck, Wes!” she shrieks.
I think a pillow hits me in the face but I don’t open my eyes to check. This tableau of my sister’s sex life will be burned into my corneas forever.
“I need an eye transplant,” I moan, turning in the doorway. Pain slams into my cheek as I stumble into something—the doorframe—in my blind hurry to get out of there and it’s kind of a balm. For three seconds I get to worry about whether my cheekbone is broken instead of my sister’s...no.
I want to go back to a time when I never considered whether my sister might have privates.
“Oh my fuck, I hate living with you!” Amy screeches from behind the now-closed door.
“Ditto,” I yell, taking the stairs two at a time. I can’t get back to my beer fast enough, placing the still-cold bottle to the throbbing spot on my cheek.
Amy comes downstairs a few minutes later. She shoots past the kitchen with her friend in tow. The only glimpse I get of her friend—other than the one she probably never wanted me to see—is a pile of brown and golden dreads twisted up on her head.
I try to close my ears to their whispers at the front door but still hear my sister call her Katie, and the distinct sound of two people kissing. A few moments later, Amy walks into the kitchen with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears.
“Don’t say anything! We are never speaking about this. Ever,” she yells.
That is abso-fucking-lutely fine with me.
She stumbles toward me with her hands out and her eyes still closed. The goofy smile on her face pulls an identical one from mine, and I push a beer bottle into her hand when she gets close enough. Opening her eyes, she taps the neck of her bottle to mine. Settling back against the counter beside me, she asks, “So, how was your first day?”
All the anger and frustration I felt earlier today somehow pales in comparison to the sheer discomfort I felt at walking in on my sister and her...girlfriend? I open my mouth, half turning, to ask her if she’s dating someone before deciding against it. Amy has banned commitment of any kind until her restaurant is up and running.
“Not as bad as what happened up there, actually,” I say, taking another sip. The bottle is still cold but the beer doesn’t have the same effect it had before.
Amy makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “I told you we’re never speaking about that again.”
“I know.” I sigh and set down the three-quarters-full bottle. “How’s the restaurant coming?”
Amy shrugs. “We interviewed servers today. Some were better than others.” A slow smirk spreads across her face.
“Amy,” I say slowly. “You can’t sleep with your employees.”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, good thing she’s not my employee yet.”
“I...that... Amy...”
“Oh, relax, you priss. We know each other. It’s fine.”
We settle back against the counter, both sipping our beers in awkward silence. The house feels cavernous with just the two of us here. There only used to be one other person but she filled the space with so much more.
“So.” Amy sets her beer down. “We need to talk.”
“Huh?”
Usually when women say that to me they aren’t my sister, so I have the good fortune of being both anxious and confused while Amy turns to face me.
“About the house, Wes. Don’t you think it’s time we thought about...”
“About what?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. Moving on.”
A shudder rolls down my spine. This beer is no longer helping at all.
“Can we not...not today,” I say quickly, when Amy opens her mouth to protest. I can’t discuss moving out of our childhood home, out of Mom’s house, after a day like today. I glance at her from the corner of my eye. Amy spent so much of her time conspicuously Not Here over the last two years. How can she be ready to move so soon? “I need to swing a bat.” The popping sound of the pitching machine might be the only thing that can calm the resentment churning in my gut. “Do you want to come to the cages with me?”
We hit balls until we’re sweaty and the August sky is dark behind the cage’s spotlights. Until my shoulders no longer creep up to my ears, my chest is lighter, my back isn’t so sore with tension as it was when I left the office. Amy bumps her shoulder to mine as we walk back to her car in the empty parking lot, the only sound the crack of bats on balls and the drone from traffic on the highway. I shift my gym bag, filled with ripped ball gloves and old socks, to my other shoulder so Amy won’t have to smell the perma-stink that wafts from it.
“Wanna talk about it?” she asks.
The engine that normally runs my anxiety operates at a low hum rather than careening out of control. Something that only holding a baseball bat can do for me. I’m calm enough now that even though I still don’t want to share my miserable first day, I know Amy will help me figure out what to do next.
Amy was the one to come up with the idea to stuff my middle-school bullies’ lockers with raw meat on the Friday before a long weekend—I went vegetarian for a year after that. When I forgot I had an essay due on the sea as a character in Moby Dick the day after a baseball tournament, my sister wrote it for me. She got a B+. My dad likes to say that the only reason Amy was born was to be my human vacuum. “Always cleaning up Wes’s messes!” he’ll boom, laughing at his own joke, while no one else does.
Because he’s a dick.
Amy scoots onto the hood of the car, dropping her keys in my hand and pulling a joint out of her pocket like the magical cannabis fairy she is. I sit beside her, pull my Sox cap low, and tell her everything. How Ms. Blunt overheard my disappointment about not working with Richard. What Mark said, what my boss heard, and how she thinks I was in on it. How my internship is not going to be what I’d hoped it would be.
“Did you report him?” she asks after a long moment.
I blink down at my Nikes for too many heartbeats. “It...it honestly hadn’t occurred to me until just now.”
I scratch the toe of my shoe into the dark pavement as heat burns up the back of my neck. I had Richard’s ear for those few moments before I met Ms. Blunt and I never even mentioned it.
“I’m such an idiot. I’ll explain everything tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll tell her I’ll report it and explain exactly what happened.” I nod, resolute. Just having a plan makes me feel a little lighter, looser.
“Still. That sucks, bro. She sounds...” She winces on a deep inhale. “She sounds harsh.” Amy turns to me, wide-eyed. “I bet you she doesn’t even have tear ducts.”
“What? Amy, that’s...really weird? Besides, if anything this is my...wait.” I pluck the joint from her fingers. “What is in that weed? You’re too high to have a conversation right now.”
She waves me away, suddenly lucid despite the size of her pupils. “Talk to Richard. Maybe he can change your mentor partnership?” She takes the joint back and stubs it, picking the cherry out and tucking the remainder away in her wallet.
I don’t answer her until we’re in the car, on the road home. “No. I’m not gonna talk to Richard.”
“But I thought he loved you?” she says, her eyes closed, her head back against the headrest. “I bet he’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Amy is right. I think he would do it. But now that I’ve had some separation from it, the perspective that time, space, involuntarily seeing your sister’s bare ass, and hitting a baseball creates—the whole situation doesn’t feel as bad as it did earlier today.
“I think he would but...he seemed excited for Ms. Blunt and I to work together. And I am excited to work with her.” Plus, I want to make it up to her. Show her I’m not the guy she thinks I am. My hand taps a rhythm on the steering wheel as I drive us back home.
“I think I just need to stick it out. Digital marketing at Hill City is still wildly behind the times and that’s my specialty. She’s the only one really advocating for big change there. I need to show her how valuable I can be. It’ll blow over.”
My words sound stronger than the churning in my stomach makes me feel. But if there’s one thing my mother gave me, it’s a sense of optimism in the face of the impossible. I pull up to the curb and put the car in park. Amy still doesn’t answer.
“She’s probably forgotten about it already,” I say, forcing out a laugh that doesn’t sound convincing to even my ears. “It’s not like being an assistant is the worst job in the world or something. I just... I hoped that this would be the start of something, you know? Something new for me. Something where I get to control the narrative on who I am. Now it all feels a little out of control. If I can just get it back on track...”
When she’s still silent I look over. She’s fallen asleep.
Reaching over, I flick her nostril. She doesn’t wake up. But it helps.