Page 18 of 16 Forever

You saw so many doctors, got CAT scans, MRIs, psych evals, blood tests, along with tests that assessed hormone levels and adrenal levels and pituitary levels and all sorts of other levels I never even knew existed.

No one could figure out what the hell was going on.

I, meanwhile, was still fourteen, enduring the squall of eighth grade as I tried to figure myself out, which was made simultaneously easier and harder by the fact that you were taking up every bit of our parents’ attention.

Also hard was that you were incredibly stressed out. I understood this, and I felt bad for you, but I hated that your main way of coping with that stress was to play pranks on me, or make a joke at my expense, or, I don’t know, some variation on that. You were particularly obsessed with hiding my shoelaces and then pretending to be shocked that my sneakers didn’t have any. I did not enjoy it.

By the time December rolled back around, I was in high school with you, and our family had more or less adapted to the situation, and we were all relieved that we could bid this horrible year adieu and move on.

Only then you woke up on your birthday, and you were sixteen. Again.

Nightmare.

But what was there to do but keep moving forward? Keep looking for a solution.

Keep trying to be the best younger brother to you that I could be.

Again. And again. And again.

And again.

Maggie

I’m always a sucker for winter break, but this year more than ever. Seriously, it couldn’t get here soon enough.

Why, you ask? Well, it’s simple.

School is where Carter is. Home is where Carter is not.

And these ten days of Not School will give me more time to Get Over This Shit.

I’m doing better. I really truly am. I went a whole four and a half minutes without thinking about Carter during a particularly spirited conversation aboutThe Scarlet Letterin Ms. Karp’s AP English class.

Wow. I’m bragging about four and a half minutes. That sounded more pathetic than I meant it to. So maybe I’m still a mess. A new cliché this time: the girl who can’t stop thinking about the guy. Who she once loved but whose memory keeps getting erased every time he ages back a year.

I guess that’s not really a cliché.

In spite of my best efforts, I passed Carter in the halls at least five times over the last school week of the year. As opposed to that first day, when he seemed clueless, he seemed more bristly and angry. Then the last time I saw him he was more hopeless and defeated, and I really, really wanted to give him a hug. Just an anonymous drive-by. No need to tell him who I was or to be overly flirty or anything. Just give him the hug and go.

But I didn’t do it.

“Mind if I join you?” my sister, Vivian, asks from the top of the basement steps.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I say, pausing the TV. I’ve been sitting on the couch down here, watching the latest Netflix show that everyone is obsessing over, a drama about the high-stakes world of circus performers. Well, watching is probably an overstatement. More likeletting the images move in front of my eyeballs while my brain spins on completely unrelated topics.

But Vivian is home from school, and Vivian is coming downstairs holding that dish we love that has separate compartments for chipsandsalsa, and the compartments arefull, and honestly, Vivian is exactly what I need right now.

Because Vivian is the best.

She’s on winter break from her senior year at UPenn, where she’s majoring in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and minoring in cinema and media studies, captaining an Ultimate Frisbee team, acting in avant-garde performance pieces, volunteering at a local soup kitchen, and dating a beautiful nonbinary junior named Brand.

Vivian’s one of those people who’s always had her shit together but is also very open about her insecurities and her anxiety and the SSRIs she’s on, and not just because I’m her sister. She’s like that with everyone, so it makes you feel less resentful and jealous of how good she is at everything.

“What’re you watching?” she asks, gracefully sitting next to me and placing the chip dish onto the old coffee table from Dad’s New York City days that he kindly left with us after the divorce.

“I don’t really know. It’s that circus show,Three Rings.”

“Overrated,” Vivian sings, and somehow even this throwawayjoke sounds like something people would pay to listen to.