Page 280 of Burn Bright

Tom pinches the quarter. “Dad would never.” He shares a gleaming grin with Eliot.

“You call it. I’ll flip it,” Eliot says to him.

That’s how the next step of my life is decided. A coin-flip.

It takes a couple hours to move all my stuff into my new room. Thirty minutes are spent putting the wooden bedframe together. I’m on the floor, barely following the directions, and Harriet keeps shaking her head at me while reading step by step. We both still haven’t showered. I haven’t even grabbed a T-shirt. She’s bunched my MVU sweatshirt up to her elbows.

“You’re diabolical,” she says.

“So you’ve said,” I smile up at her. “This is intuitive. Hole. Screw. Board.”

“There are several different kinds of screws.”

“This looks right.” I show her a wide wood screw and the bigger hole in an oak board. “What do you think?”

She double-checks, then nods. “Correct, you may proceed.”

“Merci beaucoup, mon bel oiseau.” I twist the screw into the board and glance up to see her watching me, affection swirling in her ocean blue eyes. It’s hard to tear away. I love that I really don’t have to.

After the frame is built, the mattress carried over (thanks in part to Eliot), and the bed made with my checkered blue and green quilt, Harriet plops down on the foot and I sink beside her, following her roaming gaze around my new space.

We plan to mount a ceiling track and attach a privacy curtain at some point, but for now, my brother’s side is visible, but it’s not cramped, even with two queen-sized beds. He’s always had one of the biggest rooms in the apartment, so it’s honestly perfect that the coin landed on tails.

On what Tom called out.

“Are those just for show?” Harriet points to the guitars perched on the wall.

“No, he definitely plays those.” Tom’s side is closer to the door, mine farther in the room near a floor-length window. I catch Harriet chewing her lip—hersmile, really—at the sight of the framed Green Day poster, at the dark moody walls, at my punk-rock brother’s sticker-decaled dresser and his old school cassette tapes and his ’90s stereo.

“Are you vibing with my brother?” I tease.

“With his personal belongings. Like barely at all, if he asks.” She squeezes her fingers together to show a pinch.

I smile. “Wait till you see Eliot’s raven paintings. You might want me to swap rooms.”

“That dark?”

“It gave me nightmares as a kid,” I laugh. “Or maybe you should tell Eliot you like Tom’s room better. Take his ego down a fraction of afractionof a peg.”

“Wow, the Fort Knox of egos,” she deadpans, then eyes my elephant ear plants near the oak dresser. “I like your side the best.”

I look her over. “Even if it’s not like you?”

“I like it the most because it’s like you. Because I love you, and when I look around, I just see Ben.” Her eyes slow into a stop, fixing on the wall directly in front of us. On the ginormous oil painting that Eliot and Beckett carried in here and hung. “That…” she says in quiet reverence. “That is so much like you, and I don’t even know what it is.”

“The Arcadian,” I name my painting by Thomas Cole.

Sweeping pastoral lands, so much vibrant, lush green as morning light crests behind a jutted mossy mountain peak. On a hill, a stone building has been built. Women dance in one corner while another figure plays a pipe. Fields are plowed. Shepherds tend to their flocks. An older man draws a geometrical shapeinto the dirt, new discoveries made. Boats sailing to shore. Humanity at peace with the land.

I start to smile, and I tell her, “It’s the beginning of an empire.”