And my brotherhowlswith laughter.
“You suck,” I moan from the floor.
He ignores my writhing to head into the kitchen. “I got tired of waiting for you to come home yourself. We’re going to be late as it is.” He pops open the fridge. “It’s empty.”
“Of course it’s empty. No one will be here for a month and a half. And I was getting ready to leave.”
“Clearly. Horizontal packing, wildly productive. Do you evenwantto come home?”
I climb to my feet, pocket my phone from where it spun across the carpet, and start balling up sweaters to shove back into my suitcase. “That is a complex question and I swore off answering complexquestions after I very nearly failed Applied Quantitative Analysis this semester.”
“Is that the class you had me write that paper for?” he asks, head submerged in a cupboard that still has a few half-eaten bags of chips. He pulls back, pokes through them, makes a face, and shuts the door.
I glare at him. “I asked you toeditthat paper—youchose to rewrite the last two pages because ‘my conclusion was wrong.’ On anopinionpiece.”
“And it got what grade?” He pulses his eyebrows expectantly.
It passed with flying colors but he can bite me. “You don’t get enough of your own dry classes at Cambridge? You gotta come across the ocean to steal mine?”
Kris opens another cupboard.
He goes quiet.
I can never get him to talk about how his school is going beyond the fact that what should be a three-year program will, for him, be stretching into four years. Dad may have pulled all kinds of strings to force me into Yale touphold the Claus legacy,but he left Kris to apply to a predetermined list of schools on his own.
He didn’t get into Yale.
“If you’re done being a coward.” Kris shuts the next cupboard. “We really will be late.”
I hurl a wadded-up pair of socks at him. He turns from the kitchen and it hits him square in the nose.
But he’s right.
I’m a full-on coward now. Despite my conviction about turning over a new leaf after the New Koah incident, I’ve avoided as many responsibilities back home as possible. School and my shitty jobs here have gotten the bulk of my focus, which you think would mean my grades are doing better. They aren’t. And you’d think I’d be mastering my part-time work and at least have made manager at one of those jobs. I haven’t.
But Dad also hasn’t stepped in and forced me to reassert myself with Christmas.
Until this year. With my graduation one short semester away, all the looming responsibilities of my birthright will no longer be something I can skirt around or Dad can make excuses for.
I heave all my weight on my suitcase and manage to get it zipped shut. “You deleted that text from Mom?”
Kris tosses the socks back at me and I stick them in the front pocket. “Yeah, I swear. I really don’t care that she’s dating some guy who’s a beach detector.”
“No, the Merry Christmas—” I frown up at him. “Kris.”
He looks away.
I straighten, vertebra by vertebra. “You’ve been talking with her? We promised neither of us would respond to her manipulation anymore. It was nearly a blood oath.”
He crosses his arms and rocks back on his heels, suddenly finding the ceiling very, very interesting. “I didn’t talk to her a lot. I wished her a Merry Christmas back. She told me some shit about her dating life. It was fine.”
“Talking with our mother is neverfine,Kris. What’d she say to you exactly?”
He gives me an offended look, redness creeping across his face. “Nothing. It really wasn’t bad. Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t tell me not to worry about you.” It comes out harsher than I’d intended.
His eyes droop, defeated and apologetic, because he knows exactly what I’m remembering: how the last time she unloaded the full force of her guilt trip on him, I couldn’t get ahold of him for two days, and when I’d shown up in Cambridge, it was to find that he hadn’t left his room or eaten in all that time.
