After flinging Caleb’s jeans off the armrest and onto the floor, I sit in his swivel chair and pull up a browser. I type in “Overton,” and the website instantly comes up. I know he doesn’t have controls on his computer, but I can’t explain why mine couldn’t even find any results. On the page in front of me, words like “nanotechnology” and “cognitive neuroscience” jump out at me, but with Caleb shuffling around downstairs, I only have time to skim-read.Having Problems with Your Memory?a banner at the top of the page asks.
“Yes,” I whisper under my breath. From what I can gather, Overton helps people deal with memory problems and emotional issues. The page even mentions sleep somewhere; this is perfect. I grab a pen from his desk and scrawl the number on my palm. I can hear Caleb washing up downstairs, meaning he’s done eating, so I close the window and quickly go to his browser history—I don’t want him to know what I’ve been searching for. As I delete the pages I went on, curiosity forces me to look at Caleb’s last web hits.
I feel a small kick of delight when I see that, somewhere in between a dozen video-game sites, Caleb searched for “aviation academies” this morning. Is it possible that heisitching to get out of Lyndale, after all? Maybe he’s finally going to follow his heart.
I’m so busy marveling at this that I don’t notice Caleb coming up the stairs until it’s too late.
“Addison, what are you doing in my room?”
I jump out of his chair. “I was just, er, looking up New York stuff. School stuff. Some of the pages weren’t opening because of the parental controls on mine.”
His face is impassive. “You should have asked.”
“Fine. Sorry,” I say, starting to move toward the door, but then I stop. I know I shouldn’t mention what I saw, but I can’t help myself. “So, um, I saw you were looking at some aviation academies. Are you thinking of applying?”
“No, I’m not thinking of applying. Who the hell told you that you could use my computer?” Now he’s starting to get angry.
“But why not?” I ask stubbornly. “It’s obviously what you want to do.”
“Leaving Lyndale won’t fix anything, Addie.”
I can no longer tell which one of us he’s talking about. Caleb hates that I want to go to New York. Maybe even more than Mom does. It’s like because he can’t bring himself to leave, he can’t conceive of the idea of anyone else wanting to.
And as happy as they are to clip our wings, it’s not as if either of my parents needs us here. Dad only spends a portion of his time in his sad, clammy apartment; the rest of the time he spends doing what he loves. For two years, Mom has been happily dating Channel Se7en’s five o’clock news anchor, best known as Bruce “Silver Fox” Landry. Or, to Caleb, as Bruce “Asshole” Landry. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Caleb call him Bruce at any point except when they are face to face. At which point, my brother is the picture of respect.
“So it’s better to stay here, forcing yourself to live a life you don’t even want?” I ask.
Caleb is quiet and then, in the coldest voice he is capable of, says, “Get out of my room, Addison.”
“Fine,” I spit. I’ve barely gotten into the hallway when the door slams shut behind me. I know what I said hit a nerve, and I want to feel guilty—I do—but I just feel irritated.
Caleb and I agree on some things. We both love plantains, fried like my father ate them growing up. We agree on Mom’s boyfriend—that he’s nice enough and we’re glad he makes her happy, but we sure as hell hope she doesn’t marry him, because it would break Dad’s heart. And also Bruce wears leather oxfords without socks and has his teeth artificially whitened every other weekend. My brother and I feel exactly the same way about this. Sometimes we randomly say Bruce’s hammy sign-off to each other: “Hate to leave you hanging, friends, but you’ll have to join us in twenty-three hours for tomorrow’s news.”
We’d been close growing up, but when he was thirteen, right when he became a teenager, Caleb started pushing us all away. Maybe he was angry at the divorce, or maybe it was puberty. Or both—that shivering helplessness at everything changing at once. But the more I tried to include him in my life, the more he retreated from me. Ever since I told him I wanted to go to college in New York, he’s seemed downright pissed at me. For leaving, I guess. Which makes no sense, given how little we interact now, living under the same roof.
When I was in elementary school, whenever my brother’s friends from the neighborhood came over to ask if he would play tennis with them in the driveway, Caleb would yell, “I call Addie!” Even if they hadn’t invited me to play.
Victor would make a face and say, “Caleb’s just showing off. He wants to prove he can beat us, even with a girl on his team.”
Both Victor and Job were Caleb’s age, and remarkably, Victor had managed to make it to the seventh grade, despite having a pea for a brain. Caleb would roll his eyes at him and tell him to shut up. Which he finally did, when we beat him soundly, even with a boy on my team.
We played pickup basketball in front of Victor’s house, and then, too, Caleb would say, “I call Addie.” I wondered whether it was because of Dad, flying in another part of the world, and the way he always looked at Caleb before he went and said, “Take care of things on the ground, okay?” I thought that was the reason Caleb looked out for me, keeping his promise to Dad by being nice to me. Or maybe he was saving me the pain of being paired off with either Victor or Job.
Except that when they didn’t come out to play and it was just the two of us in the driveway with our rackets, Caleb would ask, “Us against the wall?” And then we’d hit the ball at the garage door and take turns swinging it back.
As we played, Caleb would recite random facts to me.
Did you know that the pilot and copilot almost always eat separate meals, in case one of them gets food poisoning? Dad told me that.
Did you know that there are more than sixty thousand people in the air in the United States at any given time? That’s more people than live in Lyndale.
Did you know the longest flight in the world is from Fort Worth to Sydney, Australia? It’s almost exactly seventeen hours long.
“Did you know that the Concorde traveled at more than twice the speed of sound? And you could actually hear this massive boom when it broke the sound barrier. Although the first aircraft to break the sound barrier was a Douglas DC-8 in 1961.”
After we moved five years ago, there were no more tennis games in the driveway. There were only memories of a time when we used to know each other.
It catches me off guard sometimes how much I miss the relationship we used to have. It happens when Caleb and I are mocking Bruce’s sign-off together. Sometimes, when Mom ropes us into watching the holiday movies we’ve seen every year since we were in diapers, we’ll accidentally recite the same lines at exactly the same time, and I feel it then, too. It feels like finding something important you’d misplaced but hadn’t really noticed was gone. In those moments, we’re shaking dust off something lost and it’s like,Oh, there you are.
