Mom is at the stove, stirring something in a pot with one hand and gesturing with the other, mid-story. June is sitting on the counter beside her, legs dangling, holding a wooden spoon like a microphone. They’re both laughing, and I can tell it’s been building for a while, one joke stacked on top of the last until neither of them remembers what was funny to begin with.
The kitchen light catches Mom’s silver-streaked curls. June’s hair is tied up in a messy knot, and there’s a dab of blue paint along her jaw that she probably hasn’t noticed. One of Mom’scandles is burning on the counter, and the whole room smells like a place where people belong to each other.
I stand in the archway and watch.
This is their frequency. The specific wavelength that Mom and June operate on. I’ve been listening to it my whole life the way you listen to the neighbor’s loud music at 2 a.m. You can hear it perfectly. You even wonder what it’s like to be at such a fun party. You just can’t get through the door, because you’re never invited.
I think about clearing my throat and saying, “Hey, I’m home, sculpture class was actually good today, Dorien liked my sketch and I sat with him and Carter and laughed, and for thirty minutes I felt like someone who existed in full color instead of a pencil outline.”
But I know how it goes. I’d say something, and Mom would turn with a smile and say, “Oh. Hey, honey,” and June would wave her spoon, and there’d be a second of warmth directed at me. A small pause in their rhythm to include me. Then they’d absorb me into the conversation for a minute or two before drifting back to each other, and I’d stand there holding a plate I didn’t ask for, trying to find a way back into their dialogue.
I never do. Not because they don’t love me. I know they love me, in the way you know the sun is behind the clouds: factually, without feeling it on your skin.
I just…
June has always been the favorite. It’s not that Mom hates me or is being malicious, I just know the unspoken truth deep down in my gut: June was a planned pregnancy. I wasn’t.
June was the girl Mom dreamed of having. I was the boy she never knew how to relate to.
Once, when I was eleven, I overheard Mom talking to one of her friends on the phone.
“Boys are so much trouble,” she’d said. Her friend said something and she laughed. Then, “Oh I know. I never wanted to be a Boy Mom, but here I am. Honestly, why couldn’t I have another girl? That would’ve been so perfect. June would’ve loved a sister.”
That’s me: unwanted but here.
Tolerated.
Mom laughs again in the kitchen. Then June follows. They grin at each other. I watch the candlelight flicker across the counter and think about how the warmest rooms are the hardest to enter.
I back away from the archway quietly. The hardwood doesn’t creak if you step on the left side, which I learned a long time ago. I take my bag upstairs and close my bedroom door.
My room is the smallest of the four bedrooms. It gets the least natural light, positioned on the north side of the house where the afternoon sun doesn’t reach. I like it that way. There’s a desk against the wall, a bed I make every morning (even weekends), and shelves organized with supplies: jars of ink, rolls of fabric, wire, old magazines I’ve been saving for collage pieces. The walls are bare because that emptiness helps me think.
The only space in this house that’s fully mine.
I sit on the bed and flip through my sketchbook. I pass the concept for the sculpture, the one Dorien liked, and keep going. Past class notes I drew over. Past a quick study of the shadow pattern on the quad. Past the page I ripped out and taped back in because I hated it and then changed my mind.
I find her.
Cinna. Three pages of her, spread across the last few weeks. I don’t remember deciding to draw her this many times. The pencil moved and the face that appeared was hers.
The first one is from memory, just her profile, the curve of her jaw and the way her soft golden hair falls in front of herear. The second is more detailed: her eyes, those rich brown eyes with the gold flecks that make them look lit from the inside. The third is a full portrait, and it’s the best of the three, which annoys me because I drew it at three in the morning when I should’ve been sleeping.
I pick up a pencil and start a new one.
This time I draw her the way I saw her today, crossing the quad in that late honey light with her head tilted. But I change the background. Instead of the campus brick and grass, I draw wildflowers. Tall ones, unruly, the kind that grow in ditches and along fences, which nobody plants on purpose. I’ve seen her pick them before. She stops on campus paths and bends down for dandelions and clovers and those small purple things I don’t know the name of, and she carries them like she just found a diamond.
I add color. Soft, careful dots of it from the colored pencils I keep in the desk drawer. Not much. I don’t want to overwhelm the graphite. Just enough to make the flowers real: faded yellow, pale violet, a tiny pop of orange. The color bleeds slightly where the graphite is thick, and the effect is accidental and perfect, the way the best things in my work always are.
I look at the finished drawing and Cinna looks back at me from a field of wildflowers, her head tilted, her eyes caring. This time, that look, that tilt, her attention… it’s all for me.
She smiles and I smile back. And I imagine picking a flower for her someday, drying it, then offering it as a token of everything wonderful that she deserves.
I close the sketchbook and press it against my heart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JUNE
