The thing is, I’m usually the one trying to kick Cole out of my room. He’s always in here. Says he likes staring at my walls. At the sketches and writings torn from my notebooks, at the images I’m drawn to in magazines . . . the photos he lets me keep . . . my favorite pieces from art classes over the years . . . all the poems and notes and lists and cards and quotes and random facts I collect. I’ve always figured that if I’m constantly looking at things that call out to me, then the Universe would eventually have to tell me what I’m supposed to do with my life. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Cole squeezes my hand, lets it go, and gets back to collecting his photos.

“And what? Daddy told you to pass all this information along to me?” I ask, trying to slow him down. It pisses me off that Daddy would tell him and not me.

He grabs a black box off a stack of magazines on my desk. “No, he probably thought Mom would tell you,” he says, and slides three photos behind a tab in the box.

“Mom didn’t say anything to me. We talked about—” I almost tell on myself, but don’t. On the way to get my car, I talked to Mom about the gallbladder attack finally being the sign to quit basketball. She’s the only one who knows I want to quit. Known since I was in seventh grade and told her that getting my period was a sign to quit. Known I’ve been afraid to quit because I don’t have a better dream to replace it with.

Daddy would die if he knew the truth. He’s had a basketball in my hands since before I could walk. If Cole knew, he would die, too. He loves basketball. And we’ve been playing each other our whole lives . . . pushing each other . . . supporting each other . . . defending each other when Daddy’s too hard on us. Sometimes I wonder if we’d be so close if I didn’t play.

Cole hasn’t even noticed I stopped mid-sentence. It’s like he’s in a trance, focused on picking up and organizing his photos. “Oh, and we have until March eighteenth. That’s the date we’ll have to sit down with the judge and state which parent we want to live with,” he says. I swear it’s like someone has steamrolled over his emotions. Flattened him right out.

“That’s not even six weeks! What if we refuse?”