“Two hours? Well, you shoulda let me know four hours ago. You know I hate to be rushed.”

“If Dad was here, we couldn’t talk about last night because we’d still be catching up on stuff from two years ago,” Whit says.

And she’s right. And we do this sometimes, riff on our parents. Make fun of them the way the four of us always teased each other. Except right now it feels off.

Our normal broken, again.

“Whit, I know there’s a lot to talk about, that last night is a thing I’ll be talking about for the rest of my life, but right now I just wanna sit here and not eat my cereal and hang out with my sister like a regular morning. Can we please do that?”

“Okay, I hear you, but I just think we should probably . . .”

“Whit, please.”

“We can’t keep sweeping things under rugs, Jamal. We can’t let the bad things fester inside. Remember what Dr. Ocean said, ‘If we’re gonna heal, then we’ve . . .’”

“I know. I’m not asking for forever. Just not now.”

She sighs, and I feel it coming. “You know, it’s one thing to skip school. But it’s another thing entirely to lie to me about it.”

“Really? You wanna throw that on me now?”

“Jamal, you’ve been throwing that on me for two years.”

“Don’t you get it? I could die on my way up those stairs. In the shower. You could . . . What if you . . .” But I can’t say it.

And honestly, I couldn’t survive that.

“What’s the point of school, Whit? Of calculus or biology or any of it?”

“Jamal, as lonely and as personal as losing Mom and Dad feels to you, to me, we aren’t the first to ever be dealt a crappy hand. And we aren’t the last. And you’re right. You probably don’t need calculus. But life isn’t only doing the things you want. And you definitely don’t get to use our parents’ deaths as an excuse to detonate your life. If you wanna fail high school, own that. If you wanna make poor choices, do it in your own name. Not theirs. Don’t dishonor them.”

And I want to run out of this kitchen. Climb the tallest mountain. Scream every curse word I can think of, and when those run out make up my own, until my voice gives. Except life isn’t only doing the things I want, so I’m told.

Whit takes my hand, lowers herself onto the chair beside me.

I can’t tell you how many minutes go by before either of us speaks again. I take out my phone, cycle through a few apps, try to pretend I’m unfazed, but.

“Angeles hopped in his car, soon as I told him what happened.”