We headed up the next flight. They were outdoor stairs, like at a motel. We dragged my garbage bags of clothes and books in. My room was straight through at the back. His and Mandy’s was off the kitchen. I never went in there the whole time I lived there, so I can’t tell you what it was like. From the kitchen, when they left the door ajar, it looked like a black hole. My room was bright with two windows looking out onto North Street, not the parking lot, and plenty of room for my desk. He thought it was funny I’d brought a desk. It was a table really, no drawers, with legs I had to screw back on.

I’d moved a lot but this time it was more like self-banishment. I didn’t have the same feeling I normally did, setting up my room that night, twisting the legs back into the underbelly of the plank of wood and pushing it against the wall between the windows. That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.

My brother came in and laughed at my only poster. It was a timeline of human history. It was narrow and wrapped around three walls and went from the Middle Paleolithic age to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a few years earlier. It comforted me.

He put his thumbnail on a spot close to the end. “There I am. Born between the first manned spaceflight and the construction of the Berlin Wall.”

We hadn’t lived together since I was seven and he was thirteen. Now I was twenty-five and he was ancient. He sat down on my bed. “Does that guy know where you are?” he said.

“No.”

“Will he find out?”

“Probably.”

“Am I going to have to fight him?”

“More likely you’ll have to listen to him sing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the sitar under my window.”

“Then I’ll really have to beat him up.”

“Your neighbors will probably beat you to it.”

He laughed, hard. “They really fucking will.” He looked around. “Mandy is not going to like all these books.”

I didn’t have bookshelves so I’d stacked them in columns in various parts of the room. They looked like a grove of stunted trees. “No Ethan Frome as far as the eye can see.”

“Shut up. Now.”

“Just tell her that,” I said, louder. She wasn’t even home yet. “Tell her I’ve never read it.”

“No. We cannot mention it. Don’t you get that?”

“I’ve never ever wanted to talk about Ethan Frome more than I do right now.”

“She is going to fucking hate you.” But he was leaning back against the timeline on the wall and laughing again.