I cringe. Archie couldn’t lie convincingly to solve the Riemann hypothesis.

Snatching up my own rice ball, I sample it. A bitter, acrid taste spreads across my tongue. No question about it. I burned the chicken.

“But how?” I moan. “I only took my eyes off the pan for a second, I swear. One tiny, little second. There was this fascinating article in this week’s National Geographic about the authenticity of these nine-thousand-year-old masks from the Judean desert—”

Archie bursts out laughing, and I join in grudgingly. Maybe one of these days I’ll stay focused enough to make the perfect meal. Just not today.

He eyes another rice ball. “My sister. The only foodie account holder on Instagram who can’t actually cook.”

“For your information, the caterpillar post has already gotten a hundred likes!” I grab his arm as he reaches for another piece. “Don’t. Really. The chicken’s disgusting.”

“I kinda like it,” he says loyally, even as he grimaces. “The flavor’s…interesting.”

I rock back onto the grass, shaking my head even as my cheeks go soft. What am I going to do without my brother? He leaves for Harvard in a few months, and already I’m dreading my final year in high school without him.

It’s bad enough that I’m the only student here who’s not a science wiz. My dream is to take photos for National Geographic, not solve world hunger with a well-placed equation. My fledgling foodie account is a poor facsimile of what I hope to one day achieve.

But more than any of that, Archie gets me.

Losing a parent will do that to siblings.

He’s the one who picks up a pint of cookie dough ice cream for me on the rare occasions he remembers to go to the store. He listens to me agonize over whether to use “yesterday” or “the day before” when I’m posting on social media. He even watched Thor with me thirteen times in a single weekend because he knew I needed to forget the anniversary of our mom leaving.

My brother understands, without me saying a word, the hole in my heart that Mom created when she abandoned us. Maybe because he has one, too. Maybe because he’s the only one who ever comes close to filling mine.

Dad doesn’t have a clue. Since Mom took off six years ago, he only talks to me when he has to—about dinner, the plumber, my allowance. It’s almost like I lost both of them that day, instead of just her.

My stomach tightens at the thought of my absentee parents—one literal and the other in practice. But I push away the sensation and toy with the carrot slices I carved into flowers this morning. “You…um, you didn’t come out of the basement for dinner last night.”