Instead, I follow Jen to the door, dragging my shirt down over my hips, scouring my brain for a clever opening to detain her. How relaxing it would be to slump against her large frame in front of the TV, even just for an hour. At the threshold she launches into Sunny’s needs: he won’t eat chickpeas or meat or radishes or red jelly; he has lotion in his bag for the dry patch on his elbow. She packed a workbook in case he can fit in a little studying. “He gets overstimulated. He’ll want to stay the whole day tomorrow, but maybe skip the last bit.”

I take notes, though I know everything already.

“Remember when we went up Monadnock, when he was six?” she asks. Jen carried Sunny halfway up the mountain, his body flipped over her shoulder, pigtails dangling.

“You worry about him too much.” My words are sharper than I intend.

“He’s a kid.”

Besides his fifth-grade trip to Manhattan—the last school year Sunny attended as a girl—he’s never left New England. “He’s a teenager. He’ll be fine.”

“Don’t make me regret this.”

“Hey,” I say, softening, playing along with her story. “Ditch your friend. We’ll watch movies or something. Come on, Jen. It’ll be nice.” Somewhere toward midnight, Sunny asleep between us, our bodies washed in the aqua light of the TV, Jen will apologize for how she treated me when we were kids. I’ll laugh and say it’s nothing. And it will be nothing, somehow, suddenly. A glow will ignite between us, and our relationship will revert to how it was before I hit puberty. We’ll hug a normal hug. And ever after: weekly calls like regular siblings. Conversations that aren’t about Sunny.

She waves me away. As she ducks into the car, her face strains.

I sit with Sunny, him on the couch, me on the desk chair. He clutches his phone, skinny limbs tangled. I have to pee, but if I leave even for a second, he’ll drift away on the currents of the internet. What can I ask next? How’s puberty? Have you discovered what romance is yet? What are my sister’s secrets? Sunny and I like each other—he’s my only nibling, a term he taught me—but we’ve only spent time together with family. We’ve diced tubers for holiday meals and raised our voices to compete with conversations about baseball and acid reflux. We’ve never talked about anything serious.

“So,” I say. “How’s math class? You must have math class, right?” I want to slap myself.

His knee bounces. “Not class, really. I have, like, workbooks.”

I arrange the cheese bears on the coffee table. “What about language arts?”

“I have a workbook for that too. The cover has, like, tumbling letters to symbolize the vast and dynamic field of English-language literature.”

“Science?”