My life is one big cosmic joke.

Which is what I was thinking when Aaron, unprompted, slid into the chair across from me. He took another big crunch of the carrot and leaned his arms across the table, stretching out like a floppy dog, his bangs falling in front of his face and giving him that effortlessly cool look that I can literally never achieve.

GOD, I hate him sometimes.

“Listen to me, Rosie,” he said with a world-weary sigh.

He does this constantly. Despite the fact that he is exactly sixteen months older than me, he always acts like he’s the wise old brother who knows absolutely everything about the world and I’m his silly little sister “Rosie” (which NO ONE else calls me, by the way).

“I get that it’s weird to be in this family and not have an ability—”

“Aaron, stop listening to my thoughts—” I said, knowing he didn’t actually want to invade my privacy (or at least, so he CONSTANTLY TALKS ABOUT, always so smug about his ethical code).

“You know I can’t help it, sometimes,” he said, eyes big and puppy-doggish. “Stuff just jumps out.”

I wanted to jump out of that conversation. But he kept going.

“I’m just saying, I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” I mumbled. “You have one.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t,” he said.

I wanted to say that it wasn’t the same. That when he thought he was a normal human, he also had me, Rosie, normal human number two. He didn’t have to do this alone. But Aaron and I have never really talked like that before. We’ve always gotten along decently—I complain about him being a know-it-all and he complains about my Switzerland-like neutrality when he gets into arguments with Mom and Dad, but we’ve never been, like, genuinely mad at each other for a long period of time. It’s just sibling fighting. Normal brother-sister stuff.

Except it isn’t really normal, is it? Not when we were inseparable as kids, before coming out on the other side of middle school as complete strangers. We never really talk to each other about the big stuff, like how we were both unmoored when our grandmother died or how we can both hear when our parents argue about my mom’s visions and we pretend it doesn’t bother us. Maybe ignoring all that stuff is normal, I don’t know, but what’s definitely, completely not normal is that now it doesn’t matter if I want to talk to Aaron about that stuff or not, because he knows. All his insistence that he has it under control, that he feels strongly about respecting our privacy doesn’t change the fact that he could be listening, at any time.