January (Finally)

Sonia and I have a lot in common. Our parents are divorced. Our dads are gay. We both love barbecue potato chips. And yogurt with tons of honey. We agree that pistachios are the best of all the nuts. But she is different from me in at least one way, which is that you can’t tell how she’s feeling just by looking at her. At all.

On our first night together, after Sonia put her blue suitcase in my room, after I showed her the two drawers I had cleared out for her, asked her which of my stuffed animals she wanted to sleep with, and made Rocco shake hands with her three times, Dad and Jesse took us out to eat at Pizzeria Pete’s, where there’s unlimited refills on soda. Usually Dad lets me have zero sodas, but he said tonight the rules were “out the window.”

I told Sonia about the just-a-little-bit-burnt crusts at Pizzeria Pete’s, how they are the most delicious when you dip them in the ranch salad dressing, and I warned her to hide her crusts from Dad and Jesse, who will just take them without even asking. We ate our pizza and saved our crusts in our laps while Dad pretended to look everywhere for burnt crusts and be sad when there were none, and Sonia laughed really hard. Her hair bounced on her shoulders the way I always wished mine would, but I wasn’t jealous because Sonia was going to be my sister, so it was like that hair was already a little bit mine.

Sonia and I each had two sodas, first a root beer and then a ginger ale. She was smiling a lot, and I said to myself that Miriam was wrong to worry about her so much. Sonia smiled right up until the moment she ran away from the table and out the front door of Pizzeria Pete’s.

Jesse jumped up, grabbed Sonia’s coat from the back of her chair, and ran after her.

Dad looked at me, and his eyes were tired. “Sonia’s having a little bit of a hard time—for one thing, I think she’s exhausted.”

“But she was happy,” I said. “She looked happy.”

“I know, sweetie.” Dad didn’t look happy.

We sat there.

He said, “Sonia has never been so far away from her mom before, Bea. The idea of spending time with two families is all new for her. It’s not easy.”

I didn’t say anything.

He said, “Hi.”

“Hi” is our code for a check-in. Miriam taught it to all three of us—me, Mom, and Dad—when they first got divorced. “Hi” means, “I want to know what’s going on with you if you want to tell me.” It means, “I’m listening.”

“Sonia doesn’t want to be my sister,” I said. “That’s mean.”

Dad waited.