“Oh, come on. You must have missed him a little.”

Zadie hesitated. “Yeah, kinda. He can be … a lot, but he was the only person who was really there for me after Mom left.”

Finn studied her sister’s face. Zadie was usually hard to read, a letter written in invisible ink, but Finn could tell Zadie had meant what she’d said. Joel had been there for her during a time when no one else was.

No one—including her.

Finn cringed, remembering all the times she had been too busy with school or sports or dinner with her foster family to answer Zadie’s calls; all the times she’d had to cancel their plans to go out for frozen yogurt. Oh, and then there was that one time I canceled the beach vacation she’d been planning for months to drag her out to the desert, where she could get stuck in a car with her ex-boyfriend. Had her sister been hurting all those years, and she’d just now noticed? Finn had been only a kid when their mom left, but that now felt like a feeble excuse.

“I was thinking…” she began. “Rice is only two hours from Austin. You can come visit me in the dorms, or I could drive down on weekends to see you.”

Zadie turned her face away, but Finn could tell from the crack in her sister’s voice that her offer had meant something to her. “I’d like that,” she said.

Black nail polish. Joan Jett poster. Finn must have been asleep because she was back in Zadie’s childhood room.

Yellow carpet. She was in the hallway now. Honeyed light spilled down the stairs.

Finn/Zadie kept one hand on the banister. She counted her steps: one, two, three …

Fourteen. A bird somewhere was singing. Her mom would leave the windows open on days when the weather wasn’t too hot.

Fresh air. Fresh air is good for you.

But it was windy that day. Fresh air had knocked over a pencil cactus and spilled its dirt onto the windowsill. The words close the window filled her head as if it were her own thought, but it wasn’t.

A premonition was telling her to close the window.

Another gust rattled the window screen, and the clay pot rolled to the edge of the sill, then over it. Finn/Zadie outstretched her arms instinctively, swiping air. When the pot smashed, she felt the impact in her bones.