When Joey got home, music was blasting from upstairs. He heard voices and coughing as he climbed the staircase toward the smell of burning plastic, and when he opened their bedroom door he found Lacy sitting on his bed by the cracked window. Her face was bright from the sunlight filtering through the trees outside, the whole room golden with the tint of the oak’s leaves. Another boy was on his bed, crumpling Joey’s Avengers blanket beneath his shoes. The boy had Lacy’s emotion card in his hand and was using a metal file against it, scraping shavings thin as fluff into a folded piece of paper. Lacy held a lighter to a glass tube, and the pipe glowed molten yellow with a puff of black smoke.

“Fuck!” she said when she saw Joey. Her exhalation pierced the room, and she buried her face in his blankets, her body shaking so hard Joey thought she was choking until he saw her teeth grinning. The guy scraping the card grabbed a can of air freshener and sprayed it in a wide arc, the room suddenly synthetic with mango.

“Hey, lil guy,” he said, sliding the scraped card into Lacy’s armpit. “Cool room. You like the Avengers, huh?”

“What are you guys doing?” Joey said to his sister.

Lacy just continued to grin, and the kid with the air freshener folded the paper on the bed into a makeshift envelope, carefully securing the remaining filings, before tucking everything into his backpack. He put his hand on Lacy’s back and shook her. “Hey, we should go. I can drive.”

Lacy sat up crookedly, her mouth tight. “My fucking brother,” she said and laughed so hard that a streak of spit glistened on her chin. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” she said as the boy helped her down the stairs, and they stumbled together to the front door.

From the upstairs bedroom, Joey watched them drive away. The leaves rustled from a warm breeze which blew through the cracked window, everything stinking of mango and burnt plastic. His Avengers blanket was a mess, and his mom would be home in an hour. So he picked up the air freshener and sprayed the room again before going downstairs to find the fan his dad kept stored in the basement.

When Lacy came home that night, her eyes weren’t red anymore, but the sides of her mouth still curled upward in a grin, and it was only later, when they were in bed, that her smile disappeared. She lay on her side, watching Joey. “Thanks for not telling Mom and Dad,” she said. “You’re a cool little brother.”

“Why were you doing that?”

“Smoking tobacco?”

“I’m not stupid. You were smoking your card.”