Nonny is really good at music.

I don’t think Beethoven and Bach laugh at her.

You might think this means that I’m jealous of Nonny because she can do all these things I can’t do. Not just piano. She can also help Mom in the kitchen without breaking bowls or messing things up. And she can do the monkey bars. I’ve never been able to do the monkey bars.

Let me tell you the truth about Nonny.

Nonny is my safe person.

She’s the person I can talk to who never makes me feel like I’ve said the wrong thing. She’s even better and more helpful to talk to than the people in my head. Of course, my parents are also good to talk to. They never make me feel dumb when I say things, but they still sometimes get that look like I’m so precious or growing up so fast. I’m still their little girl, you know?

Then there’s my sister, Nonny.

Her real name is Naomi, but I couldn’t say it when I was little, and so now everyone calls her Nonny. She’s twenty, almost nine years older than me, but she doesn’t talk to me like I’m her baby sister. She has long, long dark hair and a clear complexion pale as starlight, and she’s married to a man named Thomas who has the best laugh and the broadest shoulders and can still lift me over his head with one arm. He’s got deep, night-sky skin, what Nonny calls a wrinkly-eyed Idris Elba smile, and he once beat my dad at Boggle, which is super hard to do. They met last fall, at Nonny’s first semester away at college. They fell in love fast, like gravity pulling two moons into orbit around each other, and then got married in May, right before the end of the school year. And right before Nonny’s twentieth birthday. I think my parents were really nervous about her getting married so young, except then we met Thomas. Then they weren’t nervous.

Let me tell you a story about my sister.

A couple of years ago, during Nonny’s senior year of high school, I got hearing aids. I didn’t know that kids at school would think they were weird until after I got them. Nobody made fun of me or anything. Then at the beginning of last year when I was on the playground at lunch I started talking to these two girls with bangle bracelets up both their arms, and they were nice but after a few minutes one of them said, “Sorry, I’m not really used to playing with people who wear hearing aids.” They went over to the swings and I went and ate my lunch in the library.

Want to know the weird part? I didn’t even feel bad about it. At least not at first. I just thought, Okay, and I went and read a book about the discovery of penicillin. (Penicillin was an accident, by the way.)