“Gracie and I broke up.”
“Oh, Sam.” Sarah sounded sympathetic but, he noted, not especially surprised.
“She says I don’t know who I am.”
Instead of saying That’s bullshit or Of course you know who you are!, his sister said nothing.
“What?” Sam asked. When she didn’t answer, he asked again, more loudly. “What?”
“Well.” He could tell Sarah was being careful, taking time to choose her words. “It’s just that you can be a bit of a chameleon.”
Sam frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Okay. Remember in middle school, when you started playing hockey? And you were, like, Mister Hockey? All hockey, all the time?”
“I liked hockey!” Sam protested.
“And then, senior year of high school, you started dating Tory, who thought that contact sports reenacted the toxic gender dynamics of the patriarchy?”
Sam was impressed that Sarah remembered, verbatim, exactly what his girlfriend had said when she’d held forth at Thanksgiving dinner at the Levy-Weinberg house.
“So you stopped playing hockey, and you joined that a cappella group.”
“I like singing!”
Sarah’s voice was infinitely patient. “I’m not saying you don’t. You have a very nice voice.” She hummed a few bars of “My Coney Island Baby.” Sam ignored her.
“What else?” he asked.
“Then, when you and Tory broke up…” Sam mentally thanked his sister for not saying Then Tory dumped you. “And, by the way, remind me why you decided to go to Berkeley?”
Sam pressed his lips together, remembering Tory lecturing him. “You need to figure out who you are as a person. Not as a twin.” It was Tory who’d urged him to look at schools in California, luring him with pictures of sand and sun and surfing （and, of course, with the fact that she was going to Stanford）。 Then Tory had dumped him, and Sam had been stranded, single and three thousand miles away from home.
“Then you get to college, and you start dating Celia, and you join a fraternity.”
“I wanted to make friends!” Sam realized he was almost shouting. He lowered his voice. “Berkeley is a very big school. A fraternity helped to make it feel more manageable.”
“Of course.”
“I felt like I had a community.”
“Makes sense.”
“And Phi Kappa Psi wasn’t, you know, one of the toxic fraternities.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said dryly. “I’m sure women are treated with consideration and respect, and the brothers are all very big on consent.”
Sam closed his eyes.
“So then you’re Mister Greek Life. Until you and Celia break up, and you drop out of the fraternity—”
“It was costing a fortune. And I got busy with my thesis. I was never there, and it didn’t make sense to—”
“… and you start dating Gracie.”
Sam squeezed his eyes more tightly shut.
“And Gracie’s an artist. So you move in with her, into that…” Sarah paused. “… place. That commune or whatever it is.”
“It’s a co-op,” Sam said wearily. “A vegan co-op.” It was actually, per its charter, a long-running experiment in meat-free, mutually respectful communal living, one of Berkeley’s longest-running off-campus houses, with generations of pot smoke and patchouli fumes contained within its plastered walls.
“And you start doing morning pages, and you grow out your hair and you get a tattoo…”
Sarah was the only one in the world, aside from Gracie, who knew about his tattoo. Sam hoped she hadn’t told their parents, who would undoubtedly freak out. “I know you better than anyone in the world,” Sarah said. “And I feel like there’s this piece of you that maybe you’re not entirely sure about yet.”
“So I’m missing pieces.” Sam could hear the bitterness in his voice. But why shouldn’t he be bitter? No one else he knew was missing anything. They’d all found their place; they all had their thing. His father had known, since reading To Kill a Mockingbird in sixth grade, that he’d wanted to be a lawyer; his mom had known, even sooner than that, that her life would involve reading and writing. Sarah, of course, had been a pianist, a serious musician who’d never wavered from her path until she’d segued—painlessly, as far as Sam could tell—to music education. Gracie would surely end up being some kind of artist, but even if she didn’t, she’d always have her style, her tattoos, her piercings, her sense of who she was.