With Cleo’s extra life, she tells us, she’d farm, which makes everyone laugh so hard the wooden pier trembles under us. “I’m serious!” she insists. “I think it’d be fun.”
“Yeah, right,” Sabrina says. “You’re going to be a famous painter, with landscapes in every celebrity’s LA mansion.”
When she turns the question to me, my mind blanks. I’ve wanted to become a surgeon since I was fourteen. I’ve never considered anything else.
“You can do anything, Harry,” Sabrina presses. “Don’t overthink it.”
“Overthinking is the thing I’m best at, though,” I say.
She cackles. “Maybe in your other life you figure out how to monetize that.”
“Or maybe,” Cleo says, “in our other lives, we don’t have to figure out how to monetize anything. We can just be.”
Without sitting up, Parth reaches over to high-five her.
“I love you,” Cleo says, “but I do not high-five.”
He lets his hand drop to his stomach, unbothered. He asks Wyn what he’d do with his second life. I don’t look over, but I feel him stretched out under the sun on my left, a second star, a thing with its own gravity, light, warmth.
He sighs sleepily. “I’d live in Montana.”
“You’ve already done that,” Parth says. “You’re supposed to say you’d go to the South Pole and rehabilitate penguins or something.”
“Fine, Parth,” Wyn says. “I’d go to the South Pole, for the penguins.”
“There’s no right answer,” Cleo says. “Why would you move back to Montana, Wyn?”
“Because in this life, I decided not to stay there,” he says. “I decided to do something different than my parents did, be someone different. But if I had another one to live, I’d want the one where I stayed too.”
I chance a glance at him. He turns his cheek flat against the wooden pier, and our gazes hold for the span of four breaths, his damp arm and mine barely touching.
A silent conversation passes between us: Hi and Hi back and You’re smiling at me and No, you’re smiling at me.
I turn my eyes back to the sky and shut them tight.
By the time we crawl into our beds on opposite sides of the kids’ room, the buzzing in my veins still hasn’t let up.
Wyn, however, is so still that I assume he’s instantly fallen asleep. After some time, his voice breaks the quiet. “Why do you always start cleaning when I come into the room?”
My laugh is part surprise, part embarrassment. “What?”
“If everyone’s out back and you’re in the kitchen, the second I come inside, you go for a sponge.”
“I do not,” I say.
“You do.” The blankets rustle as he rolls onto his side.
“Well, if I do, it’s a coincidence,” I say. “I love cleaning.”
“They told me that,” he says.
I laugh. “How did that come up? Did you ask for the least interesting thing about me?”
“A few weeks after I moved in, the apartment was completely disgusting,” he says. “And I’m not even that clean of a guy. I finally asked Sabrina about it, and she said they must’ve gotten used to you always scrubbing everything. I think I’m the only person who’s taken out the trash in the last six months. Cleo picks up after herself, but she won’t touch Sabrina’s mess.”
I smile at the dark ceiling, my heart swelling with affection for both of them. “Cleo’s great at boundaries. She probably thinks if she lets Sabrina’s toothpaste splatter accumulate long enough, she’ll notice.”
“Yeah, well, if I didn’t intervene, the counter would be more toothpaste than porcelain by now.”
“You’re being unrealistic,” I say. “The entire apartment would be toothpaste.”
“You don’t seem to mind that our friend is a disgusting slob.”
“I’ve always liked cleaning,” I say. “Even when I was little.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Both my parents had to work a lot, and they were always stressed out about money, but they were also good about making sure my sister and I had everything we needed. There wasn’t a ton I could do to help, except cleaning. And I like how it’s so measurable, like you immediately see that what you’re doing is making a difference. Whenever I get anxious, I clean, and it relaxes me.”
A long silence. “Do I make you anxious?”
“What? Of course not,” I say.
His blankets rustle again. “When I came into the room tonight, you started rearranging the drawers.”
“Coincidence,” I insist.
“So you’re not anxious,” he says.
“I’m never anxious here,” I say.
Another pause. “What are they like?”
“Who?”
“Your family,” he says. “You don’t talk about them all that much. Are they like you?”
I prop my head up in my hand and squint through the dark. “What am I like?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says. “I’m not good with words.”
“If you’d rather, you can act it out,” I say.
He turns onto his back again, waves his arms in a circle.
“A gigantic orb,” I guess.
He laughs. “I guess I’m not good at charades either. I mean it in a good way.”
“A gigantic orb in a good way,” I say.
“So.” He faces me once more. It’s easier to meet his eyes in the dark. “Are they gigantic orbs too?”
“It’s impossible to say, since I still have no idea what that means. But my parents are nice. Dad’s a science teacher, and Mom works at a dentist’s office. They always made sure my sister and I had what we needed.”
“You said that already,” he says.
Reading my hesitation, he says, “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”
“There’s not a lot to say.” We fall back into silence, but after a while, it bubbles over: “They don’t love each other.”
The words hang there. He waits, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve decided not to talk about this. It comes out anyway: “They barely knew each other when they got married. They were in college still, and my mom got pregnant with my older sister. Mom was supposed to go to medical school, and Dad was supposed to go to grad school for astrophysics—but they needed money, so she dropped out to raise Eloise, and he got a job substitute teaching. By the time I was born, it was already like this weird late-twentieth-century marriage of convenience.”
“Do they fight?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say. “My sister’s six years older than me, and she was kind of a wild child, so they used to argue with her, but not with each other.”
About her dropping AP classes without talking to them, or coming home with a belly button ring, or announcing her plans to take a backpacking gap year.
Mom and Dad never screamed, but Eloise did, and when, inevitably, they sent her to her room or she stormed out of the house, everything would always seem somehow quieter than before. A dangerous quiet, like one tiny peep might make the cracks spread, the house collapse.