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flipped a page of my book, even though I hadn’t finished reading it.
    “So … do you go to school here, Emily?”
    “Uh-huh,” I said.
    “Are you from around here?” he asked.
    I started to mow down my sandwich faster, just in case I needed a quick exit, and thought of a good vague response that I had recently heard.
    “Not really,” I said, hiding my smile.
    “ … Yeah, I’m not really from around here either.” There was another blissful moment of silence, and then he continued, “Do you live close to school?”
    “Kind of,” I answered, my eyes never leaving the page, my lips never more than an inch away from my sandwich.
    “I’ve got my own place a couple of blocks from here,” he said. “Do you still live with your parents?”
    “Yep,” I lied.
    “Do you have any siblings?” he hurriedly asked, likely noticing that I was shoveling the food into my mouth as quickly as possible. But he was too late. I was done eating, and for the first time, gladly offered more than a few syllables.
    “Sorry, my break is over. I’ve got to go before my boss freaks out.”
    I picked up my stuff and rushed off before he had a chance to find something else to question me about. I would have run out of there, but that would have made it a little too obvious.
    “What a freak,” I whispered to myself, as I walked back into the library—though he was probably thinking the same thing about me.
    I was back at work, half an hour early from my lunch. And my fake boss didn’t freak out.
    By the time I strolled out of the library at the end of my work day, the weather had changed dramatically; the sky was dark, and black clouds were rolling in like a tsunami. With all of the humidity from the past few days, I expected that I didn’t have much time to spare before the rain came crashing down, hard.
    Back at the house, I spent more time than I had squinting in the mirror, fixing my devastatingly frizzed hair, trying to find something to wear.
    When I reached the cemetery’s entrance, black clouds were already threatening overhead. With only two or three people idling under the shadows of the trees, the cemetery was almost desolate—the smart people were indoors again.
    But when I took a quick right at the decaying catacomb, I stopped dead in my tracks.
    Someone had thrown a crushed pop can and candy wrapper on top of my brother’s grave. I knew it was unfair of me to be upset that my brother Bill’s grave had been desecrated—especially when the rest of the cemetery had never been anything but disrespected—but I had no sense of justice when it came to my big brother.
    I took a few steps to Bill’s tombstone and crouched down to push the garbage away. I grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and wiped the soda that had been spewed onto the stone. And I then stopped, forgetting my purpose, tracing my hand along the engraved lines of his name.
    You’re supposed to hold your breath when going past a cemetery, or, as the superstition goes, you’ll breathe in the spirit of the dead. You’re also supposed to stick your thumbs into your fists to protect your parents. I did neither and ran through the cemetery almost every day—if only that was enough to explain why I was so haunted, and why my parents were … the way they were. I missed Bill—every second of every day.
    I had little recollection of my life before things started to go so wrong in my family. Burt and Isabelle had had an affair when Burt was still married to someone else and Bill was just a baby. When Burt left Bill’s mother and married my mom, Bill’s mother committed suicide. And I was born in the middle of all of this, a soap opera that my big brother had tried to shield me from. Through all of this, in spite of how I came into this world, he was my biggest, my only, ally.
    Most of my family memories were of the heated arguments between Burt and my brother. Bill getting into fights, Bill selling drugs, Bill getting kicked out of eight different