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Laboratory School. On the one from NYU: Christian Emerson Marshall.
    He was supposed to go to Northwestern or the University of Chicago, stay in the city. NYU was his third choice. I pulled the bratty little brother routine, hiding the letter for a couple of days before I let him see it. But when I gave it to him, he just chucked it on his desk; he’d already been accepted to Northwestern.
    “An acceptance, right?” he asked when I picked it back up and handed it to him.
    “Yes,” I said, looking up at him.
    “Good to have a backup, I guess,” he said, and I knew he was going to stay in Chicago, that he’d be around for another four years. At the time, I thought it was because of me. I never considered where he might go after he graduated from college.
    Now I look at the NYU diploma and glance at the date.
    Twenty-eight months ago. More than two years. Two years. What was I doing the day he graduated? It was the summer before I started high school, before I even met Lauren, but after my dad started in on me. The blister in my brain wobbles threateningly.
    I want to prop the diploma on my fingertips like a waiter with a tray and then whip it over, slamming the glass against the dresser’s corner. Shatter it. Anger coils in my chest, and I hold it there, refusing to let it strike. No smashing of sentimental objects. Too much like my father. Carefully, I rehang the frame.
    When I hear Christian’s voice, I jump and whirl around. But he isn’t in the apartment; he’s in Mirriam’s place, and the walls are thin.
    I’m tempted to stay and press my ear to the wall, but I figure I shouldn’t add eavesdropping to my steadily growing list of crimes, bastard that I am. I start to back out of the closet, hoping a board won’t creak, when I hear Mirriam say, “You’ll have to think about it. I mean, he’ll need to transfer into a school, and I’m just saying I can help you guys look into them.”
    “I can’t make any plans right now. I don’t even know if he’s staying.”
    That stops me. I push through a row of shirts, step over to the wall, and lean against it. Cold plaster against one shoulder. I’m sandwiched between dress pants and a blue long-sleeved shirt. I push the sleeve out of my face.
    “Wait, what? Isn’t he?” There is a pause. “He’s your brother, Christian. Family.”
    “And that means something different to me than it does to you.”
    There’s another pause, and I picture her putting her hands on her hips like she did in the bookstore. Even without seeing her, I know that they’re having a silence-off. I press my shoulder deeper against the wall and wait.
    Wait.
    Wait.
    Finally, Christian caves. “You have a great family. You’re always around for each other.”
    “So, tell me about it, about yours.”
    I hear the bedsprings squeak. When Mirriam speaks again, her voice is coming from farther down, so I know she’s the one who sat.
    “Tell me something, anything, about him.”
    Christian’s voice is closer to me now. “He was a typical little brother. He was pesky and tagged along and … Okay, I remember something. One Halloween …”
    Family legend time. I dressed up as a knight, and he bought me a sword with his own money since my mother wouldn’t hear of such a violent instrument in the hands of her son. Ironic? Why, yes.
    He tells her about our neighborhood’s haunted house and the witch who lived there (really just a lonely widow, as we discovered later). For Halloween, she put cobwebs all over her gate, had howling ghosts that lurked in trees, and a mechanical skeleton in a coffin beside her door. But she gave out Mr. Goodbars, and not the fun-sized rip-off, but the real deal. We used to tell this one together to our family friends, each of us adding a part.
    “Anyway,” Christian continues, “it was creepy, so I went with him. One year …”
    I was six, and you were eleven , I add my lines silently.
    “… Paul, a friend of mine, had dressed up as a skeleton. He must