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you.
    This is boring, I said after a while.
    Leave then. Who wants you here—you or your fruitcake mom? You shut the book and centered it carefully on the coffee table. My dad knows some ladies, but my mom is number one. She’s number one, he tells me all the time. No one can take her place. Your mom’s not so good-looking, either. Her ears stick out.
    I pushed my nose into my baseball glove and smelled and hoped for a terrible thing to say back.
    My dad could whip your dad in a fight.
    Anyone could whip my dad in a fight, you said. Even I could. Maybe one day I will.
    It wasn’t the answer I expected. I want to go now, I said.
    Go. Who’s stopping you?
    Her ears do not stick out.
    Nobody asked you to come here. My mom talks to me at night from Eternity and she said, Don’t let strangers in our house, especially not in the dining room with the silver candlesticks, because they could be robbers.
    So I punched you where it hurt. I knew, since I was getting beat up a lot in my new school. A good six inches above the belly button, square between the ribs. You doubled over, then jumped, catching my leg as I made a coward’s break for the kitchen. Then you leaped and rolled on top of me, grinding your elbow into my chest until I thought my heart would rupture. I was pounding the floor with my heels and wheezing for Mom, and with her and Lyle only a sprint away, you knew your time was almost up. Still, there were a few seconds left where you could have punched back, jammed some fingers, maybe yanked a joint out of its socket.
    Instead you mashed my cheeks tight between your thumb and fingers, then pulled my head rough to the side and dipped your face low to my ear to whisper words damp and hard enough to flood shivers through my body.
    You’ll never be my brother.

T HE PLANE LIFTS INTO the air. My ears pop and Lyle passes me a stick of gum. He says he bought it at the airport shop along with my apple juice. Lyle is a think-aheader.
    “Mal’s probably just starting her champagne and shrimp cocktail.” I try to get a look.
    “Sit down, Ben. The seat belt sign is on. They’ll put you in airplane custody if you can’t follow directions.”
    “You’re lying.”
    Lyle shakes his head. “I’ll have to report you to the GCA.”
    “Whatever.” I fiddle for my seat belt. When I was younger, Lyle had me believing that the GCA was a real place, like a courthouse. You were the one who told me there was no such thing as the Good Citizens’ Alliance.
    That’s Dad’s phony-baloney, you told me. Only in his dreams is there a place like that. He’d elect himself president. President Citizen.
    Even after four years, Lyle won’t let on that the GCA’s a joke.
    A plane lady wheels down her cart, asking if anyone wants a beverage. I call out, “Grape pop!” before Lyle can intercept my choice with more juice. Lyle asks for coffee but he doesn’t drink it, just watches it and stirs it with a plastic straw.
    “Not since Thanksgiving, right? Five months, it’s been,” he says.
    “That’s about right.” I know what Lyle means. It’s been five months since we saw Mom and you. It should have been four months, but you both were on a boat this past Christmas, on a scuba-diving trip along with your new girlfriend, Melanie, and some people from Mom’s job at the vet clinic. So Mom had pushed up your visit to Thanksgiving, except for Lyle made it to be like Christmas, baking his special gingerbread and buying presents, and he didn’t schedule any clients for the whole week.
    “Mom brought that free turkey,” I say.
    “Free-range, not free,” Lyle tells me. “He seemed good, wouldn’t you say?”
    “Dustin? Yeah, he was good.”
    “He got tall. He was always going to be tall.”
    Which kind of gets me, since it’s looking like I’m not going to be tall like you or like Lyle. Runt, you used to remind me. Or Big Ben, for a joke.
    “His hair covered his ears,” I remind Lyle. “You didn’t like it that way, but he