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want to tell you now,” he uttered.
    “Tell me anyway,” I demanded, and he knew he would have to, or suffer the consequences. There were ways of making Scott talk, and in our eighteen years as brother and sister, I had learned every one of them.
    “I joined the Army,” Scott spared himself, looking up at me with his big brown eyes for reaction, and, for a second, I felt numb, as if his words had poison in them that rendered me paralyzed.
    Then, I felt everything but numb. There had been a lot of fear and pain and anger I had felt over the past years, but there had been a lot of those things I hadn’t let myself feel too, and all that was left came crashing in at once.
    “Scott,” was all I could say, but, in my mind, I was cursing all those damned war ads in every paper, plastered on the screen before films, and posted at his high school for making him feel responsible and chosen and patriotic.
    “Well, what else should I do?” he reasonably asked, as if he would have liked a real answer, and I cursed myself too when I didn’t have one to give him. “Just sit around and wait for them to draft me? They’re going to get to me eventually. I would rather it be my choice.”
    It wasn’t Scott’s choice, though. I could see it in his eyes. He was scared and he was trapped. He wasn’t a soldier.
    “But Uncle Rodney and Edward...” I reminded him we had another brother once, the other half of me, born a minute and a half before, Edward, who was first in line to enlist the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
    Sometimes, when we were young, Edward and I left Scott out, because we were twins and nearly four years older than him. He was the annoying little brother who followed us around, trying to be like us, with no chance he’d ever be as much like us as we were like each other. Until, one day Edward and I finally realized Scott didn’t want to be us, he just wanted to be with us.
    “I’m not going to end up like them,” Scott made me a promise there was only a fifty-fifty chance, at best, he could keep. “I’m going to go in there and end this war single-handedly.”
    He thought he would make me laugh, but watching him be brave, not because he was that kind of brave, but because he had no choice but to find bravery he shouldn’t need, only made me cry harder. I would rather him spend all his time with Ariel, I realized then, making her laugh and getting all her touches, than for him to be anywhere else, and my tears were less selfish as I hugged Scott around his neck, until Mama came in and caught us like that.
    “Elizabeth, what’s the matter?” she asked.
    “She broke a dish,” Scott said, and, pulling back, I blinked at him. It wasn’t like Scott to lie, and especially not so well. You could always see it in him when he tried, but even I would have believed him if I hadn’t been there the instant before.
    “It’s just one dish,” Mama turned softer. Strict as she could be, she always let up when one of us cried, as if she knew a heavy hand could do real damage. “We have enough. I’ll clean this up. Scott, take your sister in to dry her face and listen to the radio for a while. She’s been doing too much. No news, now. Listen to something nice.”
    “Yes, Ma’am,” Scott said, and we did as Mama told us, settling in the living room, where Scott put me down in a chair with a handkerchief and turned the dial on the radio until he tuned out of Daddy’s news program and found music we both knew wouldn’t fit Mama’s definition of ‘nice,’ but that she’d forgive us listening to under the circumstances.
    “Don’t tell Mama or Nan, okay?” Scott returned to my knees to make me swear. “They don’t know yet.”
    Trying to be as brave as Scott was being, I felt nothing close to bravery, but I still nodded in agreement. “Are you leaving as soon as you graduate?” I asked him, feeling like the younger sibling asking for reassurance, and when Scott’s gaze dropped to the floor, I