What I Thought Was True Read Free Page B

it.
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    Em chews his lip, and his foot begins twitching back and forth.
    My eight-year-old brother is not autistic. He’s not anything
    they’ve mapped genetically. He’s just Emory. No diagnosis, no
    chart, no map at all. Some hard things come easy to him, and
    some basic things he struggles with. I wrap my arms around
    his waist, his skinny ribs, rest my chin on his shoulder, feeling
    his dark flyaway hair lift to tickle my cheek, inhaling his sun-
    warm, little-boy scent. “This is the one with the funny song,
    remember? The sunny funny-face song?”
    At last Em settles, snuggled with his favorite stuffed animal,
    Hideout the stuffed hermit crab, in his arms. Grandpa Ben won
    him at some fair when Emory was two, and he’s been Em’s
    favorite ever since.
    I nudge aside Fabio, go outside to the front steps, because
    I just can’t watch Audrey Hepburn being waifish and wistful.
    At nearly five eleven, nobody, no matter how nearsighted, will
    ever say I’m waifish.
    Squinting out over the island, over the roofs of the low,
    split-level houses across from ours—Hoop’s squat gray ranch,
    Pam’s dirty shingled white house, Viv’s pale green house with
    the redwood shutters that don’t match—I can just barely catch
    the dazzle of the end-of-day sun off the water. I lean back on
    my elbows, shut my eyes and take a deep breath of the warm,
    briny air.
    Which reeks.
    My eyes pop open. A pair of my cousin’s workout sneakers
    are inches from my nose. Yuck. Eau de sweaty eighteen-year-
    old boy. I elbow them off the porch, onto the grass.
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    The screen door bangs open. Mom slides down next to me,
    a carton of ice cream in one hand, spoon in the other. “Want
    some? I’ll even get you your own spoon.”
    “Nah, I’m fine.” I offer a smile. Pretty sure she doesn’t buy
    it. “That your appetizer, Mom?”
    “Ice cream,” she says. “Appetizer, main course, dessert. So
    flexible.”
    She digs around for the chunks of peanut butter ripple, and
    then pauses to brush my hair back from my forehead. “Any-
    thing we need to talk about? You’ve been quiet the past day or
    so.”
    It’s ironic. Mom spends most of her spare time reading
    romance novels about people who take their clothes off a lot.
    She explained the facts of life to a stunned and horrified Nic
    and me by demonstrating with a Barbie and a G.I. Joe. She took
    me to the gynecologist for the Pill when I was fifteen—“It’s
    good for your complexion,” she insisted, when I sputtered that
    it wasn’t necessary, “and your future.” We can talk about physi-
    cal stuff—she’s made sure of that—but only in the abstract . . .
    Now I want to rest my head onto her soft, freckled shoulder
    and tell her everything about the boys in the car. But I don’t
    want her knowing that anyone sees me like that.
    That I’ve given anyone a reason.
    “I’m fine,” I repeat. She spoons up more ice cream, face
    absorbed. After a moment, Fabio noses his way through the
    screen door, staggers up to Mom, and sets his chin on her
    thigh, rolling his eyes at her beseechingly.
    “Don’t,” I tell her. Though I know she will. Sure enough,
    Mom scrapes out a chunk, tapping the spoon on the deck.
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    Fabio drops his inches-from-death act and slurps it up, then
    resumes his hopeful post, drooling on Mom’s leg.
    After a while, she says, “Maybe you could walk down to the
    Ellingtons’”—she wags the spoon toward Low Road—“say
    hiya to Mrs. E.”
    “Wait. What? Like a job interview? Now?” I look down at
    my fraying cut-offs and T-shirt, back at Mom. Then I run inside
    and come back with my familiar green-and-pink mascara tube.
    I unscrew it, flicking the wand rapidly over my eyelashes.
    “You don’t need that,” Mom says for the millionth