I take a deep breath, seize the doorknob, turn it—and it’s locked. I grin. Suddenly, all that unfamiliarity melts away, and I’m at home again. Really at home.
I dig a coin out of my pocket and use it to unlock my door. It’s not a particularly clever trick, most doorknobs have a little slot in the handle that makes it easy to do … but it never really caught on with my brothers. They preferred the method of barging into a room that left the door swinging off its hinges.
I, on the other hand, have always preferred a more subtle approach.
I tuck my penny back into my pocket and slip into my room. It’s just like I left it, which is good … but more than a little surprising. I’d half expected one of my brothers to have claimed it in my absence and turned it into some teenage boy’s sweaty den by now.
But here it is, exactly how I remember it.
There’s my twin-size bed with the faded hand-me-down SpongeBob sheets. There are my plain blue curtains, taken from Caleb and Spencer’s room once they got blackout ones. There’s my white dresser with little yellow flowers painted on the handles, a freebie from a cousin who moved to Cincinnati for college … and also the only piece of furniture in the room that actually looks like it might belong to a female.
Most of the things I own are secondhand. Even this T-shirt used to be Mom’s.
Shit, even my school choice was handed down. Caleb was the one who got the pamphlet for Bleakwood.
I don’t have my bag—Dad already took it to the laundry room—so I head for my dresser, passing by the shelf with all my academic trophies. I’ve won a lot of quiz bowls and spelling bees. And essay contests. And math competitions. My brothers’ rooms are filled with awards from hockey, baseball, football, soccer, and even surfing, in Spencer’s case, you name it; but I was always the smart one.
The nerdy one—a fact that my brothers were not want to let me forget.
Just wait until they hear that I signed up for lacrosse. They’ll never let me hear the end of it.
There’s a soft knock at my door.
“Who is it?” I call, still rooting through my dresser drawers for something comfortable to wear. I happen across a pile of hand-me-down sports bras and push them aside to a more prominent place in the drawer. Those will come in handy for hiding the boobs on a day-to-day basis once lacrosse season is over.
“Me,” calls a male voice from the other side of the door. It takes me one second to register that it’s Caleb. I really have been gone long. My brother’s voices have started to meld all together into one.
“Read the sign.”
He laughs. “Come on. Can I come in?”
I toss the shirt I’m holding onto my bed and cross my small room to open my door. Caleb ducks his head to enter and scoots across the floor to my bed, plopping down on the edge of it. I shut the door behind him and head back to my dresser.
“What do you want?”
“I’m checking on you,” he says.
I shoot him a look and go back to digging through my drawers. Caleb’s eighteen, only two years older than me. I’ve always been the closest to him out of my other brothers—or as close as you can be to a boy who’s hell-bent on stuffing you inside cabinets or whatever. Despite that, he can still get protective.
“I’m fine.”
“No, I mean,” and here he glances once towards the open door for listening ears, “did you really fall down the stairs?”
I grab a pair of shorts and turn to him. “Yeah, actually. Why?”
He fidgets, his eyes darting around the room. He grabs my Scooby-Doo alarm clock off the chair that serves as my nightstand and turns it over in his hands. “Normally people say that kind of thing when … uh … well, girls say that kind of thing … .er, women, I mean, say …”
“Spit it out, Caleb.”
He sighs. “Sometimes victims of domestic abuse use falling down the stairs or bumping into things as excuses when they’ve been battered by their spouse.”
I’m taken aback. “‘Victims of domestic abuse’? ‘Battered by their spouse’? What the hell, Caleb?”
He shrugs. “I’m taking a criminal justice class as an elective this semester.”
“Ah.” That explains thing
s. I was scared for a moment that maybe he’d fallen on his head or maybe I’d actually stepped into an alternate reality where my brothers used words like “victims” and “battered” on a regular basis.