Chapter 4
It was never going to end.
I glanced at my sister, who had dragged herself out of her bedroom (my mom had gone in there to prod and wheedle in order to make that happen). Now Morgan looked both disheveled and half-asleep again, but at least she was seated and not prone.
Next, I looked over at my parents. My dad stood with his arms crossed and his face set in a bland expression. You might have thought that his apparent calm was a positive thing, but I knew him better. He could have erupted at any moment.
My mom had her fingers twisted together behind her back and she was trying to smile, but her eyes kept darting around the room: Dad, the door, her purse, Max, the door again, Morgan, back to Dad, over to Max, and then to the window.
I thought she might have been looking for an escape route, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea. We’d sat through these before.
“It can’t lose because it’s me. It’s me, I’m the guarantee,” Max said. “I’m the guarantee. It’s me, I’m the guarantee.” He said that a few more times and I thought how it would be a good refrain in a song.
“Our love is true, it’s meant to be…because it’s me, I’m the guarantee!” I sang, but only in my mind. I had never thought about a career as a lyricist, but hey, maybe I had a hit on my hands.
“Arsch mit Ohren. If he says that one more time, I guarantee that I’ll smack him.”
I looked over at Morgan, shocked. I hadn’t caught everything she’d just said, but I got the last part.
Had she really just whispered that to me?
It was a funny comment she might have made a few years before, but I must have misheard her now.
I turned to look again at my brother’s laptop screen and in my head, I continued my musical composition.
“My favorite snack is crackers and Brie, and it’s me, I’m the guarantee!
” Or how about, “Someday I’ll go to Tennessee? ” I did want to travel.
“Max.”
Oh, damn. I snapped out of my stupid daydream and I felt my breath catch. My sister audibly swallowed.
“Max,” my dad said again. His face was losing the blandness as it coalesced into a more familiar expression: anger.
“Dad, I’m not done. Here are the profit projections.
” But when my brother went to switch to the next slide, he hit something else and closed the presentation by mistake.
His graphs disappeared and there was his wallpaper, which was a picture of him and a woman.
They both held bottles of beer and she was licking hers in a way that… well…
“What the fuck is this?” my dad asked. But he seemed less angry. “Is that your girlfriend?”
“Uh, yeah,” Max mumbled. He had closed his laptop and the slideshow seemed to be over.
“What’s her name, hon?” my mom asked. “You haven’t talked about her.”
But my brother wasn’t ready to talk about her now, either. He hurried up the stairs, his computer under his arm. My dad, chuckling to himself, went toward the kitchen and my mom followed. It left me and my sister in the living room.
“Did you recognize her?” Morgan asked.
“I think they went to high school together, but I didn’t get a great look,” I answered. I had been focused on that girl’s tongue caressing the neck of the bottle so I’d missed some of her other features.
“Does Max really have a girlfriend?”
“Ask him,” I suggested. That would have involved my sister making an effort, though. She’d have to stay out of her bed and engage in human interaction without being harassed into it by our mother.
But I didn’t say any of that and I went upstairs to my bedroom.
We were lucky to have a house big enough that we all got a separate place to sleep (thanks to my grandpa, who had built it with the idea that it would be a family home, shared and maintained just like our family business).
We were also unlucky because it was a lot of area to maintain, even if everyone worked on it and split the cost. For example, if you needed to do repairs on the foundation (and we did), there was a lot of foundation to fix.
Although it was my room, I didn’t have a lock on the door and I didn’t think to wedge a chair under the handle so that no one else could enter.
My sister did enter, right behind me, and she sat down on my bed as if we were going to have a cozy chat.
That was something we hadn’t done in at least ten years, so my reaction of staring with my jaw hanging open made sense.
“At least Dad didn’t call us names,” she remarked, making herself comfortable.
She looked around the room and she was probably impressed.
It was significantly neater than hers, because I picked up my dirty clothes, washed them, folded them, and then put them all away.
It was also significantly cleaner, because I dusted, changed the sheets, washed the windows, and vacuumed the old carpet.
Maybe it was giving her ideas about how to keep up her own space.
“Why are you in here?” I asked. No, I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was genuinely curious about her answer.
She only shrugged, though, and then sat in silence.
So I continued to do what I had planned, which was to go to my little desk to work on a “group project” for school that had become a solitary, me-only project.
I opened my laptop, which was five years older than my brother’s and was inching daily toward a total crash-and-burn situation.
Now, the screen flashed green three times before it finally showed something recognizable, and the whole process took much too long.
However, my sister was still sitting on my bed as it finished, like she wasn’t going anywhere. I continued to ignore her.
“Do you think Max’s business idea will work this time?” she asked me.
“No.” How many of his presentations had we sat through? He had come up with idea after idea, and none of them had ever bloomed into success. They had all lost money, in fact. “Have an iced tea, don’t you agree? It’s me, I’m the guarantee!”
“I wish he hadn’t done that course.”
I turned away from the laptop, which was struggling to open my project. “What course? How do you know about it?” As far as I was aware, she didn’t talk to him, either.
“I could hear him from my room,” Morgan said.
“He did this online business thing that was supposed to help you optimize your…” She stopped and thought.
“They said a lot of words but none of them made too much sense to me. Mostly they wanted you to repeat that you were the guarantee. Things couldn’t fail because you were going to make them happen. ”
“It’s me, I’m the guarantee, now I have to go pee,” I hummed out loud. “Basically, they were selling self-confidence.”
She nodded and yawned. This had probably been the most extended period that she’d been awake and ambulatory in several months and it was definitely the largest number of words that she’d spoken.
“I can hear everything from his room if I have my closet door open. He puts the laptop speaker up against the wall and he won’t use his headphones since they hurt him. ”
Our brother had always complained about his delicate ears. “I would have kept the closet door shut,” I remarked.
She started to change color. Not blue, like she wasn’t getting oxygen, but a funny, mottled red that was very obvious because her skin was so deathly pale. “I don’t mind hearing people,” she said.
I turned back to the screen, which now showed that my three groupmates had still not done one damn thing on our project. “If you want to hear people, you don’t have to eavesdrop. Just get out of your room,” I told her.
Morgan got out of mine. I heard the bed squeak and then my door bumped as she shut it, and I immediately felt guilty as well as angry.
There was no reason for her to waste away, alone.
And there was no reason for my brother to believe that his latest business idea would work, since his previous plans never had.
The one before this had been a rideshare company that was also a dating service: your driver would take you to your destination after also picking up the man/woman with whom you were most compatible.
Max blamed the failure of that venture on the smaller number of single people in our area and the unusual fact that most of them seemed unwilling to turn over a large amount of personal information.
“How am I supposed to match them if they won’t tell me shit?” he had raged. “Of course I need to know their social security numbers and favorite sex positions!”
The business plan that my brother had introduced today also seemed destined for failure, because I couldn’t imagine that many tourists would have been interested in having a near-death experience (he wanted to call his company “You Might Make It”).
I just didn’t believe that vacationers would readily sign up to be left in the woods at night with no gear and no phone to call for help, or to be tied up and thrown off the side of a boat.
Not to mention, if something went wrong and they didn’t actually make it…
But luckily, my brother’s plans never progressed too far out of what he called “market research” and, more importantly, funding requests.
Today, we hadn’t gotten into actual amounts because we’d been sidetracked by the picture of his alleged girlfriend giving head to the beer bottle.
We all had to listen to his presentations, every single one, because the money he requested belonged to our family. It came from our family business.
I worked steadily on my group project, which was actually only mine, and I got it to a point where it would have been ok to hand it in.
Then I sent a message to the other three people to tell them that it was done and I gave them one last chance to look it over before I submitted it.
I didn’t care if they never opened my texts but at least no one could complain to our professor that I’d cut them out.