Wheezie Cameron was redoing her room because it was the one thing in the house she could control.
The room had been the same since she was nine: the same pale yellow walls, the same white furniture, the same framed print of a sailboat that she had never chosen and never liked.
She was thirteen now, almost fourteen, and she had decided that the room would change even if nothing else at Tannyhill ever did.
She had paint samples.
She had a vision board.
She had spent three weeks moving her bed from wall to wall, testing configurations, trying to find the arrangement that made the room feel like hers instead of like a guest suite.
Tonight she was pinning fabric swatches to the corkboard above her desk when the knock came.
Not a knock, exactly.
More of a tap.
Three fingers, not a fist.
The knock of someone who wasn’t sure he was welcome but was going to try anyway.
She knew the knock.
She didn’t trust it.
“What.”
“It’s me.” Her brother’s voice.
Rafe’s voice.
The voice of the person who had snapped at her in the hallway two days ago and then apologized through the door, which was — she was still processing this, something the old Rafe had never done.
The old Rafe didn’t apologize.
The old Rafe didn’t notice when he’d been cruel.
The old Rafe barely noticed Wheezie at all.
“What do you want.”
“Nothing. Just — can I sit out here for a minute?”
She looked at the door.
The door was closed.
She hadn’t opened it.
She didn’t have to open it.
But her brother was on the other side, asking to sit in the hallway outside her room like a cat who wanted to be near but not too near, and that was so strange that she found herself curious despite her better judgment.
“Fine,” she said.
“But I’m not opening the door.”
“That’s fine.”
She heard him slide down the wall.
The old Tannyhill floors creaked.
He was sitting in the hallway, his back against her door, doing absolutely nothing that made sense to her.
“How was your week,” he said.
She stared at the fabric swatches.
“What.”
“Your week. How was it.”
“Why do you want to know.”
“Because I’m asking. Because I haven’t asked in — a while. And I should have.”
The answer was so unexpected that she didn’t have a script for it.
No one in this house asked about her week.
Her father asked about her grades, because grades were measurable and measurable things were useful.
Rose asked if she’d eaten, because Rose was kind in the way that stepmothers were kind, efficiently, without getting too close.
Sarah asked sometimes, but Sarah was never here, and when she was here she was always halfway out the door to John B’s or the Cut.
And Rafe: the old Rafe, the Rafe who had lived in this house before something changed, had never asked her anything.
He had passed her in the hall like she was furniture.
“It was fine,” she said automatically.
“How was the biology test.”
She blinked.
“How do you know about the biology test.”
“You mentioned it. The other day. In the kitchen.”
That was true.
She had mentioned it.
She had mentioned it because he had asked, genuinely asked, the way no one else did, and she had answered without thinking, and then she had spent the next two days wondering if he’d even registered the answer.
He had.
He had registered it and remembered it and was now following up on it, which was: she didn’t have a word for it.
Weird.
Good-weird.
The kind of thing you wanted to be happy about but couldn’t be happy about because you were still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I think I did okay,” she said.
“The essay part was hard. But I studied.”
“Good.”
She waited.
She waited for him to ask for something, money, a favor, cover for something he’d done.
The old Rafe was nice when he wanted something.
The old Rafe’s niceness had a shape, and the shape was always a transaction, and the transaction always ended with Wheezie on the losing side.
He didn’t ask for anything.
He just sat there, on the other side of the door, breathing.
“Your room,” he said.
“You’re redoing it.”
“How do you know that.”
“The paint samples. You’ve been carrying them around for like two weeks.”
She looked at the paint samples on her desk, greens and blues, a pale lavender, a gray that reminded her of the morning water.
“I want it to be different.”
“Different how.”
“I don’t know. Mine. Not — not like the rest of the house. The house is all the same. Everything matches and everything belongs to Dad or Rose or whoever decorated it before I was born. I want something that’s just — ”
“Yours.”
“Yeah.” She said it quietly.
“Mine.”
“That’s a good thing to want.”
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t know how to answer.
The fabric swatches blurred on the corkboard, and she realized, with a start of something that wasn’t quite anger and not quite hope, that her throat was tight.
She was sitting on her bedroom floor with her back against the door, and her brother was on the other side, and he had asked about her week like it mattered, and he had remembered the biology test, and he had said that wanting something of her own was a good thing.
The old Rafe had never said anything like that.
The old Rafe had never even noticed that she existed except as an obstacle or a witness.
The new Rafe, whoever he was now, whatever the “new program” was, sat in the hall outside her door and asked questions he didn’t have to ask and didn’t want anything in return.
“Are you okay,” she said.
The question came out before she could stop it.
A pause.
“What do you mean.”
“You’re different. You’ve been different all week. Dad thinks you’re having a breakdown. Rose thinks you’re on new medication. Topper keeps texting me asking if I know what’s going on with you. Everyone thinks you’re something, and nobody knows what, and I just — ” She stopped.
She took a breath.
“Are you okay.”
Another pause.
Longer this time.
She could hear him breathing on the other side of the door, and she could almost feel him thinking, the way you could feel a person choosing their words.
“I’m getting better,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’m okay yet. But I’m getting better.”
The answer was more honest than any answer she’d ever gotten from him.
The old Rafe would have said “I’m fine” and slammed a door.
The old Rafe would have turned the question into a fight.
The new Rafe said I don’t know if I’m okay yet, and the honesty was almost harder to take than the cruelty had been.
Cruelty you could handle.
Cruelty was predictable.
Honesty meant something was at stake.
“The colors,” he said.
“For your room. What are you thinking?”
“Green. Like — kind of a soft green. And blue for the trim. And I want to get rid of that sailboat picture. I hate that picture.”
“I’ll get you a new one. Something you actually want. If you want.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I’m offering.”
She sat with the offer.
The offer was small: a picture for her wall, a thing that cost nothing for a Cameron, and also not small at all.
The offer was a door, and the door was open, and she didn’t have to walk through it yet.
She could sit on her side and look at it and decide later.
“Okay,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Okay.”
He stood.
She heard him stand: the creak of the floor, the rustle of clothing, the sound of a person getting up from a hallway floor where he had been sitting for no reason except to talk to his sister.
The door stayed closed.
She didn’t open it.
He didn’t ask her to.
“Goodnight, Wheezie.”
“Goodnight.”
His footsteps went down the hall.
His door closed.
She sat on her floor with the fabric swatches in her lap and the paint samples on her desk and the strange weight of a conversation that had actually happened.
Her brother had asked about her week.
Her brother had remembered the biology test.
Her brother had said he was getting better and didn’t know if he was okay yet.
She believed him.
She didn’t know why she believed him.
She didn’t know if she should.
But she believed him, and the belief was a new thing, a small thing, a green shoot in soil that had been dead for years.
She pinned another swatch to the board.
Green.
Soft green.
Like something growing.