I left home to live with the Lanes the summer before my senior year. It was July in New Jersey. My mother and I had gotten into a fight, and despite my threats to leave home, I doubt she expected me to run away.

My mother worked at an insurance firm close to the city; it paid well but never enough, not for the hours it stole from her days. I made a point of leaving when she was at work. Downstairs, a visiting nurse was attending to my grandmother, who spent her days resigned to a rented hospital bed in what had been my father’s office — before he abruptly left when I was in middle school, saddling my mother with debts she couldn’t pay. Through the thin floor, I could hear my grandmother joking about the sitcoms she watched. She referred to the characters as her only friends. “That’s not true,” said the nurse. “You have so many people.”

I stuffed clothes into a backpack. Knowing I’d have to give the Lanes something for letting me stay, I filled a second backpack with DVDs. I had the largest collection among my friends. I bought movies indiscriminately, often regretting the purchases immediately: action movie sequels, horror flicks, derivative rom-coms, spoofs from the ’80s, unrated versions of R-rated films. I also bought movies that played almost nightly on TV — The Matrix or The Rock — because I liked accessing director commentary and deleted scenes. Having what others did not gave me something to offer people. The Lanes owned very few movies, and I hoped to ingratiate myself with the DVDs.

The nurse was washing her hands in the kitchen sink when I came downstairs. She glanced at the backpacks in my arms and shut off the faucet.

“I’m going to work,” I lied. “Will she be okay on her own?”

“I have other patients,” said the nurse.

“I’m not asking you to stay,” I said.

“You don’t have anything to worry about.” She shouted goodbye to my grandmother on her way out.

“I need to leave too, Gram,” I said, loud enough for her to hear me from the back of the house. When she didn’t respond, I brought her a fresh glass of water and was grateful to find her sleeping. It would’ve been hard to lie to her directly. Her long gray hair was pulled to the far side of her face, a few strands stuck to her lips, and I considered freeing the hairs before I thought better of it, unwilling to risk waking her up. I unwrapped two small chocolate bars — she had trouble undoing the wrappers — and placed them next to the water. I doubt I would’ve been so kind if I hadn’t been leaving. The gesture made running away seem less self-absorbed.

The Lanes lived two miles away by road, but a trail through a forest cut that distance in half. Ours was rural New Jersey, a small town of aging farmhouses and mud-bumpered trucks, one stoplight and no mayor, a town cheap enough to attract the sort of people who’d come into money through contracting companies and boat dealerships, financiers who felt superior for starting families away from the intrusions of life in New York. My own father had been one of those financiers — or so we had believed — until one day he suddenly wasn’t, or rather, had never been.

I knew the Lanes through Mitchell, the middle brother of three. Though he was a year older than me, we’d been friends since elementary school, when I joined his class after skipping third grade. Mitchell treated me with indifference, cruelty, and care, which I assumed was how one treated a sibling. He was handsome and athletic, with flopping black hair, a mole on his chin, and the sort of hardened jawline I often compared my face against when I pulled at my skin in the mirror. I had swollen, comical features; my eyes were set close together, and my chin, according to Mitchell, looked like an ass. No hairstyle I had ever flattered my face but instead showed off every inconsistency — the large ears, the wall of shimmering forehead. I had, with threatening effort, lost fifty pounds the previous summer, but I still found my body pouchy and wrong, a pillowcase loaded with beans.

Where the trail through the forest ended, a gravel driveway snaked up an incline to a broad white house built into the side of a hill. Vines climbed the walls; peeling paint revealed splotches of brown wood underneath. In the center, a picture window showed the dense violet light of a greenhouse. I’d never been inside the main portion of the house. Three-quarters of the building belonged to the property owner. The Lanes had stuffed a family of five into a two-bedroom apartment at the end.

There were no cars in the driveway. A pair of shaggy dogs darkened by dirt lay at the foot of the steps leading to the front door of the Lanes’ apartment. I shouted hello, but no one answered. Inside, a History Channel documentary about Nazis played on TV; Mitchell must’ve left it on as he rushed to work. He was a camp counselor. I would have the apartment to myself until he returned.

The living room was attached to the kitchen. On the counters were crumpled bills, cracked CD cases, reading eyeglasses, mugs puddled with curdled milk. A bowl of buggy meat fat sat on the stove. I carried the scraps to the back porch, as I’d watched Mitchell do hundreds of times, and tossed them over the railing for their chickens.

A few hours later, Mitchell shook me awake from my nap on the couch. He held my backpacks over my head. “You’re serious?”

I told him I had no other choice.

“You could’ve stayed home.”

“I brought movies,” I said.

“You’re lucky there’s room,” he said. “But you better hope Colin doesn’t come home.”

Mitchell’s father reacted to my presence with quiet disregard. The man painted cars for a living, a job that demanded hours alone wearing noise-canceling headphones, and when he wasn’t at work, he was fixing cars for spare cash and tending the property for their landlord. He valued precision and silence, and he accepted the eccentricities of his family because resisting made things difficult, loud.

Mrs. Lane said I could live with them as long as I needed to. She promised to pick up my favorite foods at the grocery store the next day. I came from unsentimental people, and Mrs. Lane was pathologically helpful. She went to great lengths to earn the love of her sons. She bought them restaurant gift cards, mended their clothes, completed their homework, filled Mitchell’s car with gas, and used her connections to get them jobs — which was how Mitchell came to work at the camp. She also substitute taught, waited tables at a barbecue joint, ran the town’s youth soccer program, and freelance edited to help keep their family afloat.

“I’m happy to have you here,” said Mrs. Lane as she prepared the next day’s lunches for the family. “I’d gladly trade you for Colin, but that would be cruel to your mother.”

My throat tightened. My mother had called me repeatedly throughout the day. I’d told her my plans in a text and hadn’t read the barrage of responses. She and Mrs. Lane were polite to one another, though they were not friends. My mother worked in an office close to the city, spent her nights at a local pub. The two women lived different lives. However, I knew they would eventually talk — a child cannot run away without parents eventually getting involved — and I feared what their conversation would reveal about the fight that had led to my leaving. The truth might make Mrs. Lane less sympathetic toward me.

For now, I had her support. I served as an antidote to her sons: the deferent, polite child. She finished the lunches and wished us goodnight.

“I love you,” said Mitchell.

“Don’t do this,” she said.

“You don’t love me?” he asked.

“I do,” she said.

“Then tell me,” he said.

She paused on the steps. “Fine,” she said. “I love you.”

“Jesus, Mom. That’s disgusting. I’m a child. I’m only seventeen — it’s illegal.” Mitchell had learned to treat her with this mix of revulsion and cloying affection from his older brother, Colin. But for Mitchell, it always seemed like a performance, whereas Colin’s cruelty was as obnoxious as it was authentic.

I’m still ashamed of the truth: my mother and I had fought because she found a bottle of gin in my bedroom. She’d always had a problem with liquor — as did her mother — and in an attempt to fix the problem in me, she grounded me for the rest of the summer. The punishment seemed severe after years of lax, distracted parenting. But grief had made her impatient. Had she discovered the gin a year earlier, before her mother got sick, she might have poured us both drinks.

And had she grounded me a year earlier, I wouldn’t have left. But I wanted an excuse to flee. As a child, I had spent entire summers in my grandmother’s apartment, playing dominoes and backgammon in her living room, lying with her in bed watching movies. Her death would be my first — and I was not prepared to face it. I believed I loved her too much to see her that sick. My mother’s punishment was a gift. It gave me a reason to leave.

I slept on a futon in Mitchell’s bedroom surrounded by dirty clothes and busted sporting equipment. The youngest brother, Danny, slept on a bare twin mattress in the corner of the bedroom. Mitchell slept downstairs on the couch.

The first morning, I woke to a rooster crowing at dawn. I slipped downstairs just before Mitchell and his mother left.

“Are you staying here today?” he asked.

“I mean it,” said his mother. “You’re welcome as long as you like.”

“She’s not really this nice,” Mitchell said.

His mother said nothing.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. “Any work?”

“You’re a guest,” she said. “All you have to do is relax.”

I spent the following days napping or watching action movies with Danny. He was ten and grateful for the movies. He made a tower of DVDs next to the TV arranged in the order he planned to watch — the second Fast and the Furious movie, Any Given Sunday. When Mitchell returned from work, we normally played soccer in a field behind his house. I was a poor athlete, especially compared to the Lanes — Mitchell would later play Division-1 soccer in college. Mitchell and Danny practiced trick shots against me, kicking the ball through my legs or at my face. I didn’t mind the attention.

Most days, Mitchell and Danny were tasked with chores like cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming, mowing the lawn. “You’re a guest,” they’d say when I tried to help. It stung to hear this. I hadn’t come there to be a guest. I was there to join their family. Alone, I tidied the basement laundry room and swept cobwebs off the walls. I folded the clothes strewn across the bedroom. I organized the refrigerator. I washed dishes. These were normally Mrs. Lane’s tasks, and though she never asked me to, I was sure she appreciated doing fewer domestic tasks.

I had a summer job at an ice cream shop in town. On my third day with the Lanes, I walked all five miles to work, unwilling to burden anyone. At the end of my shift, Mr. Lane waited outside. Soon it was no question whether Mitchell or his parents would drive me. I thanked them by stealing quarts of their favorite ice cream flavors. After a week, I’d stocked their freezer with Mint Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Fudge, Rocky Road, and Coffee.

My mother’s calls came less frequently. It became easier to ignore her. Your grandmother’s dying, she would text me. Your antics are hurting her. These threats made me feel guilty but also vindicated. What type of mother, I thought, would accuse her son of killing his grandmother? Blame is something of a shell game, hidden and shifting, and I excelled at sliding the blame away from myself to my mother, preserving my integrity and innocence. The Lanes were accomplices in that innocence — that is, until Colin returned home.

It was a Saturday, my ninth day with the Lanes — Mitchell and I were gawking at sports highlights, and power tools buzzed as Mr. Lane fixed someone’s transmission — when a car roared up the driveway and Mitchell cursed under his breath.

Colin burst through the door with the feverish energy of a child on the last day of school. He dropped an enormous duffel bag — the kind used for hauling sporting equipment — on top of me. “Dad tells me we’ve got a new baby brother,” he said, pushing the bag so hard into my chest that it hurt to breathe. “A thousand-pound bundle of joy. Is it true, Mitchell? Is Half Ton living with us?” Colin had been calling me Half Ton for years, but he really committed to the nickname once I lost weight. He had a talent for spotting deep insecurities.

“I bet he weighs less than you do,” Mitchell said. He was always kinder to me around Colin.

“Of course he weighs less than me,” said Colin. “I’m not in the bathroom after every meal.” He pretended to puke on my face.

I laughed to seem impervious. I hadn’t purged once at the Lanes’ house. It would have been a betrayal of their hospitality.

Colin released the duffel bag. “Dad signed off on your stay? And Nancy?”

“He’s here, isn’t he?” said Mitchell.

“You’re the baby girl she always wanted. You two go dress shopping yet?”

I said nothing, though I felt a pinch of excitement, likely from the suggestion that I could be what this family needed, that I did belong.

“There any food in this house that Half Ton hasn’t spit in the toilet?” Colin marched to the fridge and opened the top and bottom doors with one massive tug.

“I bought some stuff,” I said.

“This stuff?” He held up two Lean Cuisines, both of which I’d brought into the house. “How gracious of you, how generous, Mother Teresa, feeding a family of five — excuse me, a family of six — with microwave meals.”

“There’s ice cream,” I said.

Colin was already peeling off lids. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Peanut Butter. All right.” He ate straight from the carton, leaving the others still on the counter. I got up to put them away. Colin stole my seat. “Where do you even sleep?” he asked me. “In bed with Nancy?”

“The futon,” I said.

“You gave him your bed?”

“I like the couch better,” said Mitchell.

“Why couldn’t one of your cool friends move in? I don’t want this buttered turkey trailing me all day.”

I laughed as he continued to call me worthless, stupid, and fat. I didn’t enjoy being ridiculed. But Colin held some inexplicable power over me. I assumed he mocked me out of affection. If he truly hated me, he would ignore me.

Mitchell said, “Get a job. Leave home. You won’t have to deal with him.”

“Who’s gonna hire a dropout?” He spit little globs of peanut butter and chocolate onto his shirt as he spoke. I admired his self-awareness — it seemed his greatest attribute — and I didn’t consider him sad or desperate — yet — because his honesty, albeit ruthless, was so different from how my mother and I interacted. We built fences around what we wanted to say to each other; Colin announced whatever he thought. Like a child. On the couch that afternoon, with ice cream sticky and brown in the creases of his lips, he even looked like one. He was thickly built, with rounded features, pale plush lips, and hair buzzed nearly bald. He shaved his arms and his legs too — a habit picked up on the high school wrestling team — and he most resembled a baby that had enlarged instead of maturing.

Danny started soccer camp the following Monday, and it was our job — Colin and me — to drive him there every morning. Afterward, we worked out together in the small weight room at Rider Academy, where Colin had gone to high school. Colin had attended Rider thanks to a small sum of money his father inherited, enough to pay for Colin’s tuition but not for Mitchell’s or Danny’s. The Lanes had invested in Colin over the others, and one of the major sources of tension in the family, I gathered, was their fear that they’d chosen incorrectly.

That first day, before we stepped out of the car, Colin grabbed my T-shirt by the neck. It had the red devil logo from my public school. “You’re serious?” he said.

“It’s the only workout shirt I packed.”

“You really couldn’t be any dumber,” he said. He unburied a Rider Athletics shirt from a pile of clothes in the back.

“It’s wet,” I told him.

“And it better get wetter.”

I fumbled with the shirt in my haste to change, sticking my head through a sleeve and fighting it free as Colin cartoonishly licked his lips and whistled, repeating “Show me those titties, baby” as he pinched the lingering flab on my stomach.

Technically, the weight room was closed for the summer, but Colin’s prep school education had taught him to charm people in power: he’d convinced Rider’s athletic director to make him a copy of the keys to the gym. Colin put me through intense workout routines from his wrestling days. Alone in the weight room, he’d cheer me on through burpees and pushups and squats, praising me when I completed a full-body circuit, but if anyone entered, he’d tell them I was shockingly weak for my size, shout out the flaws in my form, and invite the others to mock me with him.

After the workouts, we’d eat bagels at a grimy deli on the far side of town. He mocked me at first for ordering vegetable cream cheese, but the next day he was ordering it too. “I’m getting so fat,” he said, patting his stomach.

“You’re not fat,” I told him.

“Maybe not compared to you.”

I shouldn’t have liked hanging out with Colin — and perhaps like is the wrong word to use. But I felt important in his company. He had a large, turbine-like personality. On the Rider Academy campus, his former teachers constantly stopped him to ask about college. “It’s a drag,” he’d tell them. “But I’m getting through it.” I loved when he lied to his teachers because it meant I was special for knowing that he had dropped out. Colin shifted easily between the large baby who’d left college prematurely and the articulate charmer. I had always felt trapped by myself — permanently feeble and shy — and it was invigorating to see someone shake off their personality to adopt another.

Over bagels on a Friday — my fifteenth day with the Lanes — Colin told me we were going on a date that afternoon. “Not me and you,” he said. “Keep dreaming. We’re going with two other women. All my real friends are busy.”

“With their jobs?” I asked. I’d gotten better at mocking him.

“Hey, Half Ton, I’m doing you the favor, in case you forgot what you look like.”

I apologized. “Who are the women?”

And I knew Kate and Melanie. Rather, I knew of them. They also went to the public school and were both in my year. Kate had briefly dated Mitchell in middle school, before dating was dating, and on the drive to pick them up, Colin bemoaned that he was about to hook up with his brother’s former fling. “Best I can get,” he kept saying. I couldn’t tell whether he wanted pity or encouragement.

Kate and Melanie were waiting outside Melanie’s house, a massive six-bedroom tipped against a private lake. It would burn down later that year, weeks before graduation. Melanie twirled a tube of lip gloss between her fingers, snapping orange bubbles of gum. Kate was an athlete: the daughter of a football coach and an all-state soccer player three years in a row. She had a smoky voice and a high, piercing laugh. I pretended we didn’t already know each other when she introduced herself. They sat in the back of the car. It was a forty-minute drive to the mall. Somehow we got on the topic of prom.

“Are you going?” Melanie asked me.

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Who’s gonna go with him?” Colin said.

“It’s expensive,” I said.

“What type of mutant would you have to be to say yes?” he continued. “I’d love to go with you,” Colin said in a deranged, monstery voice.

“I’ll go with you,” Melanie said.

“We’ll both go with you,” added Kate.

I thanked them, though I knew they weren’t serious. I was accustomed to Colin’s cruelty but not to the mix of hope and despair that their pity invoked. Somehow, it felt worse.

At the mall, we meandered from store to store without buying anything. Kate and Colin walked ahead of Melanie and me, laughing, leaning into each other. Melanie told me she wanted to stay close to home for college, but her parents were insisting she go somewhere that required a flight. “It’s not that they don’t love me,” she said. I hadn’t said anything about whether they loved her. “They think I’m sheltered, that I need to experience life. But I like my life.”

Since sixth grade, I had fantasized about college as my chance to escape, and listening to her, I wondered what was driving me to flee my hometown and my family. And not just them but my body too, with its embarrassingly bulbous masculine features, even after losing weight. A body that felt increasingly like a promise I had made with no desire to keep it. What could possibly make her want to stay in our town? Before I could respond, Kate ran back to us, smiling and clapping.

“I convinced Colin to get a makeover.” She pointed to a sign outside Sephora offering free makeovers until five. She took my hands in hers. “He said he would if you would.”

Colin leaned against a railing, shaking his head. “Don’t you dare agree to this.”

“You need to do it,” said Melanie.

“You’ll both look so pretty,” said Kate.

“I’ll love you forever,” Melanie added.

Before that day, Melanie was only a rumor to me. I knew she would never want me. But I loved how she’d spoken to me about the makeover — the gentle and encouraging way I saw girls speak to each other, a language flooded with cartoon hearts. Hearing her, I felt invited to a place that previously didn’t exist, and I already knew that I would do anything to remain there.

The stylists at Sephora agreed, reluctantly. Kate and Melanie circled us, snapping photos on their flip phones and laughing. Their enjoyment seeped into the stylists. The one working on Colin said, “You’re both looking so pretty,” and all four women giggled. No one had ever touched my face so intimately. The stylists rested their fingers on my cheek, turning me toward them. “Look at me, honey,” they said. “You’re so beautiful.” But when they held the mirrors up to us, we still looked like ourselves, only brighter. It wasn’t the transformation I had expected — or wanted. We had been lied to. Our eyes were shadowed tamely purple. Colin’s lips had been given a deeper shade of red lipstick than mine. I did like the thick length of my lashes and the blush of my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop puckering my lips. Kate and Melanie made us pose for their phones. “Pout,” they said. “That’s it, baby. Oh, look at how pretty you are.”

I went along with it all — pouting, posing, following Kate and Melanie’s every command.

“You’re such a fucking bitch,” Colin whispered to me between photos.

Men like Colin were always telling me I was weak and effeminate, as if I were destined to end up in a position like this. But Colin didn’t belong here. He raced into the first bathroom we passed. Kate and Melanie begged me to keep my makeup on, but I joined him inside. “I’m trying to get laid. Now all Kate’s gonna remember is me with the makeup.”

“It washes right off,” I said. But I was slow in washing mine off. I puckered a few more times for the mirror. I was not merely unbothered by my new face; I liked how I looked, and I felt powerful knowing that Colin couldn’t command the same level of confidence I found in myself.

“No one will ever want to fuck you,” he said. “You’re a fat fucking loser, so you can look however you want. But I have standards.”

On the ride home, Colin continued berating me. “You’re a fucking disease,” he said. “You’re oblivious. You’re a swarm of locusts eating our crops. Wasting our food stamps on Skinny Cow popsicles.”

“Colin,” Kate said once, without much effort. Melanie said nothing.

I allowed myself to cry — silently, though — hoping that he might ease up if he noticed.

“Jesus,” he said. “I’m not gonna pity you just because no one’s ever told you the truth.”

I kept waiting for Kate and Melanie to defend me, or for Colin’s remarks to offend them, for any sign that they found this side of him alarming. But they just rested their heads on their windows, yawned at the traffic. Eventually, Colin grew tired. The car thickened with silence.

He stopped at a gas station once we returned to town. As the attendant filled up the tank, Colin said, “I’m dropping off Melanie, then going to Kate’s.”

I didn’t understand.

“I’m not driving you home.”

“It’s a six-mile walk.”

“Six and a half,” he said.

When I got out of the car, Kate climbed over the console to the front. She and Melanie rolled down their windows and waved. “See you later!” they said cheerily.

I bought the largest bottle of water I could afford at the gas station and started walking back to the Lanes’ place. I regretted burdening his family, but I didn’t regret it enough to return to my mother’s house. Colin liked hurting people. If I were truly a burden, his parents would ask me to leave. If I were truly so spoiled, Mitchell would tell me.

My mother kept calling me repeatedly as I walked, but I ignored her, because answering would’ve meant conceding something to Colin. Or perhaps I ignored her calls because it was obvious why she was calling: the end of every call fed into a new call, the vibrations like sand pouring into my pocket.

So I shut my phone off and ambled along the road, waving away offers for rides. By the time I reached the Lanes’ apartment, sweat had soaked through my T-shirt and dried, stiff and pinching. My mouth was dusty from thirst. Mitchell and his parents were pacing inside. They lined up against the kitchen counter when I entered. I felt as if I were facing a firing squad.

“Your mother called,” Mrs. Lane said.

Mitchell glanced down at the floor, his hair flopping over his eyes.

“You should call her,” she said.

“My phone’s off,” I said, like off had happened to my phone.

A car graveled up the driveway.

Mitchell’s parents asked me to sit down. Mr. Lane handed me his phone. My call went straight to my mother’s voicemail. I knew what would be waiting for me when she answered her phone. It was a relief to put it off for another few minutes.

Outside, footsteps pounded up the wooden stairs, and Colin burst through the door. “Guess who just got his knob slobbed?” he asked. He held up his hand for a high five from his father and didn’t get it.

“Maybe give us a minute,” said his mother.

“Nancy, it was me.” He pointed both thumbs at his chest.

“Please, Colin,” said his father.

Mitchell wrangled Colin onto the back porch.

“Your mom’s at the hospital,” said Mrs. Lane. “We can drive you. She asked us to drive you, and we’re more than willing.”

“Can I try her again?”

“We should go now,” said Mr. Lane.

“I should change first,” I said, still sitting. The day my father left, my mom dropped me off at my grandmother’s apartment, a cramped, smoke-laced one-bedroom perched above a convenience store in the center of town. I remembered sitting on her couch, believing I was too old — twelve — for the comfort my grandmother tried to provide. I deflected her jokes and attempts to ask how I was feeling. She put on a movie we liked, a children’s movie I used to watch with her in her bed, and gave me cookies and over-milked coffee — a drink I loved but wasn’t allowed to consume. Grief had surrounded me, and I felt as if I were being absorbed by the couch, which must have simply been my grandmother’s tenderness, and her pity, as I was, then, coming to terms with how my life would be different. It seemed unfair that I would feel this again, this shock of transformation.

Colin rushed inside with Mitchell at his back. “Half Ton, toss me the phone! I gotta call my nana. You just never know, right?”

Colin’s father grabbed him around the neck as Mitchell wrapped an arm around his waist, dragging him back toward the porch. Mrs. Lane apologized. I walked upstairs, changed into a less dirty shirt than the one I had on, and told her I was ready.

Of the dozens of times I must’ve seen Colin after that day, only one moment stands out. It happened a decade after my stay with the Lanes, on the day Mitchell got married. After high school, I’d gone to college in Washington, as far from New Jersey as I could get, and the distance had deteriorated my friendship with Mitchell. I was invited to the wedding but not included in the party. He had no reason to include me, but it still hurt to realize how little I now meant to him.

I would not have attended if I weren’t already in New Jersey. My mother, living alone, had slipped in her kitchen two months before the wedding. When she didn’t show up for work or answer her calls, a friend drove to the house and found her unconscious on the kitchen floor, dehydrated but still alive. I quit my job waiting tables out west and moved home to take care of her. Together we practiced basic speech therapy, but it wasn’t enough to help her regain language completely. She preferred to communicate with me by scribbling in a tidy white legal pad on her bedside table. It sat next to the dinner bell she used to summon me to her room, the same room where my grandmother had died. During my time with my mother in the house, navigating its unfamiliar messes and scents, that house that, like a living person, seemed to have transitioned through every cell in its body, I came to see my caretaking as punishment for leaving home to live with the Lanes, for abandoning my mother and grandmother, and what hurt most was the silence of my mother, who could not — or would not — forgive me for leaving her, first as a sixteen-year-old and then a year later for college. We never spoke about it, even before she was ill, but I knew she resented me, and even more than forgiveness I think I wanted her to berate me for having been so selfish as a child.

Grief cluttered my mind over those months. I only left the house for groceries or prescriptions. One of the pharmacists, a muscular man with an unfortunate ponytail, had been a high school classmate of mine, and when he recognized my name on the credit card, he leaned over the counter to give me a hug. He and I hadn’t been close. “I heard you moved out west,” he said. He wanted to know what I was doing in town. I lifted the bag of prescriptions. He had heard. Ours was a town where everyone heard. He asked if I wanted to grab a drink sometime, to take my mind off things. He added, “There’re places we can go — outside of town — where it’s easier.” What an odd thing to say, I thought, but I pretended to know what he meant and told him with complete certainty that I would love to get a beer. When he pulled out his phone to save my number, I waved, said I really must get home, but I shook the bag of prescriptions and assured him I’d see him soon. That afternoon, I transferred the scripts to a chain pharmacy on the outskirts of town.

The wedding was held at a country club in the wealthy New Jersey suburb where Mitchell’s fiancée, Celia, had grown up. The only formal clothing I owned was the suit I had worn ten years earlier to my grandmother’s funeral. The pants were too tight on my thighs, but the jacket fit loosely, so I wore it over a pair of dark jeans. My lips were severely chapped, which happened to me in the summer, and they gave me the appearance of a child wearing her mother’s lipstick. I was underdressed alongside my old high school friends, who came in tailored suits and matched their shoes to their belts. They worked for investment firms or new media start-ups. Repeatedly, these friends introduced themselves to me before realizing we’d known each other since childhood.

“Oh God,” they’d say, “you just look — ”

“Tired,” I’d say.

They’d smile at me, pityingly, because it was true.

The ceremony took place outside with a view of the golf course behind Mitchell and Celia. The setting sun dulled the surroundings. Shadows of oaks stretched across the grass as the light took on a dark-orange haze. Colin was the best man and seemed agitated during the vows, stuffed as he was in a suit that appeared too small, pant pockets flaring out from his hips. He eyed the crowd but rarely looked at his brother and sister-in-law. He hadn’t shaved for the occasion, and patchy strands of hair corrupted his face. He frequently blinked. And his hair was buzzed — a haircut he’d clearly given himself.

Both of Mitchell’s parents — now divorced — brought up Colin unprompted when we spoke during the cocktail hour. “He doesn’t make any sense to me,” his father told me as we waited for drinks. “I thought he’d grow out of it. He’s got a job. Financial sector. It’s stable. You’d think it would make him responsible, but he’s only gotten worse.”

“Maybe he’s lonely,” I said, though I didn’t think he was lonely — people like Colin never really get lonely. When people grow close with people like that, they hurt them, retreating to the isolation they craved or felt they deserved.

“If he’s lonely, he ought to grow up.” This was the most I’d ever heard Colin’s father talk. “He was dating someone. We all loved her. But a week ago — one week before his brother’s wedding — he dumped her. Told me he couldn’t put up with her. Put up with what? He wouldn’t give me an answer.”

“Not everybody gets married,” I said.

“I sure wish I hadn’t.” He winked conspiratorially. I had always admired his restraint and his silence, but this bland candor upset me. He wore his new personality like an outfit he’d seen advertised in a men’s magazine. I excused myself for the bathroom.

Later in the night, Colin delivered his best-man speech. He opened by saying, “We are gathered here today to celebrate love — the love between my little brother and Celia, my first-ever sister.” He paused as most of the crowd pleasantly clapped. Those who knew Colin, though, held our applause. “And in the spirit of love, I want to talk about the woman Mitchell loves most in this world, Kimberly, the bitch who broke his heart during college.”

Mitchell wrenched the microphone away from his brother. Colin ceded it without much of a fight — he appeared tired — and then bowed. “I love this woman!” Mitchell shouted, imitating a diamond commercial that was popular when we were in high school, and his buffoonish fervor made a few people laugh, until everyone started forcing laughs, clapping to ease the tension. Mitchell kissed Celia’s cheek. She smiled like a shattered windshield.

When I finally ran into Mitchell as he was making his rounds later that night, he only wanted to talk about Colin: “He promised me he’d be good. That was the deal. Is it really so hard to be good for five minutes? That’s all I asked of him. Five minutes.”

“You had to expect it,” I said.

“He’s my brother,” he said. “He shouldn’t act like this. For once in his life.” There was nothing to say, so he said, “How’s your mom?”

“She’s doing great,” I told him.

“Considering what happened, you mean.”

I pretended I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to discuss her accident, here. I’d come to act like nothing had happened, like nothing worse was about to happen.

“You think I don’t know when you’re lying?”

“Don’t you have people to see?” I asked.

“Don’t leave without saying goodbye,” he said, firm enough to convince me he meant it.

After the reception, Colin picked me out of a crowd in the parking lot. “Half Ton!” he shouted. “Somehow, you’ve been hiding.” He pounded his fists on my shoulders as we embraced. His breath reeked of liquor.

“Nice speech,” I told him.

“Nobody wants to hear anything honest.”

Behind him, I spied someone racing our way from the far side of the parking lot. It was Mitchell, screaming louder and louder the closer he got. Colin did not turn around, and I froze, bracing for Mitchell to pummel his brother. As he drew near, Mitchell lowered his body, as if preparing to shoulder Colin square in the spine, but he leaped instead and landed firmly on his brother’s back, arms clasping his shoulders. Colin caught him in a squat and tore a seam in the ass of his pants. Mitchell jumped off, pointing at the rip as he curled over in laughter.

“These are four-hundred-dollar pants,” Colin said.

“My wedding,” said Mitchell. “One night, my wedding, and you couldn’t shut up.”

“You’ll have another one,” Colin said.

Mitchell grabbed Colin’s chin and pulled him close. Here it is, I thought, expecting a punch. But Mitchell leaned his face close to his brother’s and planted a kiss on each cheek. I understood nothing about the love of a family. “I fucking hate you,” Mitchell said. “I wish I could divorce you. Now get in the limo.”

“Did you tell Half Ton?” Colin asked.

“We’re going out,” Mitchell said to me. “Hotel bar. You better be there.”

“I need to get home.”

“I’ll see you there,” Mitchell said to me.

“I really wish I could make it,” I said.

“Cool, cool,” Colin said. “We’ll see you there.”

“It’s already so late.”

“Great,” Mitchell said. “Go grab us a table. We’ll meet you there.”

“It’s gonna be great catching up,” Colin added.

“At the bar,” Mitchell said. “Where you’re meeting us.”

I could have agreed to go out and then flaked. But I wanted them to hear me refuse, to show them they’d lost the power they once wielded over me. And it was just as important for them to convince me I had no say in the matter. “You can’t go home,” Mitchell said. “Because you’re my oldest friend and we need to hang out.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “I really wish I could stay.”

“Save us a table at the bar!” Mitchell said to me before bounding away to the limo. It was the last time I would see him.

“You know you don’t need to come,” Colin said. He spoke tenderly, defeat in his voice.

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

“He’ll understand. I’ll understand.”

This kindness was a final act of cruelty: he wouldn’t even let me refuse. I turned around without waving goodbye. I like to believe Colin watched me walk to my car, wondering what he might say to convince me to change my mind, wishing we might all share a final night together, to recapture the innocent selfishness that had shaped our lives when we were young, but when I reached my car and looked back, he was sliding into the limo. The driver slammed the door shut.