Chapter 5: September
I left for college on a Saturday in late August.
Dad loaded the car.
Mom reorganized everything Dad loaded.
Danny stood on the front porch in his slippers and watched, which is what he does when something is happening that he doesn't know how to help with.
I came back up the porch steps to say goodbye and he handed me something.
A paper bag, folded over twice at the top, stapled shut.
"Don't open it until you get there," he said.
"Danny—"
"When you get there." Firm.
Final.
The Danny voice that means the conversation about the rule is over.
I put it in my backpack.
We hugged.
He smelled like the same shampoo he's used since he was seven — the green kind, the one Mom buys in bulk because he won't use anything else.
"Call me on Sundays," he said into my shoulder.
"Every Sunday," I said.
"And Wednesdays if something happens."
"And Wednesdays if something happens."
He pulled back and checked my face.
Whatever he was looking for, he found it.
He nodded and went back inside.
I sat in the back seat with the paper bag in my lap for four hours.
My roommate's name was Priya.
She was from outside Philadelphia, she had strong opinions about the correct way to organize a shared closet, and within twenty minutes of meeting her I could tell we were going to be fine.
She helped me carry boxes.
She showed me where the good bathroom was.
She did not ask me a single question I didn't want to answer.
When the room was mostly set up and my parents had gone to find dinner and Priya had gone to meet her family in the parking lot, I sat on my bed and opened the paper bag.
Inside was a card — the drugstore kind, with a bird on the front.
Not a carved one.
A printed one, blue, mid-flight.
He must have picked it out himself because Mom would have found something fancier.
Inside the card, in his careful uphill handwriting:
*You are going to do great.
I already know.
Call me Sunday.
— Danny*
Underneath the card was a small ziplock bag.
Inside the bag was a folded piece of paper and a single brass hinge.
Just one.
From the hardware store on Ferry Road, by the look of it.
I unfolded the paper.
*I have the other one.
So we still match.*
I held the hinge in my palm for a long time.
Then Priya came back and said her family wanted to take us both to dinner if I didn't have plans, and I said I didn't have plans, and I put the hinge in the small dish on my desk where I keep things I don't want to lose.
It was still there at Thanksgiving.
Still there at Christmas.
Still there when I came home for spring break and Danny immediately checked my bag to make sure I'd brought it.
"You brought it," he said.
"I brought it."
He showed me his.
He'd been keeping it in a small wooden tray on his dresser — a tray he'd made himself, of course, because by then the garage had become a regular thing.
He'd moved on from birds.
He was making small boxes, trays, a birdhouse for the backyard that Mom said was structurally sound enough to actually use.
"I'm making you something else," he said.
"For when you come back in June."
"You don't have to keep making me things."
He looked at me like I'd said something mildly ridiculous.
"I know I don't have to," he said.
"I want to."
I didn't argue.
There is no arguing with Danny when he wants to make something.
That night, after dinner, after Mom had gone to bed and Dad was watching the game with the volume low, Danny and I sat at the kitchen table the way we used to when I'd get home late from the library.
He had a glass of milk.
I had tea.
The house was quiet in the specific way it gets quiet when everyone who lives there is finally in the same place.
"Is it good?" he asked.
"College."
"It's good," I said.
"It's different."
"Different how?"
I thought about it.
"Nobody knows anything about me yet.
I have to start from the beginning."
He considered this seriously.
"Is that bad?"
"No," I said, and realized as I said it that I meant it.
"Actually, no.
It's kind of good."
He nodded.
"You can be whatever you want."
"Something like that."
He drank his milk.
Set the glass down.
"You were already good before," he said.
"Just so you know."
The kitchen clock ticked.
Outside, a car went past.
"I know," I said.
"But thank you."
He pushed back from the table.
"I'm going to bed," he said.
"Don't stay up too late."
He said goodnight.
He went upstairs.
His door closed with the small, familiar click it has made my entire life.
May you like
I sat at the table alone for a while with my tea going cold, and I thought about thirty-one reasons written on wide-ruled notebook paper, and a brass hinge in a dish on a desk three hundred miles away, and a bird with open wings sitting on my bookshelf between two textbooks.
I didn't feel far from home.
