* * *
The next day, Caleb bought a little whiteboard and hung it on the fridge.
“This’ll make it easy,” he said, holding out a purple marker. “Write your gender here so you don’t have to worry about Simone or me screwing up.”
Kelby took the marker and wrote ‘Hello, I Am They’ on the board. It remained that way for most of the month. By the time ‘they’ got replaced by a lime green ‘she,’ the Grammar Nazi was black and blue. He’d get over it. Who listened to Nazis anyway?
March
Kelby sat on the couch, fiddling with his dark hair while reading a geography textbook. We never had to nag him about homework, and any time a presentation came up, he could spend hours practicing in front of the square mirror mounted on his bedroom wall. In short, surprisingly studious for a part-time brat. He didn’t even look up when I settled in the recliner beside him.
Work that day consisted of updating the Book Worm’s Twitter feed with news of St. Patrick’s Day savings on any book by or about the Irish. Someone asked if we’d be serving free Guinness. I didn’t dare respond, so my thoughts drifted over the coffee table (was Caleb allergic to coasters?), skimmed the couch (orange floral print seemed like a good idea at the time), and landed on Kelby. Kelby. Caleb and Kelby. Weird combination. I met their parents once, and they didn’t seem the type to go all matchy-matchy with baby names. But Kelby didn’t seem the type to give himself a name that honored his brother, so…
“Is Kelby your original name?”
“Why does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. I was just curious.”
He flipped the page in a manner that suggested I was fortunate he hadn’t flipped me the bird. Awkward, but it didn’t make the Book Worm’s Twitter feed any less stupid, so I grabbed a controller and settled in for some quality video game time.
“If you want quiet, you might want to leave. Mama needs some stress relief.”
I heard him close the book. I assumed he left until suddenly he was right there, watching over my shoulder.
“You want to play too?” I said. “It’s not hard.”
“Sure.”
I handed him a controller and brought up the Create Character screen.
CHOOSE YOUR GENDER
MALE FEMALE
“I thought you said this wasn’t hard.”
“Sorry, I never really thought about that before.”
“Well, I’m a dude today, so we’ll go with that.”
He named his character Medieval Starlight and dressed him in the most distracting outfits the game provided. I blamed his initial bout of beginners’ luck on the ridiculous reindeer pelt that wiggled its antlers every time the wearer scored a hit. I swore in Korean. Kelby covered a snort with a cough.
“I thought you said you only knew Scandinavian languages,” I said.
He chuckled and shrugged. It was the closest he’d ever come to an apology, but after pounding Medieval Starlight into the ground a few times, I felt more inclined to forgive.
April
Sun poured through the bedroom window in direct defiance of trusted proverbs (“April showers” my foot) and my plans to sleep past six o’clock. The glow of my muted cell phone didn’t help.
Caleb didn’t wake as I stretched far, far away from the cozy warm comfort of our bed to grab the cold, cold phone. I just missed a call, apparently. The number belonged to one of my clients, Michelle, who ran Fluffy Friends with her sister. They were nice enough, but Michelle had to be living in her own private time zone to think anyone appreciated her predawn check-ins.
I left the bedroom, mentally cursing all the way, and hid in the bathroom. Michelle spent at least a minute thanking me for returning her call so promptly before launching into a list of toys she wanted me to promote. Lacking pen and paper, I wrote on the mirror with Kelby’s lip-stick.
“By the way,” she said, one ruined tube of lipstick and a barely-legible mirror later, “I saw some of your more recent Tweets, the ones plugging the computer games we just got in?”
“Yeah?”
“I know Twitter is hardly a bastion of good grammar, but you keep using ‘fun for all ages and genders,’ and that always looks awkward since there’s many ages and only two genders.”
“Actually, some people identify as a third gender or as being both male and female, others shuttle between two or more genders, and still others don’t have any gender at all. I didn’t want to exclude them, so I went with ‘all genders.’”
“…”
“Plus it’s easier to fit in the character limit than ‘fun for boys and girls of all ages.’”
“Oh, okay. Keep up the good work, Simone.”
Yeesh. Did I ever sound like that?
I felt a little less like client-punching by the time I joined Caleb and Kelby at breakfast. Kelby wore a plain button-up, jeans, and a face full of make-up. The whiteboard read ‘Tell HER About It.’
“Hey, babe. Hey, Kelby.”
“Hey,” they chorused. They could have been the new Queen with harmonies like that.
Kelby cocked her head. “You okay? You’re making an owl face.”
“Does that mean I’m cute? Owls are cute.”
“No—”
“You are cute, though,” Caleb said.
“—it means you’re annoyed. Owls always look like someone drank all the orange juice and put the carton back in the fridge.”
“Did Caleb do that again?” I said.
“It wasn’t empty!”
“Yeah, you left like a whole teaspoon,” said Kelby.
I left them to bicker in favor of retrieving much-needed coffee. Out the window, two squirrels chased each other across a roof. I superimposed Caleb and Kelby’s squabbling over the scurrying squirrels, biting my lip so as not to interrupt the comedy routine behind me, and forgot all about Michelle until Kelby discovered her poor lipstick.
May
“You are not going out dressed like that!”
“I’m not five years old! You don’t get to dress me anymore!”
“Obviously I should! Is this what Mom and Dad let you wear?”
“Why do you think I’m wearing it now?”
Kelby stormed into the living room wearing a metallic black skirt and a ruby top. Nothing looked too tight or too skimpy, but Caleb must have seen it through Big Brother Vision and I knew better than to interfere in a sibling fight for any reason short of a 7.0 magnitude earth-quake. Which, by the way, never happen in Connecticut.
“Get back here and change!”
“You’re just embarrassed that your brother wants to go out in a dress!”
“That’s not—”
Whatever it wasn’t, Caleb couldn’t say it before Kelby snatched a clam-shaped clutch off the armchair and slammed the door. That didn’t deter Caleb from yelling, “I bought you that clutch!”
“No wonder it’s so ugly!”
I finally let myself laugh, which made Caleb mope like a puppy too short to reach a burg-er on the counter. He spent a full hour that way, slouching over the couch until he was almost on the floor, pouting at the television, checking the clock every thirty seconds. I was supposed to blog about the wonders of Angelo’s liquid nitrogen chocolate bars, but after the fourth sigh, con-centration finally slipped from my grasp.
“Would you rather she didn’t have a social life?” I said.
“No.” His tone suggested a walrus-sized ‘but’ would be forthcoming if I waited long enough. I typed one whole sentence before it came. “I just wish she’d show half as much inter-est in spending time with us as she does alone or with her friends.”
“Did you want to spend every night with your family when you were in college?”
“Not every night, but I didn’t run away at the mere mention of a night with them, either.”
He returned to sulking and I returned to work. Those chocolate bars wouldn’t sell them-selves. Okay, yes they would, but
my client didn’t pay me to be a smartass.