Chapter 7: Trying

Nobody hands you a manual for dating two sisters. We checked. There is no book, no chapter, no helpful pamphlet in the school counselor’s rack between the ones about test anxiety and applying for financial aid. We were going to have to write it ourselves, one strange ordinary week at a time.

Here is what we worked out, that February, mostly by collision.

Brent could not date seven days a week — he had a job at the hardware store on Saturdays, homework like the rest of us, and parents who expected to see his face at dinner occasionally. So the arithmetic settled at two dates a week, more or less, and the dates alternated. A real date — one boy, one girl, out in the world — and the next time, the other girl. In between, the three of us did what we had already been doing for a month: the morning rides, the lunch table, the homework at our kitchen table, the weekend movies with Parisa in her tactical aisle seat.

The first time it was Parisa’s turn, the household nearly broke.

Not from objection. From nerves. She changed clothes four times. I know because I was her staff for all four changes, lying on her bed offering opinions she ignored, watching my sister — who could annotate three sources an hour with her heart rate flat — come entirely unstitched over a Thursday evening at a bookstore café.

“It’s Brent,” I said. “You have eaten lunch eighteen inches from him every day for two months.”

“That was different. That was geometry. This is—” she gestured at herself, the third outfit, the whole concept, “—deliberate.”

“You kissed him deliberately?”

“HE kissed ME, and if you are going to weaponize the historical record I will tell Maman who actually broke the blue vase in 2019.”

She wore the fourth outfit. He brought her home at nine forty with a used paperback he had bought her — some novel she had mentioned once, in passing, weeks ago, the way he remembered things — and she floated past me up the stairs without speaking, glowing like a reading lamp, and that was the first date.

By March, I had noticed the thing I would spend years watching: he was not running one relationship twice. He was running two relationships once each, and they were not alike.

With me, everything was current and counterplay. We argued for sport. We kissed like a debate neither of us intended to lose — in the parking lot, in his car, once memorably in the chemistry supply room with the door open exactly far enough to be technically innocent — and his hands in my hair and my back against the shelving was not a boy being swept anywhere; it was two people who had chosen the voltage and kept choosing it. He managed me, is the truth, the way you manage a live wire: with attention, with respect, with both hands. I have never felt more awake in my life than I felt that spring, being handled by a boy smart enough to know he was handling something.

With Parisa it was different weather entirely.

I saw enough of it — across the lunch table, in the rearview mirror, in the kitchen when they thought I was upstairs — to understand. He gathered her. There is no other verb. She would drift into his orbit at the end of an evening and he would simply collect her, an arm around her, her head finding the spot below his collarbone as though the spot had been measured for it, and she would close her eyes, and something in my contained, calculating, four-minutes-of-crying-allotted sister would audibly power down. The vigilance. The arithmetic. In his arms, and only there, Parisa stopped solving.

Their kisses, the ones I witnessed the beginnings of before finding somewhere else to be, were slow and careful and devastating in an entirely different dialect from mine.

I want to be honest about what watching that cost me, because I promised you honesty: it cost something. Not jealousy, exactly — I had built this, I had stood in a library and asked for exactly this — but a strange new weightlessness, the sensation of a planner inside a plan that no longer required her. He loved her differently than he loved me. Differently, not less, not more — I ran that calculation weekly, sometimes nightly — but the running of it was new, and the needing to run it was new, and some evenings I lay in my bed listening to my sister hum through the wall and thought: I have given away the steering wheel of my own life, and the car is being driven beautifully, and I am still learning how to sit in the passenger seat.