A World Without You(16)

“See?” she said. “Ghost eggs.”

And she was right. The poached egg did look like a little ghost floating in the water.

After a minute, she took the egg out of the hot water with a slotted spoon, dropped it on a plate, and handed it to me with salt and pepper.

“My little sister would poke the yellows and scream, ‘I’m making the ghosts bleed!’” she said. “She was kind of macabre.”

“Mmm, ghost blood,” I said, licking my fork.

And she smiled at me, but it was a sad smile. She missed them. Not in the same way that we all missed our families while we were at Berkshire. She missed them in a deeper way, because she knew she’d never see them again. It wasn’t that she was gone from them; it was that they were gone from her.

? ? ?

We talked a lot about family, me and Sofía. Not at first. Sofía kept her family close to her heart, like a secret, but eventually she opened up.

“Carmen was two years older than me,” she told me after we hopped over the gate and were walking on the boardwalk together. A crane watched us from the marsh as we passed. “And Maria was just eleven months younger. People used to tell Mom that Maria and I were Irish twins, but she didn’t understand what that phrase meant, so she’d tell them, ‘No, no, we’re Latina, not Irish.’”

She laughed, and the crane flew off, its long legs dripping water like glittering crystals.

“I miss them,” Sofía said in a small voice. She moved closer to me and touched the back of my hand, as if to remind herself that I wasn’t gone. Not like them.

“Carmen would always try to be my mom, even when Mom was around,” she continued. “She pretended like she knew all there was to know about raising babies. And Maria—” Sofía laughed. “Maria would always try to make it harder on her, you know? Like, Carmen would say that she could get Maria to eat her vegetables, so Maria would load up all her peas in her mouth and then spit them at Carmen one at a time when Mom wasn’t looking.”

Sofía’s face fell.

“She was only fourteen,” she said, starting to turn invisible around the edges.

I pulled her down onto one of the benches on the edge of the boardwalk. It overlooked a shallow part of the marsh where the ground was dry enough to grow coneflowers and goldenrod. “I’m still here,” I whispered in her ear, and I kept my arm around her until she was fully visible again.

“I just really enjoyed being a sister,” she said. She snuggled deeper into my arm; it was starting to get dark and cold. “It was like being in this exclusive club, and we were the only members.”

“They sound pretty amazing,” I said.

“Tell me about your sister.”

I shrugged, and even though the moment was nice, I got up and started walking back to the academy. “Nothing to say,” I told her.

I was never really able to explain to Sofía what my family was like. For her, family was this unbreakable bond of trust and loyalty and love, and that sounds nice and all, but that’s not what it’s like in my home. That’s not to say we didn’t have those things. I’m certain if I needed my family, they’d be there. It’s just that they weren’t there otherwise.

Take Phoebe. You’d almost think we weren’t related. We look nothing alike. We act nothing alike. We share no friends. We are as different as two people can possibly be.

Sofía doesn’t really know how to live in a world where she’s not a sister. But Phoebe’s the exact opposite. She just doesn’t think in terms of us being brother and sister. I’m just a guy who grew up with her, and we happen to share the same parents.

She was always like that, even when we were kids. She did her thing, and I did mine.

By the time I started high school and Phoebe was in middle school, there were cracks in our family. I don’t think I noticed it at the time. It’s only now, here, away from them, that I can see them.

Mom always talked about going back to work one day, maybe when I got to middle school. But that day came and went, and she never did. Instead, she grew increasingly . . . hover-y. When Pheebs and I were little, Mom didn’t really seem to care what we did with our days, as long as we were quiet and let her do her crafts in peace. But the older we got, the nosier she got. She nagged me for details about friends I’d go out with, what I wanted to do with the day, with the weekend, with my whole damn life. After I got my powers, it just got worse.

Dad lived his job. He came home every night at the same time, but he was never really there. “Lots of work is good,” he’d insist, locking the door to his office.

And Phoebe . . . she just sort of . . . she spun around so fast. She’s like one of those ballerinas in the cheap music box she got for her seventh birthday. She’d spin from school to clubs to cello lessons to friends’ houses, and sometimes she’d spin through the house, but she never seemed to notice anything or anyone.

And I, somehow, never really seemed to notice her.

When Pheebs entered high school, I was a sophomore. One day when I was walking down the hall, preoccupied and not really paying attention, I bumped into a girl in a bright blue sweater, her hair done up in braids, shiny pink gloss perfectly applied to her lips.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, already moving away when I realized—