I woke up the next morning to the usual clattering in the kitchen. It was hard to tell if Foster was so loud because he was just inconsiderate or because trying to do everything soundlessly made him even clumsier than usual. I didn’t really think Foster would consciously be inconsiderate toward us—it was just that he had been used to doing what he wanted for so long. It was like eating the skin of the baked potato. There was never anyone there to tell him not to.
I turned over in bed a few times and stared out the window through the crack between the shade and the wall, listening to myself breathe. I was awake, but I wasn’t quite ready to admit it until I heard the front door shut. It’s a really distinctive sound—the opening and closing of your own front door. Ours was a kind of wooden click. That click drew me out of bed.
I had a blanket thrown over my shoulders and that fuzzy feeling in my mouth you get when you’ve just woken up and haven’t talked yet. I emerged through the front door into the early-morning light to see Foster, dressed in full TS gym uniform, running in big loopy circles around the front lawn.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t break stride. As he turned and jogged back across the yard, he said, “Ezra’s gonna run by here any minute. I want to warm up, but I don’t want to miss him.”
“How do you know he’ll run by?”
“He jogs past our house every day at six fifteen.”
“Does not.” It was immature. But I couldn’t believe that someone else our age voluntarily woke up as early as Foster.
“Does so. I see him every morning. And he said if I’m awake”—he pivoted and ran back—“I can run his route with him.”
“His route?” I sank down onto the step and wrapped the blanket around me a little tighter.
“Uh-huh. A four-mile route.”
“He runs four miles before school every day?”
Foster gave me a withering look. “You don’t get that good by doing nothing.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth (it still felt fuzzy) and watched Foster pivot and run another lopsided circle around the front lawn. It struck me suddenly that it had been exactly three months since he first came. Before this summer, I hadn’t laid eyes on Foster in five years. Now it was three months to the day that he had been living like … well, almost like my brother. The word made me feel funny, the way it had when the PT used it in gym class. That’s your brother, right? I was seventeen years an only child.
Another set of footsteps broke the early-morning silence, and just as Foster had predicted, Ezra Lynley jogged into view. His strides were long and even and controlled. He was like a windup toy or something, perfectly consistent.
He didn’t break stride as he neared the house. He didn’t even look over as Foster began waving like a lunatic. He just kept running.
Foster looked at me for a second, shrugged, and then went tearing off after him. I could hear “Wait up, Ezra, wait for me!” all the way down the street, until Ezra turned the corner and Foster, lagging somewhat behind, disappeared as well.
School came, and at lunch I went to investigate what Mrs. Wentworth had described at our meeting yesterday as “an extracurricular opportunity.” This opportunity came in the form of the school newspaper—apparently they were looking for photographers, and Mrs. Wentworth had made it clear that skill wasn’t a prerequisite.
I tracked down the student editor of the T.S. Herald in the writing lab. The table that spread in front of Rachel Woodson was covered in papers, books, old copies of the Herald, and issues of the monthly TS literary magazine (to which Rachel also contributed). She sat amid it all looking more than a little harried and twice as much hassled, but that was how Rachel always looked.