Don't Let Them See Us

The moving truck pulls away before I've even found the front door key, and I'm left standing on a driveway I don't recognize, in a life I didn't choose the shape of. Behind me, my mom is already laughing at something my new stepdad said — that easy, bright laugh she hasn't done in years, not since Dad left. I should be happy for her. I am happy for her. It's just that happiness looks a lot like standing in a stranger's yard holding a box labeled BOOKS/MISC while everyone around you already knows where the bathroom is, which drawer sticks, which floorboard creaks. Everyone but me. I look up at the house — two stories, white shutters, a porch swing that's clearly been there longer than my mom has known this family exists — and I try to feel something other than dread. I try to feel hope, the way she does. I want this for her so badly it aches. She deserves someone who looks at her like she's the answer to a question he's been asking his whole life, and that's exactly how Greg looks at her. So I can do this. I can be a good daughter and share a house with strangers and pretend four months of dating didn't turn into a wedding at a speed that still makes my stomach drop when I think about it too hard. "You must be Mia." I turn, and the box in my arms suddenly feels like it weighs nothing, because all my strength has relocated somewhere else — somewhere useless, like my knees. He's leaning against the porch railing like he's been carved to fit there. Dark hair pushed back like he didn't try, a T-shirt that fits like he didn't try either, and an expression that says he's fully aware none of that matters because he didn't need to try in the first place. There's a confidence to him that isn't loud — it doesn't need to be. It just sits there, certain of itself, and somehow that's worse. "Ryan," he says, when I don't manage words fast enough. "Your stepbrother, apparently." Apparently. Like it's a technicality. Like it's not about to ruin my entire nervous system. "Mia." I say it like he didn't already know. Smooth. Wonderful. Off to a great start. He takes the box from my arms before I can protest, and his fingers brush mine in the handoff — barely, accidentally, except it doesn't feel accidental, it feels like a hello my body understood before my brain caught up. I hate how aware of it I am. I've known this boy for eleven seconds. "BOOKS/MISC," he reads off the label, glancing at me sideways. "Let me guess. Mostly misc." "Mostly books," I say. "The misc is just embarrassing." That gets a real laugh out of him, low and short, like I surprised it out of him rather than earned it. "Good. I was worried you'd be boring." "You were worried about me?" "Everyone worries about the new sibling," he says, already walking the box toward the house. "Statistically, most of them are boring." "And if I am?" He glances back at me, and something in his eyes catches the porch light in a way that makes my chest go tight. "You're not," he says. Not a question. Not even really a compliment. Just a fact he's already decided. I follow him inside, and I tell myself it's just to see where my room is. My room is small but clean, freshly painted a soft gray that still smells faintly of the can it came from. There's a window that looks out over the backyard, and beyond that, a strip of woods that separates this house from the next. Greg mentioned, cheerfully, that Ryan used to have his college friends over to build bonfires back there. Used to. Before I existed in this equation. Before his father remarried a woman with a twenty-one-year-old daughter who was about to make everything complicated in ways none of us could see yet. I unpack in silence, listening to the muffled sounds of my mother's laughter drifting up through the floor, and the lower rumble of Greg's voice underneath it, and somewhere in between, occasionally, Ryan's — easy, unbothered, like this is just any other Tuesday and not the day his family doubled in size. Dinner that night is the four of us at a table too big for the amount of things we have to say to each other. My mom keeps reaching over to touch Greg's arm like she's checking he's still there, still real, still hers. He does the same thing back — small, involuntary. It's the kind of tenderness that looks fragile precisely because it's new. Like it hasn't been tested yet. Like it could still go wrong if the wrong thing leaned on it too hard. I watch them and think: don't be the wrong thing. Ryan sits across from me, and every time I look up he's already looking at me, like he'd rather watch my reaction to the pasta than eat his own. He doesn't hide it. That's the first thing I really learn about him — he doesn't seem to know how. "So, Mia," Greg says, warm and hopeful in that new-parent way, the way people talk when they're desperate for everyone at the table to like each other, "Ryan can show you around campus tomorrow, introduce you to people. He knows everyone." "He knows everyone," my mom echoes, amused, like there's a story there she's not telling. "I know of everyone," Ryan corrects, not looking away from me. "There's a difference." Under the table, his foot brushes mine. I move my leg like it burned. "I can find my own way around," I say, too fast, and catch my mom's eyes flick toward me — reading something in my voice I didn't mean to put there. She's always been good at that. Too good. It's how she knew, within a week of meeting Greg, that he was different from the men before him. I used to think that instinct of hers was a gift. Tonight it feels like a liability. "I insist," Ryan says, unbothered, reaching for the breadbasket like he hasn't just made my pulse spike. "Someone has to make sure you don't end up in the wrong lecture hall on your first day." "I've survived twenty-one years without your help." "Barely, probably." He grins, and it's infuriating how good it looks on him. Greg laughs, delighted, oblivious. My mom smiles into her wine glass. And I sit there thinking that I need to be more careful than this. I've been in this house four hours. Later, I find Ryan in the kitchen, alone, drinking water straight from the fridge dispenser like a man in an ad for a life he already knows he's living well. He hands me a glass without me asking for one. "You're going to have to relax eventually," he says. "I don't bite." "I'm plenty relaxed." "You've been sitting like you're at a job interview since you walked in the door." I want to tell him it's because every time he looks at me my stomach does something it has no business doing, especially now, especially here, in this house, with our parents upstairs building something soft and breakable out of two marriages that both ended badly enough to make them cautious, hopeful, terrified all at once. Instead I say, "It's a lot. New house. New family." Something in his face shifts — softer, less performance. "Yeah," he says. "It is." A pause. "For what it's worth, I know this wasn't really your choice. Any of it." I look at him properly then, past the easy grin and the practiced confidence, and for a second I see something else underneath — a boy who's watched his father get his heart broken once already, who maybe isn't as unbothered by all of this as he wants me to believe. "Was it yours?" I ask. "No," he admits. "But I'm not mad about it. Not anymore." His eyes hold mine a beat too long for the sentence to mean nothing. For a second neither of us says anything, and the silence isn't awkward, it's worse than that — it's comfortable, which is somehow more dangerous than anything he could have said. "Goodnight, Ryan," I say, before the silence can turn into something I'd have to explain to myself tomorrow. "Goodnight, stepsister," he says, and the word comes out like a joke and a warning at the same time — like he already knows exactly what this is going to cost us, and he's decided he doesn't care. I climb the stairs slowly, my hand trailing the banister, my heart doing something I refuse to name. I tell myself it's just nerves. New house. New people. Nothing more complicated than that. My room is at the end of the hall, but the heating vent runs straight down into the kitchen below — I discover this by accident, sitting on the floor by my dresser, unpacking a box of photographs I'm not ready to look at yet. Voices drift up, tinny and clear, and I go still without meaning to. It's my mom and Greg. They think they're alone. "She's a good kid," Greg is saying, gentle. "It's going to be fine." "I know." My mom's voice, quieter than I've heard it in years. "I just — I don't want to get this wrong again. I can't watch another family fall apart, Greg. Not after everything." "It won't." "You don't know that." A pause, the clink of a glass being set down. "Your sister already thinks this happened too fast. If something goes wrong — with the girls, with the kids, with any of it — she'll say she told us so. And she'll be the one they listen to. This whole thing is still on trial with your family, and I don't think you realize how thin that ice actually is." I sit frozen on my bedroom floor, the photograph still in my hand, my heart pounding so loud I'm sure it must be audible through the floorboards too. On trial. Not settled. Not safe. A marriage that could still be undone by the wrong word to the wrong person, weighed by people who are already looking for reasons to call it a mistake. And downstairs, close enough that I can still hear the low murmur of his voice, is a boy who looked at me tonight like he'd already decided something about us that I haven't agreed to yet — a boy who is, apparently, exactly the kind of complication that could tip everything I just heard my mother say into disaster. I set the photograph down with hands that aren't quite steady, and for the first time since the truck pulled away, I understand exactly how much is riding on me getting this right. I just don't yet know how impossible that's about to be.