"He said my name was on top," Caleb said. "He said it said it has to be in the living room. Underlined twice."
For a long time Jordan didn't say anything. Then he said, very quietly, to the blanket, "He wasn't supposed to tell you that."
"Why not? Jord, why not? Why didn't you just—" Caleb heard his voice going up and made it come back down. "If it was for me, why'd you make it your birthday? Why didn't you just give it to me? I've been — this whole week, I thought — I said that thing to Mom, about being her favorite, I said it right in front of you—"
"I know what you said. I was there."
"So why didn't you tell me?"
And Jordan looked up, and there it was, the thing Caleb had been waiting for all week without knowing he was waiting for it, the thing that had been under the quiet and the closed doors and the controller squared up on the edge of the coffee table: Jordan was furious.
"Because if I gave it to you, you'd take it to your room," Jordan said. His voice was shaking. "You'd take it to your room and shut the door and put your headphones on and play with Dev and Marcus and Tyler Gaines, who can't even read, and I'd hear you through the wall every night laughing, and I'd never — you'd never—" He stopped. He breathed. In for four, Caleb thought, without knowing how he knew it. Hold. Out for six. "If it was mine, it had to stay in the living room. Mom said. And if it was in the living room, you'd have to come downstairs. And if you came downstairs, the game I got needs two people. You can't even start it with one. I checked. I read the whole website."
"Jordan—"
"I'm not done." Jordan's face was red now. His eyes were bright. "You didn't notice anything. The whole year. You notice everything — you noticed my shoe was untied from across a whole soccer field one time, you noticed when Mom changed her shampoo, you noticed when Mr. Feeney got a new toupee, you told me about it for a week — and you didn't notice I stopped going to school. I stood at the front door every morning for, like, a month, and you walked right past me. You stepped around me to get your bike. You said move, Jord."
Caleb opened his mouth and nothing came out.
He remembered. Not clearly — it was just a morning, just one of a hundred mornings — but he remembered. October, the front hall, cold coming in under the door. Jordan in his coat, standing there with his hand on the knob, not moving. Caleb late, irritated, reaching past him. Move, Jord. Jordan moving, slowly, like something underwater. Caleb going out. Not looking back.
"You stopped," Jordan said. The fury was going out of him now, running out like water, leaving something smaller and worse. "That's all. You just stopped. You used to let me sleep on the floor when there were storms. You used to let me be Player Two. And then you got Dev and you got headphones and I wasn't — I wasn't anything. I wasn't even annoying. I was just there. Like a lamp." He wiped his face with his wrist, hard, angry at it. "I didn't want to be Mom's favorite. I never cared about that. I just wanted to be in the game."
The room was very quiet. Out the window, someone down the street was running a leaf blower, though there were no leaves. Caleb sat on the end of the bed and looked at his brother and saw him. That was the only way he could think to describe it, later. He just saw him. Like an optical illusion, like the staircase on the cover of the book, where you look at it one way for years and it's going up and up and then something shifts in your eye and all at once it's going down, it was always going down, and you can't believe you ever saw it any other way.