“I’m just so tired,” she said.

“Your shoulder okay?” I asked. Aunt Deedee had something vaguely wrong with her left shoulder. She’d never been to a doctor about it. But it had to do with being on her feet too much and being too tense and lifting things that were too heavy, and I often rubbed her back for her. I got up behind her to do so now and I could feel her relax under my hands as all her quivering little bird muscles, in her neck, in her shoulders, webbing her spine to her scapulas, almost hissed with release.

“I can’t let you move into a shelter,” she said. “I can’t have you live with Jason. He’s too—”

“Annoyed,” I said.

“Hateful,” she said.

I was beginning to come around to the idea that Aunt Deedee was going to let me stay, even though it made me feel servile and weak. There was something daring and beautiful about the idea of storming out, packing a single bag of my things, going to a shelter and quitting high school and starting my own life. I had even been fantasizing about it on some level. But when the reality of being kicked out had been so naked in the room, I found that I was terrified. If Aunt Deedee had kicked me out that night, I would have simply gone to Bunny’s house like a child playing at running away. I would never, it occurred to me, actually have gone to a shelter. I would have been too scared. And now, as I rubbed Aunt Deedee’s back, the nodes of her vertebrae so unpadded with fat that they felt like sharp rocks through her skin, I was willing to do anything to stay.

Aunt Deedee put her face in her hands and breathed in and out. “I have to give Jason his own room. The question is where to put you where you’ll be as comfortable as possible. You could room with me?” she said, but the look on her face was reluctant.

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “I don’t think that would be—I mean, I could sleep on the couch.”

“I don’t want you sleeping on the couch,” she said.

I made a sympathetic sound as I thought: I’ll get to keep going to high school. Even the sense memory that flooded me of the odor and weight of my textbooks seemed like sweet ambrosia.

“I’ll think of something,” she said, and patted my hand on her shoulder, a signal that I could stop rubbing. But I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want her to think of some way of fixing it later because I was certain she would change her mind.

“I could just sleep on the couch,” I said. “Really.”

“For tonight that’s probably best,” Aunt Deedee said.

“No, I mean, like, until I graduate. And then I could get out of your hair. I’m already practically full-time at Rite Aid.”

Aunt Deedee motioned for me to return to my seat on the ottoman, and then she took hold of both of my hands and she began to speak to me in a manner so earnest it seemed old-fashioned and at first I almost got the giggles. “Michael, I need to tell you something that I don’t know how to say, and I may fail, but I will never feel quite right again if I don’t at least try to say it, which is that there is something absolutely beautiful in you. I’m not sure what it is, if it’s your brain or if it’s your soul, but it reminds me of your mother and what was so beautiful in her when she was a girl, and I don’t know if she ever spoke about this, but she is profoundly dyslexic, and back then it wasn’t talked about, it wasn’t known, what it was, and so the name for it was—just being dumb. And she would cry about it, about thinking she was retarded, and her teacher telling our mom that she was learning disabled and that she would never be able to go to college or have a job that involved reading or writing, and, well, it would mean a great deal to me if you were to go to college.”

Her brown eyes were set at a hawkish angle in her face, and the dark circles under her eyes made her seem tough in the most fragile way possible, like a person who has tasted the poison and is speaking the truth even as they are succumbing to death.

“To college?”

“Jason will go to a few semesters of community college and that’s fine. Maybe he’ll join the army. He’ll do something. But you. I mean, when is the last time you even got something lower than an A?”

“I got an A-minus in chem last year.”

“An A-minus is an A,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Michael, you have to go. I never went. Your mother didn’t even finish high school.”

“She didn’t?” I asked, scandalized by this idea.

Aunt Deedee shook her head. “Our parents didn’t go. You will be the first one. And you might be the only one. And so if I need to fight with Jason, I will fight with Jason. But what I need from you are two things.”

“What?” I asked. We were still holding hands, which was weird, but I didn’t want to let go.

“I need you to keep up your grades and apply to colleges, a lot of them, state schools, out of state, spread a wide net. I don’t even know what the options are, but you go to someone who knows—maybe Ray Lampert can help you—and you figure out what the other rich kids know and you copy them. And you get in, and you graduate. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, hardly able to breathe.

“And then the second thing is I need you to stop with the online stuff. Any profiles you have, I need you to cancel them. And I need you to end things with the man you’ve been seeing. Completely. No contact.”

“Can I write him to tell him I’m ending it?”

“Of course,” Aunt Deedee said. “But I want you to close all your other accounts tonight. And if I hear that you’re still messing with all this, then it’s over. You’re out. Okay?”

I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I felt tricked. I had practically broken up with Anthony already. And yet I had the feeling that Aunt Deedee’s vulnerability had been a disguise, and now I was finding myself at her mercy. Did she see something beautiful in me? Could she? Did she know enough of what was authentically me to see something beautiful there? And if she could, how could she think that the subterranean taproots I had been sending out all these years, through the internet and down into the casual embraces of men, through lives strange to me that turned my life strange, through kisses and bruises and jokes and cruel remarks, how could she behold the entire domain I had built for myself in the dark and decide it should be amputated? The portal closed.

I felt then that no one would ever know who I was. No one, I thought, was even capable of seeing another person clearly, let alone loving them. Aunt Deedee was merely clacking beads on a moral abacus together. College + no sex = safe + good.

They were unspoken equations that propelled her as surely as physics equations could explain a ball’s arc through the air. I had watched my mother keep trying, and failing, to live by her own moral equations. Being nice to husband = being a good wife. Making husband angry = being a bad wife. Suddenly, blossoming in me like food dye dropped in a water glass, was a memory of his voice, angry at her, saying, “I need you to be fucking available by phone. Why is that so hard? Are you fucking nuts? You’re my wife, you’re taking care of our children, you should have your phone on you at all times.” She had taken us to the park, one of the rare days when she was in a good enough mood to want to go outside, and her phone had died, and she had been nervous about that, but she’d taken us to McDonald’s on the way home for ice cream anyway. I remember telling her, “Don’t worry about it, he probably hasn’t even called. He won’t notice. He’s at work, why would he call?” But he had called. How old had I been? Seven?