The Brother Who Came to Live With Me

The front office

The Monday before school started, I took him to enroll. I had a shift at nine and I was already in my navy scrubs, with my hair pulled back in a clip because I had run out of time to braid it.

Caleb wore a black hoodie, in August, because he was fifteen and that was simply who he was.

The high school sat about a mile up the road from the hospital.

The front office had the bright morning light coming through the big window and that smell every school office has, of floor wax and copier paper and somebody’s coffee.

The secretary was a friendly woman in her fifties named Mrs. Foster, in a floral blouse, with a blue lanyard around her neck.

She took my manila folder, looked over the form, and typed for a while. Then she smiled up at Caleb.

“Well, Caleb, it looks like you’re all set,” she said. She printed his class schedule and slid it across the counter to him. “You’ve got Mr. Hensley for biology. You’ll like him. He keeps a snake.”

Caleb took the schedule with one hand, his backpack hanging off one shoulder, and he smiled at her shyly, the way he smiles at people when he is not sure yet that he is allowed to be happy.

Then Mrs. Foster slid a blue card across the counter. “Emergency contact card,” she said. “Just fill that in for us, honey. Who we call first if you’re sick or there’s a problem.”

I reached for the pen, because I assumed I would be the one filling it out. But Caleb had already picked it up.

He leaned over the counter and wrote, in his careful, crooked printing: Megan Harlow. Sister. And my cell phone number, which he knew by heart.

He wrote Mom’s name second. Then he handed the card back to Mrs. Foster and hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder, like it was nothing.

I had to look out the window for a minute. Mrs. Foster saw it. She did not say anything.

She just reached under the counter and handed me a tissue from a box she clearly kept there for exactly that reason.

“Where should we mail his report cards and progress reports?” she asked, after a moment.

“To me,” I said. “His address is my address now.”

She typed it in. A few keystrokes on an August morning. That was the moment it became real.