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01 – Fraud
It happens in a flash. One minute Lau’s computer screen is showing him PayPal, the next it’s a garish yellow website he’s never seen before in his life.
Hm, Lau thinks to himself, not good. And then: oh, FUCK.
It’s almost midnight. Lau lives alone—sure, it’s New York City, everywhere’s open, but probably not his bank’s call center. Mom and Frank are in Greece with one of Mom’s art school friends, and while Lau isn’t above paying international rates to panic to his mother, he just knows that Frank will deliver a lecture about “being careful” with where Lau types his bank account information if Lau wakes him up at six in the morning. Damn it, if he’d just gone out with his friends like they’d all been pestering him to instead of trying to go to bed early for one night, this would never have happened, because he’d be at Marie’s Crisis hollering along to Broadway hits and not thinking about his responsibilities.
Lau has to be up in six hours if he wants to continue his streak of making a good impression at work by showing up early. He needs to fix this. Who can he call, who can he call… William! William’s a lawyer, William’s thirty-two and a real adult. William can fix it.
He’s really proud of himself when William picks up on the first ring, and then William says “Lau? Are you okay?” and he sounds all tired and Lau remembers that part of William being a real adult means that William goes to bed at 10 at night like an old man. Fuck.
“Sorry, sorry,” Lau hastily assures him—or tries to, because then his voice cracks, because his stupid savings are about to get stolen and Brooklyn rent is expensive. “Um. You’re a lawyer, right?”
William does not sound reassured, but he does sound a lot more awake. “Lau, are you in trouble?”
Lau babbles, “well, I was trying to deal with my commissions, and… but… I think something happened with PayPal? My computer screen turned this awful color and I’d just put in my account number and—”
“Okay.” William cuts him off. “Lau, you know I’m an estate planning lawyer.”
“Uh-huh.” Not the kind that deals with… with debit card fraud, or whatever it is that’s about to happen to him. Ugh.
“Why are you calling me, and not your bank? You know they have 24-hour hotlines for these kinds of things.”
“…they do?”
“Yeah,” William tells him. “Listen. Go—on your phone, shut down your computer, and make an appointment for a malware scan in the morning—go to their website, or whatever, and call the hotline, they’ll freeze your account and set up a new one. You’ll have to get new cards, but you can do that first thing tomorrow. It’s all going to be fine.”
Oh, so he’d gotten himself in a tizzy over nothing. Great. “Sorry,” he says to William, voice suddenly very small. “I’ll… you can go back to sleep.”
“It’s okay. Seriously. Anytime, kid.”
So it was fine. Not actually a big deal at all. Nothing’s getting stolen. And sure, he’ll have to spend his entire lunch break going to the bank and getting a new card printed, but it’s fine, okay? It all turned out fine.
04 – The dream
It’s thirty-seven minutes to midnight, Harry’s putting off his US History essay, Christina was supposed to drive back to Williamsburg yesterday, and Naoko’s first application for film school is due in thirty-seven minutes and she hasn’t finished her final cut yet. “Play it back again,” Christina murmurs over her shoulder.
Naoko hits play. Again. They’ve been here since dinner, almost five hours ago, and she was so stressed she could barely eat because she’s had this dream for years and this submission needs to be perfect. Yes, okay, she had a final cut done. She isn’t satisfied with it. All dinner, she was antsy. There was just something off about her edit and she’s been staring at it for days and days and all the frames have run together and she just can’t tell what’s wrong.
Hence, the two most detail-oriented people she knows crowded over her shoulder, staring fixatedly at the computer.
“It might be your color grading, that you’re seeing,” suggests Christina. She uses the words ‘color grading’ like they’re a foreign language. “This part, it’s just a little too green, if that makes any sense.”
Naoko blinks hard, because staring at the screen for so long has screwed up her eyes, and pauses the video. “What’s the timestamp?”
“I don’t know, ten seconds ago?” Naoko rewinds, and she can tell exactly which clip is the offending one by the way Christina jerks up and points. “There!”
Hmm. Christina’s right, it is too green. Naoko pulls up filters and lighting settings and fucks around with the clip while Christina texts… someone, presumably her mysterious new boyfriend. “Better?” Naoko asks after a minute. Christina hums.
“Move, Christina,” says Harry. Christina obligingly vacates the extra office chair they’d commandeered, and Harry shoves it aside, so he can get a better view of the screen. “Naoko, you look like you’re crying. Or stoned. Go close your eyes for five minutes, or… or stare out the window, or something, and let me take another look.”
Harry has a legal pad and pen in hand and he’s been muttering to himself about transition timings the entire evening. Naoko is hesitant to leave her submission, her baby, but Harry raises his eyebrows at her in a way that brooks no argument so she reluctantly cedes her own desk chair to him and drags the other one back to Mick and Michael’s bedroom.
“How’s it going?” Michael asks.
Naoko makes a face. “They’ve both learned too much about symbolism. I’ve created monsters.” In two very different ways—Harry’s going to find even more ways to see signs from the universe when he’s nervous about something (which is always), and Christina won’t shut up about triangles and stability and how she’s going to incorporate triangles into her interior decorating. Secretly—and Naoko would never say this to anyone, much less her ninth-grader brothers—she appreciates the buy-in. And the help. The Beardsley kids had warmed to her hobby after she’d dropped the habit of shoving the camcorder in their faces to get a reaction and started actually focusing on what she filmed.
“But they’re helping?”
“Yeah.” Naoko sighs. “They are actually helping.”
And not only because Naoko knows she needs to get out of the desk chair and pace every once in a while. When she goes back to her own room, Harry’s legal pad has timestamped instances of cuts that are too quick or too long, in order, with details to the tenth of a second about where she should have cut instead. Without a word, she takes it from him and locks in for another fifteen minutes.
By 11:51, Harry and Christina have watched the whole thing again, twice over, from behind her without any comments. “It’s good,” Christina tells her. “I think it’s good.”
“But are you sure?” Naoko begs. This isn’t just any movie, this is her bridge to the future, her ticket to film school and the whole wide world beyond small-town Connecticut. “You don’t—I mean—how do you know?”
Harry places a hand on her shoulder. “Listen,” he says, sounding—not for the first time—like he’s older than Naoko and not the other way around. “The technical stuff? Yeah, Christina and I don’t know. You’re the expert. But the story you’re telling is good. That’s always been what you’re good at. You’re gonna get in.” He raps on the wood surface of Naoko’s desk, one-two-three. Oh, this is important to him, Naoko realizes, something complicated forming in her stomach. He says it again. “You’re gonna get in.”
07 – Storytime
“What do we want to read?” Joni asks, holding up two board books. “Baby Beluga or Down By The Bay?”
Tommy makes a wordless squeal of excitement and reaches with his chubby hands for Baby Beluga.
“Oh, excellent choice,” Joni tells her nephew—William’s son, who is one year old today and thriving on the chaos that is six of William’s siblings in one house before anyone else invited to this birthday-party-that’s-mostly-for-the-parents has even shown. “Will you sing with me, Tommy? Will you sing with us?” she asks Aldo, Michael, and Marisa pointedly.
“Yes ma’am!” Aldo says, mock-saluting. William grimaces, and he sees Michael do the same—that is not how salutes are supposed to look, but then again, Aldo is twenty-two and probably doing it on purpose. Dylan to this day does the same thing, to annoy William, and they’re both in their thirties. Brothers.
Joni, a middle school music teacher who’s taken actual conducting lessons, conducts herself and Tommy and William and the captive audience of siblings (Phoebe and Harry had wisely hidden themselves in the kitchen, helping Rosemary with party prep) with one hand and turns the pages of the board book with the other. “Baby beluga in the deep blue sea, swim so wild and you swim so free…” They’re even mostly in tune.
The song finishes, and Joni goes to pick up Down By The Bay for another singalong, but Aldo puts his foot down and says that he’s done singing and doesn’t anyone else want to say hi to William, so William and Michael catch up about the latest GenAI courtroom scandal and nonprofit law while Aldo tries to teach Tommy sign language. (“Quote-unquote baby signs are just a watered-down version of the real thing, which works just as well,” Aldo had explained, when Rosemary had announced she was pregnant and Aldo got his interpreting certificate in the same weekend.) And then Phoebe and Rosemary emerge from the kitchen with mini cupcakes, and Rosemary starts answering the door while Phoebe takes her nephew into her arms and starts telling him stories about how this or that uncle or aunt was such a terrible youth and how baby Tommy should never listen to advice from them, only from Aunt Phoebe. And then the party’s in full swing and William slips into client mode trying to juggle his siblings and his college friends and his law school friends and Rosemary’s bridesmaids because all four of them who weren’t William’s sisters (and of course one of them who was) are here.
By the time the party winds down and the only guest left is Marisa, lying on the floor with Tommy sitting upright on her stomach and telling him a story William thinks is a pastiche of an Indian folktale and one of the Marvel movies he hadn’t watched, William is exhausted. With his son in Marisa’s capable hands, he sits down at the kitchen table and closes his eyes, dead to the world until he feels Rosemary’s hand on his shoulder.
“That went well, I think,” she comments, kissing the top of his head.
“It did. But I’m so tired, Rosemary, I think this is worse than that time in high school we threw a rager to—”
“Oh yeah, Phoebe’s told me that story,” Rosemary laughs. Phoebe and Rosemary have been surprisingly close since they’d met, close enough that Phoebe had made the trip up from New York just for this. “You’re not a host by nature. That’s just fine, I am.”
“No, it was good,” he affirms. Good to have all these people in their house, celebrating their son—if anything ever went wrong, if something happened to him or to Rosemary or god forbid both of them—Tommy would have a village. He would be just fine.
10 – Stuck with something/someone
“I hate that everyone thinks we like the same things.”
“I hate that nobody can tell us apart. Even our own sister.”
“I hate that I never get to be just Bina. It’s always Marisa-and-Bina.”
Bina sighs heavily, letting her arm drop dramatically over the side of the bunk bed. Beneath her, Otter mimicks the sigh, then reaches up to give her an awkward high-five.
“Great. Great job,” she deadpans.
“Thank you,” he answers, equally serious.
Bina laughs. “Ugh but for real,” she continues, “I cannot believe we’re going to be in the same class again. We! Are! In! High school! We’re supposed to be our own people and instead I’m just—stuck with her!”
“Well,” Otter points out, “you’re not going to have all your classes together, are you? We don’t get our full schedules until the first day. Your homeroom is just your first class.”
Bina twists out of the bunk bed to hang at a right angle over it and upside-down glare at him, because just a second ago he was right there with her and now he is missing. The. Point.
He holds his hands up in surrender and pulls an appropriately apologetic face, so Bina, whose blood is also rushing entirely into her head and that position was going to get painful, flops back up onto her mattress. “In fairness,” Otter adds, “sometimes even one class is too much. Man, I remember last year I just had Science and Social Studies with Ely and we still got paired up together for everything even though there were three other guys from the soccer team there and we could have been with literally any one of them.”
“I hate being a matched set.”
“You’re telling me,” Otter grumbles. “Hey. I bet if you and I have classes together they’d never think of pairing us.”
Bina grins, because he’s right. “I would pair up with you though. If they let us pick.”
13 – Rainbow
It’s the little things that tip Ethan off. Was there one great big realization, that rushed over him like a wave and turned his world upside down? No. It was more like… being bi, and that was fine, because three of his siblings had already come out by then. It was getting into a heated debate with his friend Teresa at the lipstick counter and realizing that he paid more attention to the colors than most guys he knew… and that most guys he knew weren’t best friends with a girl and wouldn’t go with her into Macy’s. It was picking up Mom’s habit of rubbing half the fabric on every rack between his fingers because her workshop was always his quiet place in the house (when Lau wasn’t there, anyway). It was that pervasive feeling of un-belonging that he’d always attributed to being the youngest of eighteen.
It was spending all of high school growing out his hair long enough that by the time he gets to college, someone in his orientation group they/thems him, and he doesn’t say anything about it.
He (they, whatever) starts going by E, tags along to Rocky Horror shadow casts, and keeps it all inside. Doesn’t tell their (his, whatever) family, not even Aldo, because Aldo’s always had a big mouth. Goes to Thanksgiving at Phoebe’s because their (her, his, whatever) family is big enough now that it doesn’t actually work to cram everyone into the lighthouse anymore and besides, she (they, he, who knows) doesn’t want to face her (their? His?) dad. Not right now.
It would be alright. Probably. Probably it would be alright and fine. But sue him (her?)—they’re scared.
Thanksgiving is weirdly unbearable. Christmas even more so. And then spring break rolls around and E finally allows herself to entertain the thought of… telling people.
Because here’s the thing. One of their earliest memories—not even a memory at this point, more just a story that older sibling after older sibling has told over and over again until she feels like she remembers it herself—is from those first few months as a blended family, when Phoebe and Dylan and William and Christina had conspired to break up their parents. They’d dressed him and Aldo up in “dresses” that were Phoebe’s most flamboyant tank tops, painted their nails, draped them both in Mardi Gras beads. Sent the two of them down to parade around the first floor. Dad had lost his shit. Mom had defended them, in the clumsy, 2005 way that people defended gayness back then.
And Dad’s mellowed, since then, E knows. Raising eighteen kids and being married to someone as bohemian as Mom had softened him, a bit. This… thing, though, that E is—trans—she just doesn’t know how he’ll react.
Mom would temper him. And E would have the combined might of seventeen older siblings to shield him, if the worst came to it. It might, just might, be worth a shot.
26 – Funeral
Kelly isn’t expecting it to hit her this hard. God, obviously, she’s grieving. Colleen is dead. Colleen, who was supposed to graduate with Kelly in a year’s time; who had a militant sweet tooth and shared all her candy with the rest of the womens’ athletics dorm freshman year; who told Kelly all the lacrosse drama; who was local to this city and taught everyone in her circle the ins and outs of the subway routes and where was the best place to get a pizza. But honestly, from the minute she’d heard the news—from the minute she’d gotten that awful campus-wide email sitting in the library and her blood had run cold—Kelly’d felt numb about it. Like, okay, this is what we’re doing now.
Except now she’s sitting in the parking lot of some funeral home in Koreatown, sobbing into her steering wheel after all the other cars have left, because Kelly doesn’t know anyone else on the lax team like that and she didn’t even really like those Hershey toffee things and won’t ever have an excuse to eat them again and taking the subway down south won’t feel the same and Colleen was supposed to be in Kelly’s graduation pictures and how could Colleen have been so fucking stupid, how could Kelly not have seen, this was the same way she’d lost her mom—
Kelly barely notices her phone vibrating against the cupholder until it’s on the last ring, and she considers not answering it for a split second and then she sees it’s Naoko and she figures what the hell.
“Are you okay,” she sobs into the phone, because honestly, none of Helen’s kids ever straight-up call without warning, so what the hell is this.
Naoko laughs, bemused, in that dry way of hers, from the other end of the line. “Are you okay? Kelly. Today was the funeral.”
“It fucking was,” Kelly confirms, still crying.
Throughout everything—the soccer team discussion, the mass at the college chapel, the funeral, all of it—Kelly had kept stoic. Cold. Stone-faced. She saw Colleen’s parents holding each other in the funeral home and watched her older brother, mid-twenties or something and certainly not expecting his sister to die young, stare brokenly out the window at mass and heard her roommate frantically try to talk down one of Colleen’s sorority sisters the night after the news broke and she’d felt sad, sure, but also she hadn’t really felt anything at all. People kept asking her how she was keeping going and she’d always shrug and say, “well, I lost my mom when I was a kid.” They’d nod in understanding and leave her alone.
Problem was, Kelly hasn’t been to a funeral since she was ten. That was half her life ago, and the death and the funeral had all happened in the middle of a three-year whirlwind that started with her mom dying and ended with her dad marrying Helen. She’d forgotten it very quickly, in some ways… but it’s all rushing back to her now. Kelly sat down in her car after and all of a sudden she was in fifth grade again and her dad was picking her up early from school, and she’s not ten anymore, she’s almost twenty-one, and she doesn’t actually know how she’s supposed to feel.
“I know you,” Naoko continues. “You don’t want to talk about it. At least not until you’re cried out and have had two to four business days to process. But, Kelly… do you want some company?”
Naoko has her dead to rights, is the thing, and Kelly does want company, but not just any company. She wants someone who gets it, not everyone on campus experiencing premature loss for the first time. She wants her fucking sister and Naoko is in SF, sure, but right now that’s just as close as Phoebe in New York City or Christina in Nashua or Harry just over the river in Camden, in that Kelly’s here and everyone else is somewhere else.
“God, Naoko, yeah,” Kelly says. “Please.”