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“Does he?”

“No! He doesn’t do drugs.”

He crosses his arms and stares at the car. “Why isn’t he getting out? Is he scared?”

I take a step. “I hope you’re not doing meth.”

He scoffs. “Like you fucking care.”

I look at his eyes, and they answer all my questions. “I do,” I admit. “It might surprise you, but I do care. I hope you’re not. And I won’t sit around and watch you do to grandma what our parents did to her.” I walk off. “See you later.”

“I don’t know about that. I think you’re too good for us now.”

I stop on the walk.

He says it like a joke, the way he says everything, with his chin up and his mouth already halfway to a laugh. But he doesn’t laugh. He just stands there on the bottom step in his socks with his arms crossed, and the wind comes up the street and moves his hair.

And I look at him in the way I haven’t let myself look at him in a while because looking at Dylan was always something I did quickly from the side to see what kind of night it was going to be.

His hoodie is too big. The sleeves come down over his hands and he’s holding the cuffs closed with his fingers, the way little kids do when they’re cold. There’s a piece of hair at the back of his head that sticks straight up, the same piece it’s always been, the cowlick Grandma used to lick her thumb and press down before church when he was small enough to let her. His eyes are pink at the rims. He hasn’t slept. He’s twenty-two years old and he looks about forty and about nine at the same time.

The night I came here with my two trash bags on the porch and my mom’s taillights going around the corner, he was seventeen. He came out the screen door in a hoodie just like this one, and he didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t ask what happened. He just picked up one of my bags, carried it inside, put it down in the sewing room, and left. I never thanked him. I don’t think either of us has ever mentioned it.

That was Dylan, and so was the hand around my wrist on Thanksgiving, and the weight on my back, and my face pushed into the couch cushion until I couldn’t get any air. So was the bite on my finger. So was every twenty-dollar bill that went missing out of my backpack the year I was fifteen. So was his father, and every bruise Dylan came to this house with. So was his mother, who left, and who he still talks about like she’s coming back.

All of that is him. I don’t get to pick one. Nobody does.

I know where it came from. That’s the thing nobody tells you about growing up in a house like this. You don’t just learn what people do. You learn why. You lie awake in a sewing room listening through the wall, and you learn all of it. I know exactly how a kid ends up standing on a porch in a hoodie with his hands pulled up in his sleeves, looking at a black car at the curb like it’s a door that got closed in his face. I know because I was the kid in the next room.

Neither of us picked this. He didn’t pick his father. I didn’t pick my mother. Nobody gets to pick the first thing that happens to them.

But there’s a point after that. I don’t know exactly where it is. It isn’t a line you can see. It’s small things at first, so small you’d miss them. Who you hurt when you’re hurting. Who you decide it’s somebody’s fault. Whether you take the twenty out of the backpack or you don’t. Whether you say sorry the next morning, or you just wait for everybody to act like nothing happened because they always do. Whether you do the same thing again the next day.

And you keep making them. Over and over. A thousand little ones, every day, until one day you look up and they’ve added up into a person.

That’s all a person is, I think. Not what happened to you. What you did next, and next, and next.

I understand Dylan. I understand him better than anybody else. And understanding him doesn’t mean I owe him something. It doesn’t mean I have to stand here on the walk and let him lean on me until I go under, too. I can know exactly why he’s like this, and still not let him decide what I turn into.

I think I used to believe those were the same thing. That if you understood why somebody hurt you, you had to forgive them. Or stay. Or keep coming back to the porch every Christmas to see if this was the year they’d be different and get your hands bit when they weren’t.

They aren’t the same thing.

“I’m not,” I say to him because it’s true. I’m not too good.

He laughs through his nose. He doesn’t believe me. I can see that he doesn’t, and I can see he needs not to because if I’m not better than him, then he can’t tell himself I left because I thought I was.

I don’t need him to believe me. That’s new. I think about it standing here. I don’t need him to understand. I don’t need him to say anything back.

I’m not better than him. I’m not. I’ve been angry enough to want somebody else to hurt. I’ve lied to everybody who ever asked me if I was okay. I’m not some girl who got out because she was good.

I just kept choosing small things every day. A library card. A bus ticket. Seven dollars for a sweater I could sell for eighty. A chain on a door. A notebook. A boy who said I know instead of I didn’t mean it, and then kept proving it, again, and again, until I believed him.

That’s the only difference between us. Not who we are. What we keep doing.

And I love Dylan like a brother. That’s the part I don’t know what to do with. I love him the way you love somebody you watched get made into what they are. I love the seventeen-year-old who carried my trash bag up the steps. I’ll probably love him my whole life.

But loving somebody doesn’t mean following them down into every choice they make. It doesn’t mean standing on the porch while they burn the house down because you were there when they lit the first match, and you understand why.