That was three months ago. Three months of living with my younger sister, and I still hadn’t decided if it was the worst or best decision of my life. The first week, I hated it.

“That’s why I moved in with you, you know,” she said quietly. “Not just because my apartment had mold. But because I was lonely. And I knew you were too.”

“Nothing,” I say. And for once, it’s the truth.

She catches me looking and grins. “What?”

“You don’t seem scared.”

I’m not good at talking. Vicky knows this. She’s always known. The thing about Vicky is that she feels everything at full volume. Joy, sadness, anger—it all comes out the same way: loud, messy, and honest. When she’s happy, she laughs so hard she snorts, and then laughs harder at the snort. When she’s sad, she doesn’t hide it. She cries openly, ugly-cries with red eyes and wet cheeks, and she lets you hold her until it passes.

Vicky doesn’t believe in closed doors. She’ll barge into my room at seven in the morning, already mid-sentence about some dream she had where our childhood dog could talk and kept asking her for tax advice. She leaves half-empty coffee mugs everywhere—on the bathroom counter, inside the linen closet, once in the freezer next to the peas. She sings in the shower, and not well. She sings like a goose being slowly lowered into a woodchipper.