An awkward silence fell as I looked around, trying to figure out what else I would need for the weekend, so that I could get out of here as quickly as possible.
“Are these from your college?” I glanced over to see Brooke standing by my desk, looking at the blue Stanwich College folder.
“Yeah,” I said, not liking at all that she was going through my stuff. “But don’t—” But Brooke had already picked up the stack of shiny, brightly colored folders and was flipping through them.
“Oh, College of the West is a great school,” she said, stopping on the orange one. “I almost went there.”
“Oh yeah?” I was trying to fight being interested, and leave it at that, but my curiosity overruled me. “Where did you go?”
“USC,” she said, flipping open Northwestern’s purple folder. “For med school too. You got into Northwestern?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“Yes,” I said, feeling my defenses start to go up. This girl didn’t even know me; why was she surprised at my college acceptances? “Why?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly, setting the folder down again. “Sorry. I just . . . When Danny told me you were staying around town, going to the local college here, I guess I just assumed . . .” Her voice trailed off, but it was like I could practically see the words she wasn’t saying floating in the air between us. I assumed you didn’t have any other options.
“It’s not the local college,” I said, hearing my voice rise. “It’s a hugely respected liberal arts school that just happens to be in this town.”
“Right,” Brooke said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”
“Not everyone has to go away to school,” I continued. “There’s nothing wrong with staying close to home.”
“Not at all,” she said, nodding a little too emphatically. She looked at the folders on the desk, then back at me. “So . . . I guess you don’t need these anymore, huh?”
“Just leave them,” I said, not liking at all the look on her face, like she understood something about me that I didn’t. “I still need to let the other schools know I’m not going, that’s all.”
“Right.” She stacked the folders in a neat pile on my desk, then turned to me. “I’ve no doubt Stanwich is a great school too,” she said, a note of false cheer in her voice.
“Yeah,” I said shortly, pulling open my top drawer and looking around for the necklace I wanted to wear tonight. The last few minutes had confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that I didn’t want to come back in here—or deal with Brooke in any way—unless I absolutely had to.
“Oh my gosh!” she said, and I turned to see her picking up the picture that I kept on my nightstand, the one of me and Danny that had run in the newspaper, him at eighteen, me at six, leaning back against his dented ancient Volvo, both of us in sunglasses, arms folded across our chests. “This is the greatest picture! This is when Danny won that contest, right?”
“Right,” I said, fighting the urge to walk over and take the frame back from her.
“He told me all about it,” she said, still looking at the picture with a smile on her face. “I couldn’t believe it. Like, who does that?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t like this was a secret—most articles that were written about Danny had it in there somewhere. It was a human-interest detail, a fun fact about the successful venture capitalist. But I still, somehow, didn’t like this girl talking about one of my favorite memories like she’d been there.
It was the summer after Danny’s senior year, and Coke was running a bottle-cap contest—find the winning cap, win up to a quarter million dollars. Danny had figured out what the winning cap would say, and also that by tilting the bottles at a certain angle, he could see just enough of one letter to tell if it was a winner. And since I was six and didn’t exactly have pressing summer plans, I rode shotgun with him as we crisscrossed the tri-state area, going into every supermarket and CVS and convenience store, Danny working his way up and down the aisles, tilting the bottles and buying us candy that we would share and keep between us on the front seat. He’d found the winning cap—the one worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—on a Diet Coke bottle, in August, but I would have been just as happy if he’d never found it, if it had just been me and my brother, driving through New Jersey, windows down and radio on, singing along as the sun set behind us. Danny gave me twenty thousand dollars of it—much to the shock of my older siblings, who felt that a first grader didn’t need that kind of money—which my parents immediately took and invested for me. Danny used his remaining money to start a fund out of his Princeton dorm room, and of course my mom put the whole thing in the comic strip. And the next year, Coke changed their rules so that all you could see under the cap was a code.
“Such a great story,” Brooke said, setting the picture down and smiling fondly at it.
I finally found my necklace, and dropped it into my bag. “You should be all set,” I said, already heading for the door.
“Oh, great,” Brooke said. “Thanks so much, Charlie.”
“Uh-huh,” I said as I left my room. I could feel resentment bubbling up, even though I had volunteered my room and it wasn’t like I hadn’t understood what would happen. But as I looked back and saw Brooke pick up her suitcase and set it on the bench at the end of my bed, tucking her long hair behind her ears as she did so, I was annoyed anyway. I wouldn’t have cared if it was just Danny in my room, but somehow this girl was upending everything.
I walked straight over to J.J. and Danny’s room and knocked on the door—it was ajar, and it swung open. “I’m coming in,” I called through the open door, giving my brother fair warning. When I didn’t hear anything, I walked in, my eyes adjusting—I always forgot that my brothers’ room didn’t get as much light as mine. It was pretty close to what it had looked like when they had been in high school—cleaned out a little bit since the tag sale, but with the same decorations in place—Danny’s trophies, J.J.’s plaques, the chair in the corner shaped like an oversize baseball glove, and the decade-old posters on the wall of actresses in bikinis, all of whom now had cookbooks and lifestyle websites.
And filling the entire back wall were the Grant Avenue signs. I sometimes forgot just how many of them there were—some with just the sign, some with the sign and signpost, and some with only portions. RANT AVENUE, for instance, had a place of distinction toward the top.
In my mind, it was always blurred—what had happened with the Grant Avenue saga in real life, what had happened in the comic strips, and what had become family legend. But everyone agreed on how it started. When Danny was a junior, Linnie was a sophomore, and J.J. was still in eighth grade, the Grant Avenue sign started disappearing with some regularity. By the third time it happened, people—like the residents of Grant Avenue and the police—were starting to pay attention.
Both my parents denied that they knew it was going on, but I had clear recollections—even at five—of being in my brothers’ room and seeing the stolen street signs. Linnie had had one as well, propped up by her mirror. We were not the only Grants in Stanwich, so I’m sure focus wouldn’t have turned to us, except for the fact that my mom started featuring it in her comic strip.
Whenever the subject of the signs came up, when we were all sitting out on the back deck, our dinner long finished but nobody going in yet, or all of us in the family room, with books and board games, my mother would ultimately be the one who was blamed for what happened. “I wasn’t the one who stole them,” she’d point out, which was a word all three of my siblings took umbrage with.
But a few weeks after the first articles appeared in the paper about the missing street signs, a similar story line started in the version of Stanwich that existed in two dimensions in the comics section. She teased it out, with Donny and Lindsay having a secret, and A.J. eventually finding out about it—and then the reveal, on a Friday, of Cassie opening the door to Donny’s room and seeing the purloined street signs.