Page 81 of Fate, Interrupted

More herself, maybe. Though she’s always been aggressively herself in every situation I’ve seen her in.

“They killed a story you wrote,” I say.

“A good story. An important story. About the school board’s creative accounting practices, which nobody else was going to write about because everyone was afraid of Dr. Hendricks, who was a bully with a good vocabulary.”

“And your response to this was burglary.”

“Unauthorized access,” she says. “Through a pre-existing structural flaw in the building’s security.”

“You climbed in through a broken window.”

“I entered through an alternative access point.”

“At night.”

“Visibility was reduced, yes.”

“To steal a document.”

“To recover intellectual property that was rightfully mine.” She pauses. “I got it back, by the way. Published it in the local paper. Hendricks retired a year later, which I’ll leave without comment.”

“You’re very proud of this.”

“Enormously,” she says, without hesitation, and the laugh that comes with it is the real one, the unguarded version, and my chest expands with it.

I consider what I can tell her without turning the game into a confession.

“Your turn,” she says.

I think for a moment, considering the inventory of things that are true about me and selecting something true without making it a weight, a narrower category than it sounds.

“I bit Logan,” I say.

She lifts her head and looks at me.

“I’m sorry?”

“My brother, Logan. I bit him.”

“All toddlers bite. Nothing new there.”

“I was ten.”

“Oh. You bit your brother,” she says, like now it’s dawning on her. “Like, hard?”

“Oh yeah. He needed stitches.”

She stares at me for a moment. “Damn. Why?”

“He had something I wanted.”

“What did he have?”

“The remote control.”

She blinks. Then she laughs properly, bright and unfiltered, and presses her face briefly into my shoulder before pulling back to look at me again.

“You bit your brother hard enough to need stitches. Over a television remote.”