Page 33 of Silver Sweet

My phone pings with a notification from him through a money app. He sent me his share for breakfast and in the memo line he put a single emoji.

The middle finger.

7

TOM COBALT

Three days pass, and compromise with Phoenix St. Pierre is beginning to feel more like cutting my chest open and handing him different body parts to play with.

Truly, he might as well be fisting my lungs and liver. It feelsevisceratinghaving to concede on even the smallest details when they’ve been a part of the band for seven years.

“Now you have an issue with the font?” I asked over a phone call last night after a series of back-and-forth texts that went nowhere.

“It’s generic,” he said.

“It’s classic,” I countered with heat, but I knew I wasn’t winning this one. Not when I insisted the album cover be a shade of blue. He’d already relented, and now it was my turn to give in.

“Tom?” Ben dries his wet brown hair with a terry cloth towel. Another wrapped around his waist. I barely heard him come into our room after a shower.

“Huh?” I ask.

“You all right?” He sits on the edge of his queen-size mattress, beads of water rolling down his bare chest. “You keepstrumming the same three chords.” His eyes fall to the indigo guitar in my hands.

Dammit. I set the instrument against my end table.

The curtain divider between our beds is currently open, and the two sides of what used to be just my room couldn’t be more different.

On Ben’s side: about five potted plants, hockey gear, a blue and green checkered quilt, sky-blue walls, Latin and science textbooks—granted, those belong to his pre-med girlfriend—and a floor-length window that overlooks NYC from twenty-one stories high.

My side: guitars hung systematically on black walls, black bedding, Green Day posters, band stickers on my furniture, and a mini-fridge. No window.

I gave Ben the side withlight, seeing as how my baby brother is like the plants he loves and needs sunshine. I’ll survive in the dark.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say more tensely than I should.

Ben might be the jock of the family, but he has brains and can sus out if I’m actually not fine. He’s the sixth-born empathetic, overly feeling Cobalt. I mean, you don’t become vegan without caringeven a little bit about something. In his case, it’s animals. The environment. The fuckingworld.

I can’t imagine caring that deeply, that extensively, about so many people, things,life.It feels like it’d rip me apart.

I prefer to focus my concern on my siblings.

Him.

And Ben does not need to be worried about me right now. Not when he’s going through major stuff on his own. Like dealing with a newly diagnosed mental illness.

He pushed us all away to the point where he gave up his money and booked a one-way ticket to middle-of-nowhere Alaska.

He didn’t want to be found.

I think that’s the scariest part. That heseriouslyplanned to just disappear off the face of the earth forever. Eliot keeps telling me that it wasn’t suicide, but it felt a lot like a form of suicide. Then there’s Charlie, who said that death would’ve been imminent for our brother—that Ben would’ve eventually taken his own life if we never found him.

That hurt more to know.

I’d thought maybe I’d just been projecting. Because being alone forever feels like death to me.

I can’t be alone for five minutes.

My little brother, I thought, was the same. Ben is the most social of my siblings. Always has friends on speed dial and constantly attracts people with his unthreatening baby blue eyes and golden retriever heart.