Within/Without

chapter eleven.

Simon

The house always looks quite haunted in the winter. Not that it doesn't look haunted during the spring or summer or fall; it always looks haunted. It's just something about the biting cold air and the grayish skies and the crumpled, dying rosebushes leading up the drive that make my childhood home look like less of a childhood home and more like something out of a gothic movie.

    Perhaps it's not just the air, though. To be fair, the house already seems sort of eerie on the outside: four stories of pale brick and dark shutters, vines crawling up the siding, a spired roof above the attic I used to stargaze out of. It sits at the top of a grassy hill, a hill so tall the house is barely visible from the bottom of it. When I was younger it was the perfect hill for sledding in the winter and taking a tumble down in the summer. Now it's just a pain in the ass to walk up.

    Pebbles of gravel pop and zing underneath the tires as Noah pulls up around the circular drive, and before the car's even reached a complete stop, people are already piling out the front doors. Mom in her favorite turtleneck sweater, Dad, oddly, in a suit, my little sister Abbie (who's sporting an extra piercing in her nose that I don't remember seeing before) in an alarmingly large sweater. Even the housemaid, Rose, is crowding around the door, just waiting to get a look at us.

    In retrospect, it hasn't been too long. Three months, maybe, since we've spoken face to face. The way they're all crowding at the door, however, you'd think none of them had seen us in years.

    Noah slides the car into park and wiggles his eyebrows at me. "Here goes nothing."

    As soon as he's out of the car, he flashes a wide smile and waves. "Mom, Pops—good to see you. Tabitha? Why is there a jewel in your nose? Yes, I've been eating fine, Rose. Could use some more of your biscuits, though. Is Simon—? Oh, yeah. He's all good—"

    As always, Noah goes into it with ease. He goes into everything with ease. I, on the other hand, take my time getting out of the car, flattening down my windblown hair, adjusting my collar. The air is snippy and cold and I want to go inside, but before I can, Mom is squealing and running towards me and squeezing me in her arms.

    "Oh my little boy! How you've grown!"

    "I just saw you for the fourth of July, Mom."

    "Oh, July!" she repeats with a huff, letting me go and folding her arms. She looks, like she usually does, like one of those chefs on afternoon cooking shows. Bright, homely eyes. Perfectly curled hair. Dangly earrings that twinkle each time she moves her head. "That was forever ago, Simon, forever ago. I used to see you everyday. I'm still getting used to only seeing you every few months."

    "Mom, I left home three years ago...?"

    She frowns, combing a strand of my hair behind my ear. "It still feels like yesterday."

    She doesn't say this kind of stuff to Noah, and I know why. Everyone knows why. Out of the three St. John kids, I'm the weird one that got stuck with this odd shapeshifting defect; I get all the fuss and the worrisome comments and the Maybe you should stay closer to homes.

    I've certainly made it easier for my siblings. There's nothing Noah or Abbie could do that would earn either of them as much scrutiny as I receive from our parents. Lucky them.

    Mom moves away to say something to Noah, and now I'm faced with greeting my father, a stone-faced real estate broker who never paid attention to science or other whimsical things before I was born. I'm the reason research is a hobby of his now. When he's not searching encyclopedias or the web, he's traveling to go to seminars or expos or TED talks. A couple of times he's visited college professors in their labs. Once or twice I've asked him just what he's looking for. Once or twice he's said, "An answer."