“So, what then? What’s the plan?”

“It doesn’t concern you.”

“Well, I’m coming, so it does.”

He stopped his angry march down the path and spun around.

“Like Hell you are,” he spit, cross-armed. I stared at my brother, crossing my own arms in protest. We looked more like twins in that moment than we had since the womb.

“Go home.” He started walking again.

“Make me.” I followed behind.

“I’ll tell mom.”

“Wouldn’t that mean you’d have to go home, too?”

He just kept walking.

“Where are we going?”

“Away.”

“You don’t even have a plan?”

“Leaving is my plan.”

“Shit plan.”

“Go home, then. I don’t even want you to come. You’re like a lost puppy.”

“You’re the one acting like a toddler.”

“Yeah well you won’t have to put up with me for much longer.”

“You can’t just run away from life. It doesn’t work that way.”

He slowed down. I couldn’t see if he was crying or not, but his voice started to shake.

“I just want to start over. My life is ruined. I’ve fucked everything up.”

“You really think that? We’re 17. Our lives haven’t even started yet.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I think I get it more than anyone.”

“Then no one gets it. I can’t live here anymore.”

“We just have 1 more year. That’s it. That’s like, one 80th of your life. In a year we can go anywhere, do anything we want.”

“A year?! I can’t even survive another second!”

He turned around and his hands were in his hands. I held my brother on that path that morning and felt closer to him than I had our entire childhood.

“When things feel like the end of the world, they never are. The world hasn’t ended yet and it’s not about to. Your whole life is unfathomably long. You could run away and have a story to tell about sleeping in a ditch and starving for a week and coming home with a lost pride. Or, we could go home now, and you can tell me everything that happened last night.”

Damn, I should be a therapist.

We stood there for a while, the only sounds his uneven breath and the chirping birds.

“Let’s go home.”

He nodded, and we turned around.