Put a boy in an alley.

Poor boy, obviously, though he didn’t start out that way. He’s handsome, because he’s a boy in a story, and at this point it’s a given. This boy’s handsomeness is more particular than other boys in stories though, on account of his eyes—one brown, one clear green—and his hair—dark, except where it’s patched with shocking white. But he’s tall, and broad, and the crookedness of his nose is charming, rather than frightening, so he’s handsome. The boy’s got rucksack at his feet, which he bought from the thrift store, because the rucksacks at the army surplus were too expensive.

Now put a cat in the alley—black cat, bad omen cat—and slink it towards the boy. Watch how the blacks of its eyes grow, ’til they’ve blotted out the yellow. Watch how the cat bumps its head against the boy’s knee, chirps to catch his attention.

There you have it—boy plus cat plus alley. Tally it up and you get Cyrus Kizy, shit outta luck, squatting outside his parents’ apartment building.

“Snuffles, you whore,” he whispers to the cat. Snuffles meows.

“I’ve got nothing for you.”

Snuffles claws at Cyrus’s canvas shoes with her tiny claws, rubbing against his shins. The slut.

“You slut,” Cyrus mutters, but he leans down to give Snuffles her sought after pats anyhow. “Now, shoo.”

But Snuffles doesn’t shoo. Instead, she gets up on her little hind legs and wails, loud enough to wake the block.

“Snuffles!” Cyrus grabs her round the middle, tucking her under his arm, as he glances hastily upwards. He waits a second, then another, but no new lights join the throng in the brownstone. Cyrus breathes a sigh of relief.

“You’re gonna get me caught, Snuf,” Cyrus says. Snuffles isn’t listening, closed eyed and content as Cyrus scratches under her chin.

When he was a kid, living in this brownstone, Cyrus walked around with Snuffles, perched on his shoulder. It was a habit that started when she was a kitten—a habit that Cyrus falls into as he sneaks down the alley.

Cyrus would like to say that he was a good kid, but that would be a lie. What he was, was a study in too-much. Too fidgety, too still, too loud, too quiet, too mean. “Balance, Cy,” Mom would sigh, wrinkle-browed and grim. Cyrus tried.

It’s funny, in a tragical, fucked up sort of way, that for all of Cyrus’s too-much, he never managed to be enough.

It’s not like he didn’t have the tools—he lived in a two-parent household, with an attentive mother and a sage father, in the heart of Brooklyn. He had two doting grandmothers, though no grandfathers to speak of. He’d been charming, precocious, and, despite his particularities, handsome. Do the math, and all these things should’ve added up to Cyrus Kizy: success story—not Cyrus Kizy: college dropout and alley crawler.

So, solve for x.

Nora Kizy was Cyrus’s sister—eight years older and wiser, already running the show when Cyrus was born. They probably should’ve hated each other—Nora in the throes of third-grade jealousy, Cyrus in the throes of shitting himself and learning to speak. They hadn’t.

Nora was Cyrus’s favorite person in the world. On Sundays, she’d make him pancakes shaped like Mickey, with whipped cream smiles drawn on top. She was never annoyed by him, though sometimes, when he was especially small, she had a bad habit of treating him like a doll.

According to their parents parents, Nora was also a disastrous failure—a sculptor, who’d abandoned their dreams of law school for a smock and an apartment that she shared with four other girls.

Cyrus thought the whole thing was trite. Nora had a handle on her life that few people did at twenty-two. She sold her clay mugs by the case and went to judo three times a week and could afford foods with words like ‘organic’ and ‘gluten-free’ on the label. And look, maybe Eileen and Raad Kizy were too uptight to appreciate that, but Cyrus wasn’t. Once a week, he took the subway to Nora’s, and stretched out on the rug in her room like Snuffles when she was out of her head from catnip.

They would talk, then, about the most random shit—the chemistry class Cyrus hated, the girl that asked Nora out for coffee, whether or not fingerless gloves were useful for anything other than an emo fashion statement. Nora would hum, Nora would laugh, Nora would flick clay in his face, her hands warm and red from the pottery wheel that hummed away in the corner.

“You should get a studio space,” Cyrus would say, and Nora would shrug.

“Can’t afford that yet.”

Nora had a special way of talking about things she didn’t have, like all that kept them away was time. Whatever was absent from her life was contingent on the ever-present yet. To Nora, good things were inevitable, if she only kept going. Secretly, Cyrus admired that about her.

Alright, so sister. That’s all well and good, but it’s not x.

X is the day, eight months ago, when Eileen Kizy called Cyrus in the middle of his biology final and told him his sister was in a fucking coma. X is Cyrus, in the middle of a hospital, blowing like a Goddamn bomb, when his parents told him what happened—a rainy night, a conversation that turned to pressure that turned to the sort of fight that got messy, that got balls-to-the-wall and mean. The sort of fight that turned to Nora, getting hit in the middle of the road on her way home, alone, a little tipsy and a lot sad.

She was only twenty six.

So yeah, Cyrus blew, and Raad gave him these big, limpid eyes of fatherly sorrow or whatever, and Eileen was brimming with rage when she told him to get out.

So, Cyrus got out. Then he dropped out.

It’s really fucking strange, he thinks, how much of you someone can hold in their hands, how much of you can tie itself to another person, so subtly and entirely that when they’re gone, you just—unravel, like a badly knitted scarf. Cyrus didn’t know, until Nora.

The kicker is: he probably could’ve gone home. He probably could’ve hung his proverbial hat in the doorway, could’ve sat at Eileen’s oak table and eaten the meat pies from the freezer, could’ve born the weight of their disappointment and their sympathy—Raad promising Eileen that Cyrus was just going through a rough time, Eileen’s furious rebuttal that they were all going through a rough time, what was Cyrus’s excuse? He could’ve done it, except he couldn’t even look them in the fucking eye.

There you have it—x.

Cyrus doesn’t see his family much anymore. Nora’s visiting hours are from eight to eight—the same hours, for the most part, that his parents work. He makes sure he’s there when they’re not.

The worst thing, maybe, is how small Nora is in her white bed. She’d always been kinda short—Cyrus had been taller than her since the eighth grade—but now she was small. She was all—still and quiet, and Nora wasn’t.

As the days pass, Cyrus feels more and more like he’s looking at a body. He hates that.

Which is maybe why he’s here, skulking outside his parents building, with Snuffles perched on his shoulder like a bad imitation of a parrot. Why he sneaks inside, because night doorman Larry is on duty, and night doorman Larry has a tendency to fall asleep when he’s on duty. Why he uses the key he never threw out for the first time in eight months.

The apartment is just as he remembers—a weird mesh between Eileens’s imposing taste and Raad’s homy touches, mahogany and floral print battling for domination. Cyrus sneaks down the hall, minding the creaky floorboards and the weird little step Eileen’s been trying to get rid of for years.

When he was four, and Nora was twelve, she’d taken her first pottery class, and made her first mug. She’d painted it in food-safe glaze, and given it to Cyrus for his birthday. It was chunky, and ugly, and brutally orange, and it was Cyrus’s favorite thing in the world. Eight months ago, he’d left it behind, holding his pens. It’s still in his room.

Look, if they’re gonna pull the plug on Nora tomorrow, he might as well have something of hers to take with him.

Cyrus’s room is the same as when he left, only dustier. The mug is on his desk, right where he’d kept it, where he’d forgotten it in his haste to move out, and again in his haste to leave. Clunky, ugly, and brutally orange. Cyrus just about sobs at the sight.

He pours the pens out of the mug, and tucks it into his rucksack. Snuffles meows, kneading his shoulder, and leaps to the ground.

That’s when the light flicks on.

“Cyrus?”

Cyrus freezes. Turns. There, framed in the doorway, in his mom.

Eileen Kizy doesn’t look like her kids—her hair’s too red, her skin too pale—except for her clear green eyes. Cyrus has just one of them, stuck in his head. Eileen takes another step, closer.

“You’re back—?”

“No.” Cyrus shakes his head. “I just. Came to get something.”

“In the middle of the night?”

Cyrus shuffles his feet.

“I, uh. I didn’t really want to see you.”

Eileen’s face falls, and it’s only then that Cyrus realizes it had risen in the first place. He should feel bad, he knows, for killing his mother’s hope like that, but he doesn’t.

Cyrus doesn’t feel a lot, these days.

“You heard about Nora?” Eileen asks. Cyrus nods, and Eileen drops, stone-like, onto the bed.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she murmurs, which makes Cyrus want to scoff, and also makes him want to scream, and also makes him want to wreck everything in sight. She’s fucking sorry?

And the thing is, Cyrus had never hated his mom until last year. Misunderstood her, sure. Wondered about her, always. But he never hated her until that night in the hospital, when she told him how Nora had left, and how Eileen hadn’t stopped her.

“I keep playing it over in my head, you know. That night. All the things I would’ve done differently,” she says, like she’s sitting in the confessional. But Cyrus isn’t a priest.

“Yeah, well.” He swallows. “Hindsight.”

“Yeah,” Eileen agrees. Her eyes are red when they meet Cyrus’s. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Cyrus isn’t.

“I’m just leaving, Mom.”

“You don’t have to,” Eileen says. “I meant—if you wanted, you could stay. I don’t want to push.”

Cyrus almost says no, but then his eyes catch on—something. Maybe it’s how Eileen’s wringing her hands, or the tentative lean of her shoulders, or the way her head is bowed, when she’s never bowed it before. His mother, he realizes, has changed since he saw her last.

He softens. “Mom?”

“It’s only—” Eileen starts, cuts herself off with a hitching little gasp, and starts again— “Nora’s already…gone, and I—I haven’t seen you in months, and I—tomorrow, we’re going to lose her for good, and I just—I can't stand the thought of losing you too.”

And Cyrus—doesn’t entirely know what to say to that. He’s wrong-footed, gaping like an idiot in a room that isn’t really his anymore, while his Mom cries on a bed that he could’ve stayed in, if he could only look his parents in the eye.

“I don’t know if I can.”

Eileen nods. “Right. You have your life, and I—”

“No, it’s just—” Christ, how does he say this?— “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?”

Come home. Be somewhere she’s not. Forgive you, either of you, especially when you haven’t even apologized.

He doesn’t say any of it, but Eileen hears him.

“Oh,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She waves him off. “I know that I—I know.”

They sit there, soaking in the silence, for another minute.

Tomorrow, Cyrus’s sister will die, and he will be truly alone for the first time in his life.

And maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t want to be.

“I could visit, though,” he offers. “Y’know, keep you guys from worrying.”

Eileen’s face rises a little. “I’d like that,” she says.

Cyrus nods. “Okay.”

He doesn’t hug her—he’s not ready to test his weight on whatever fragile bridge they’re building. But he does pat her on the shoulder before he leaves, Nora’s ugly orange mug tucked in his rucksack.