The Line Between

Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room, doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished, feeling virtuously entitled to some low–fat chocolate reward, she wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother's room on the way. Looking in — not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was doing, until shooed away — she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn't something to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.

Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece — she had the silver top hat — very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had a hotel on Park Place.

Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a larger–than–planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the container she finally managed to stuff what she'd just glimpsed deep in the part of her mind she called her «forgettery.» As she'd once said to her friend Melissa, «There's such a thing as too much information, and it is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about stuff. Look at the President.»

For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of staying out of Angie's way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry was when you didn't see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the garbage.

The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn't simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn't catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

Angie's buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she

never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him — backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie's astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do — and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn's partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.

When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke. Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only, «My room.»

Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the bed and studied him: chubby and messy–looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of rusty–brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said, «Talk to me.»

«About what?» Marvyn had a deep, foggy voice for eight and a half — Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before Marvyn was born. «I didn't break your CD case.»

«Yes, you did," Angie said. «But forget that. Let's talk about garbage bags. Let's talk about Monopoly.»

Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, «I'm warning you right now, you won't believe me.»

«I never do. Make it a good one.» «Okay," Marvyn said. «I'm a witch.»

When Angie could speak, she said the first thing that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. «You can't be a witch. You're a wizard, or a warlock or something.» Like we're having a sane conversation, she thought.

Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch almost came loose. «Uh–uh! That's all books and movies and stuff. You're a man witch or you're a woman witch, that's it. I'm a man witch.»