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like a prayer or a mantra and helps my busy brain to slow down.
    I have been serious about photography since my dad gave me one of those Lomo toy cameras that take those cool seventies-style square shots. He used to take me out for hikes on Bluff Point or excursions in our boat around Fishers Island or walks along Napatree to let me develop my sense of light and composition. We haven’t done this together in a long time, but I kept it up.
    I don’t want to be a photographer for a living or anything. I just like observing. I think that helps with my writing, which is what I really want to do. And maybe teach college-level literature like Maggie’s father, Benjamin, used to do. Although I wouldn’t stick to American lit. Too many drunk white men. I want to live in New York, that’s for sure. I will go to Columbia, which I always state with certainty, despite my terror of a slim envelope arriving in the mail next spring. Getting into Columbia is the hatch door in my escape plan.
    Just before six, Gordy knocks on the darkroom door. Even though I didn’t tell him that’s where I’d be, he knows where to find me. He takes me down to the Green Marble, my favorite hang-out spot, for a coffee.
    All our lives, Gordy has been my true brother and I have been his true confidante. I have seen him through every mismatched girlfriend, his torn medial collateral ligament, which threatened his high school football career (the horror!), every foray his mind would take into literature or philosophy or anything that approached the meaning of life. He is sweet to the bone, and I would spare him any pain and unhappiness and failure that it would be in my power to spare him.
    But do I tell him my heart? No. Why not? Because, right or wrong, I fear he wouldn’t completely understand. And that would break both our hearts in pieces.
    When we were eight or nine, there was this one night we camped out in my backyard and sort of swore or promised or at least speculated that if we weren’t married by the time we were old (which I think meant by high school graduation at the time), it probably meant we were destined to be together “in that way.” For several years thereafter, Gordy would frequently begin sentences with “When we’re married.” This usually preceded some joke, like how he’ll give up farting indoors. Real mature. I perceived this as Gordy’s excuse to kind of keep the door open between us. Like if we wanted to be together, the option was always there. And I would sometimes do the same so that he wouldn’t feel rejected. He sometimes still lapses into that, and I have to admit that I sort of like it. I will actually marry some great, misunderstood genius—a modern equivalent of Salvador Dalí, Franz Liszt, maybe Genghis Khan.
    Still, I’m comforted by the belief that someone solid and decent is there to fall back on.
    Over coffee, Gordy stares at me in that way he has when he’s intending to be meaningful. “Don’t make me do this tribute alone,” he says. “Please, Sloane. I know you think this is dumb, but we’re not doing it for them. We’re doing it for Bill. And he deserves that. You can be as agnostic as you want, but you don’t know that he isn’t somewhere listening.”
    “I’m an atheist, Gordy,” I say. “There’s a difference.” And then I feel bad for making a joke out of it, and I tell him I’ll do it and that I love him.
    Which, of course, he already knows.
    In bed with the lights out, my mind races. I wish Maggie was real so she could drive up to Mystic and “say something” for Bill. She would nail it cold.
    Then the cold panic creeps in about whether these dreams of mine are insane, and where it will take me, and the incredible irony that it’s Maggie who has a psychiatrist. My big fear is that one day I’ll be normal, and fall asleep, and Maggie won’t be there. I’ll just have normal dreams, a good night’s sleep. And she’ll be gone.
    But my biggest fear of all is the one I have