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Mona.

2
APPLE PICKING AT NIGHT
    Beckett was already sitting in the passenger seat of my car when I made it outside. I drove an old green Volvo that my dad had bought off a student who was transferring to a school in California. I had never met the student, but I felt like I knew a lot about him despite that, because the car was covered in bumper stickers. Save the Whales , Who Doesn’t Love Purple Martins? , This Car Climbed Mount Washington .  Along the back windshield was a deconstructed school sticker that read Unichusetts of Massaversity , but there wasn’t, among all of them, a Stanwich College sticker, which pretty much made it clear why the owner of the car had transferred. I had tried to get them off, but they had proved almost impossible to remove, and so now I was just used tothem, and to the occasional honks of anger—or solidarity—I got when other drivers thought they were reading my opinion. The left rear door was jammed, it took a long time for the heat to get going in the winter, and the gas gauge was broken—it was permanently stuck in the center, showing half a tank even when I was running on fumes. I’d learned, over time, just to be aware of when I’d last filled up and how much I’d driven. It was an inexact science, but since I’d never actually run out of gas, it seemed to be working.
    The biggest issue with the car, however, was that the roof was always open. The panel that closed the sunroof had been long gone when my dad bought the Volvo, and I just hoped it had been there when the car climbed Mount Washington. I had a tarp I could put over it for when it was raining in the summer, and my parents had gotten the set construction guys to cut a piece of wood that fit inside and made it nearly airtight in the winter. Sloane had loved this part of the car, and had never wanted the roof covered, even when we had to crank the heat and bundle up in blankets. She was always stretching her hand out to let the wind run through her fingers, and leaning forward into the sunlight that spilled down onto the seats.
    “All set?” I asked as I slipped on my black Ray-Bans and slammed my door. I’d asked out of habit more than anything else, since Beckett was clearly ready to go. I started the car and pulled out of the driveway, after making sure that there were no strollers or runners heading our way.
    “Who’s Tesla?” Beckett asked as I started to head toward downtown. I’d looked up IndoorXtreme’s address on my way downstairs, wanting to minimize any and all delays that I was sure would be caused by expecting Beckett to know where we were going. And despite the fact that when I was his age, I’d mastered the New York subway system—or at least the stops in Brooklyn—my brother and I had had very different childhoods. I’d been the child of two struggling playwrights, moving wherever my parents were workshopping a play, or where they’d managed to land adjunct professor or writer-in-residence gigs. We lived in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Portlands both Maine and Oregon. I was usually sleeping on the couch in the apartments we were subletting, and if I did happen to have my own bedroom, I never hung up my boy-band posters or keepsakes, since I knew I wouldn’t be there for long. But everything changed with Bug Juice . My miserable summer at camp had led to a Broadway play, a subsequent terrible movie, and then countless community theater and school productions, the play taking on a life of its own, my parents an overnight success after ten years of struggle. But most importantly, the play led to my parents securing two tenure-track positions at the same school, which even then I’d known was a big deal. And so we’d moved to Stanwich, and while my brother claimed to remember our early, horrible apartments, for the most part, he’d never known anything but security, his posters hung firmly on his walls.
    “What?” I asked, glancing up from the directions on myphone, weighing whether