"Is he nice?"
"He's..." I think about how to describe Declan to Becca. Nice is insufficient. Nice is the word for the barista who remembers your order. Declan is not nice. Declan is specific. Declan is the person who sees the thing underneath the thing and who answers the question you're actually asking and who takes his glasses off when he wants to be honest and who remembered that I drink Earl Grey from a single sentence in a hallway.
"He's the first person who ever made me feel like I could say the thing I'm saying right now."
Becca is quiet for a moment. The quiet is not her processing silence. The quiet is her emotional silence, which is the silence of a girl who loves her brother with the fierce, uncomplicated, load-bearing love of a sibling and who is feeling the full weight of what he just said.
"Jamie," she says. "I've been waiting for this call since you were fifteen."
"You knew?"
"You had a poster of Sidney Crosby in your room. Not because of the hockey."
I laugh. The laugh is sudden and real and releases something in my chest that has been coiled there for years. The coil is the secret. The coil is the carrying. The coil is Wes Chen's "alone part" and Mik Volkov's "walls" and Cole Briggs's "bag," and my sixteen-year-old sister just uncoiled it with a Sidney Crosby joke.
"It was a motivational poster," I say, and I'm laughing and my eyes are stinging and the two things are happening simultaneously.
"It was a poster of a man in hockey gear and you stared at it every night. That's not motivation. That's a crush."
"It was a really good poster."
"Jamie." Her voice softens. The joke voice is gone. The real voice is underneath, and the real voice is the voice of the person who knows me better than anyone on earth. "Are you okay?"
"I'm scared."
"I know."
"I'm really scared."
"I know. But you sound happy. And those two things can be true at the same time."
The sentence is so simple and so precisely correct that I sit with it for a moment, in my car, in the parking lot, in the warm Atlanta evening, and I let the truth of it wash over me. Scared and happy. Both. Simultaneously. The two conditions are not contradictory. They are complementary. The scared is the evidence that the happy matters, and the happy is the evidence that the scared is worth surviving.
"Does anyone else know?" she asks.
"Mik. Sort of. He didn't ask and I didn't say, but he knows. Cole. I talked to Cole."
"Cole Briggs? The one who kissed his boyfriend on live television?"
"Yeah."
"Jamie. You went to the guy who kissed his boyfriend on television and asked him how he knew. That's not being scared. That's being brave and scared at the same time."
"Is that a thing?"
"It's the only thing that counts. Brave without scared is just reckless. Brave with scared is courage."
My sister is sixteen years old and she just defined courage more clearly than anyone I've talked to, including a Sports Illustrated cover subject and a man who spent eleven years behind a wall and a security guard who sees everything.
"What about Mom and Dad?" I ask.
"Dad will need a minute. He's Dad. He processes things like he watches game film: slowly, carefully, one thing at a time. But he'll get there. He always gets there."
"And Mom?"
"Mom already knows."
"She does not."