Hope is in the guest bedroom unpacking. It takes years to unpack in the guest bedroom. Actually, it just never ends. The mismatched pairs of socks keep multiplying, and the bed never molds to your shape. It is a slab of ambiguity that ensures that no guest ever feels at home. There’s a pink cardboard Kleenex box on the nightstand and ruffles around the bed frame. It looks like a carbon copy of a Pottery Barn sample guest room. Those are dying rooms, not living rooms.

Hope’s brother died in the war, and they sent his armpits and toenails and nostrils back to the country in a box with a flag draped over it. He was just bits and pieces; he didn’t have the glory of decomposing like my grandparents. He got blown up for no good reason; the war never even ended. It was postponed, like a soccer game on account of rain. The idea’s still there, but no one can fight anymore. We just wait.

Jeremy came back from the war, but he was no better off because of it. His armpits were still in the right places, but his eyes were always in Pakistan. He never looked at you, even when his pupils were glaring into your own. He was always in the past, rewinding and rewinding and rewinding. There were girls who came around our house wearing flowing dresses and bright lipstick, but they went home disappointed.

You always see black and white film clips from troops returning from overseas, and they sweep their loving wives into the deepest kisses you’ve ever seen, carefully holding their bodies inches from the ground. None of that happened this time: it was just static on the television screen, blaring silence into our eardrums. The only similarity was that the static was in black and white, but it didn’t really matter. If it was in color, I don’t think I would have noticed.

The only thing I ever felt about the war was irritated. Not because I was always thinking of it. I wasn’t, most of the time. Life just became irritating. Like I started noticing how people don’t talk normally to animals and babies just because they don’t expect them to talk back. Hell, if they can’t understand you, why not just speak intelligently? There was a woman with red hair walking her big fat Labrador around our block, and she caught me hearing her cooing stupidlanguage to him and blushed. I asked her why she was embarrassed, and all she told me was that everyone did it. I told her not to worry, that I spoke French to my dog when I was alone, and she just laughed all I’m-more-normal-than-you-are at me.

I hate stupid people.

Life was also irritating, because Danny came over on Tuesday afternoons and wanted to play cards. He would gush and gush about his brother Benjamin and how strong and brave he was and how he was bringing the family so much honor and how he couldn’t wait to see him again but he understood the country’s need for people like Benjamin. We played war together, because it was the only game Danny even knew how to play, and I don’t even think we finished a single game. It was all gray and boring, like the real-life war that seemed fake. If we had ever finished one, I think Danny would have won. I am not a good candidate for a soldier. My hair is too long, and Aunt Nancy says I am “apathetic.” She said I would lay down and die if I had the chance. I told her I had the chance every day of my life, and she just scoffed like “Well isn’t that just proof!” which didn’t make much sense to me, because it proved nothing.

One day though, Danny didn’t talk about the war anymore. His mom called over for him, and his face went white as porcelain. His eyes weren’t in Pakistan, but they sure weren’t here. I imagined tapping his cheek and watching him shatter on the sidewalk. They could bury his nostrils right next to Hope’s brother’s. But they didn’t. They buried Benjamin’s there instead.

Hope is still packing, so I knock on the door and ask if I can help, but she says no, it’s just socks to put in drawers, but I can tell that all the tissues in the box are crumpled on the floor, and she’s probably using socks to dry out her insides on.

I don’t really know what massacre means. The one time I saw a lot of blood it turned out it wasn’t blood at all. My mom was just dyeing a shirt red, and the liquid she was pouring out of the bucket was just dye and hot water. I didn’t believe her, so she tried to convince me that blood wouldn’t steam, but I told her that our internal body temperature was almost a hundred degrees, so of course it would steam. That got her. But I was still wrong. I saw her wear the shirt later on in the week.

Hope living with us is strange. She has boxes full of artwork that are all over the kitchen. She smashes plates and ceramics and glass and mirrors and cries and makes pictures out of them. Her doctor told her to do it, to help her cope. She says it helps, but she has about a bazillion mosaics and still cries all the time. Everyone seems to think that it is normal, that she is coping. But Hope doesn’t cope. She wallows. And it’s no good, because every time you even try to give her a compliment on one of her weird mosaics, she just bursts out in tears. Then my mom hugs her close to her like she’s five and not twenty-five and tells me I’m being “insensitive.” My mother and Aunt Nancy should start a fan club.

Danny doesn’t make mosaic things, at least. But he doesn’t play war anymore, which is almost more irritating than having to play it all the time. He kisses his mother twice on each cheek before he leaves the house and stands up straight all the time. He doesn’t skip rocks, and he’s home before dark. He even started calling me “ma’am,” which just left me gaping. He forgot how to be a kid, and Hope forgot how to be an adult. I am tired of being expected to be both.

I am too tired for someone my age. I should be standing on the Eiffel tower and thinking that Paris is just a miniscule fraction of my own possibilities. Babies see the Eiffel tower upside down, because their brains haven’t figured out how to turn everything right-side-up yet. So even if I were on the top, I’d still be at the very bottom. Maybe if we didn’t pollute baby’s ears with stupidlanguage, they’d be able to tell us that. One of them could shout to me, “Hey! Watch out! You’re going to fall off!” And I could listen so that I didn’t end up falling.

I knock on the guest bedroom door and push it open a little so that a sliver of yellow lamplight shines through. “Hope?” I ask.

Hope is lying on the hardwood floor on her back, nose pointed up to the dry walled ceiling.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“I’m waiting for an epidemic,” she replies.

I think of Kenya and Bosnia and every –stan country out there. Charles Darwin is considered the Father of Evolution, and people didn’t want to believe him, because they cared so much about God. Millions of years of evolution, and we get Danny’s porcelain face and ramrod straight back and Hope’s red nose and lackluster curls. We get brothers’ armpits and Jeremy’s eyes and my apathy. We get people who charge into death and people who wait on the floor of Pottery Barn for death to take them.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “It’s already here.”