Your big brother looks older every year—wider shoulders, broader back, that faded flannel shirt you bought him for his birthday (the one with ketchup stains that never really came out, no matter how many times mom soaked it in baking soda). At these family gatherings, he stands in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, washing dishes with the kind of focus that only comes from wanting to avoid conversation. You hand him a plate, careful not to touch, and he stacks it with the rest, muttering something about how Aunt Jackie’s potato salad could probably be used to patch drywall. You both smile, but it’s not like it used to be—when laughter came easy, and the world outside your backyard was just the highway and a couple gas stations and that one Dairy Queen where the lights flickered like Morse code.

He used to drive you to school in his busted Saturn with the passenger door that never opened from the inside, so you had to crawl over the gearshift, knees knocking against his Coke cans. You used to pass a church sign that said “JESUS LOVES YOU” but half the bulbs were out so it just said “US U.” Sophomore year, you and him hid out in the Walmart garden center until midnight, just to see if you could. You ate stale pretzels and counted the birds that got stuck in the rafters. He used to call you “dummy” but he also let you wear his old Letterman jacket to sleep when the AC broke and Mom was yelling again.

There was that summer the cornfields grew so high you could hide in them for hours. He brought you a bottle of peach Schnapps and said it tasted like cough syrup but he liked the way it burned. He didn’t kiss you first—you did, after a fight about who got the last Hot Pocket. You bit his lip and then started laughing because it was so stupid, so movie-of-the-week, you almost wanted to punch him. You both knew it wasn’t right, but you were both lonely in that big yellow house, and it was easy to blame the hormones or the heat or the way everything in the Midwest feels stretched thin and desperate in July. After that you two often sneaked into Dad’s truck and listened to Dashboard Confessional until the battery died, windows cracked, lips touching, your shorts around one ankle. Your friends thought you were weird but not why. No one ever knew why.

By junior year, you both stopped talking about it, which was easier than fighting, everything got quiet. He left for college three towns over. You stayed, finished high school, pretended the world was simple again. No one said anything, no one noticed. If they did, they just let it go, like everything else here—flat tires, broken mailboxes, the neighbor’s dog that never came back.

Years passed. You grew out of it. Dated men with straight teeth and nice jobs. He got a dog, moved to Kansas City, stopped texting after 10pm. Every now and then, you’d like each other’s posts. Neutral things. A picture of a beer. A sunset. An inside joke so faded it’s just a shape now.

You see him sometimes now. Not often. Christmas, Fourth of July, someone’s funeral, the kinds of occasions where you’re forced together and forced to be polite. He asks about your job, you ask about his car. It’s always you two cleaning up after everyone else—somehow, you’re the last ones in the kitchen, stacking plates, making small talk about weather and taxes, but never about then. He drives you home in the old Saturn, even though he has a new car now, and neither of you mention the cornfields or the Walmart or anything that mattered. You both know it’s over, that it’s been over, that it never should have started.

Tonight, the others are in the living room. You and he are in the kitchen, backs turned, each at your own end of the counter. He is running water over the pans. You’re stacking silverware. There’s the murmur of a TV and laughter from the living room, the dog barking somewhere outside. The silence feels like a field. He doesn’t look at you. You don’t look at him. Out of nowhere, his voice cuts in, after all these years–

“We were really young, weren’t we?”