youknew

Kaid moved through May like someone who'd discovered time could be his. At five in the morning, before the house had stirred, he was already outside on his scooter — that restless, electric energy that six-year-olds sometimes carry like a secret. He didn't wait for permission or daylight or anyone else's readiness. There was a kind of joy in his earliness, a boy so full of momentum that sleep seemed almost incidental to his plans.

It was a month of declarations. He wanted to be a paleontologist, then a chef, then someone who builds the kind of car that goes very fast. He wanted dinner to be ice cream and was deeply, philosophically opposed to the idea that this might not be allowed. He wanted to know why the moon followed the car, and listened with skeptical patience to the answer, and then offered his own theory, which involved magnets.

He was learning, this month, that the world had rules he hadn't agreed to. That you couldn't just leave a sandwich somewhere and come back to it later. That his brother had feelings of his own, separate ones, that didn't always match the script Kaid had written for them. He was outraged by these discoveries and also, sometimes, quietly impressed.

By the end of May he had memorized seven dinosaur names, lost his second tooth, and asked his mother — apropos of nothing, in the bath, at the end of an ordinary Thursday — whether she was going to live forever. She said no. He thought about it. He said okay. Then he asked if he could have ice cream.

April was the month Maya stopped reading at the dinner table. Not because anyone had asked her to — they had asked, repeatedly, for two years — but because she had decided, on her own, that she wanted to hear what the grown-ups were saying. She put her book face-down beside her plate and she listened, and she did not always understand, and she did not always agree, and twice that month she said something so observant that her father set down his fork and looked at her like he was meeting her for the first time.

She was making lists this month. Lists of countries she wanted to visit, lists of words she liked the sound of (echo, marrow, opaline, undertow), lists of things she would never do when she became a parent, which her mother saved without telling her. Her handwriting was shifting — the letters leaning forward now, in a hurry to get somewhere.

She cried twice in April, both times privately, both times about things she would not explain. She apologized for crying, which broke her parents' hearts in slightly different ways. She was beginning to understand that some of her feelings were hers alone, that not everything had to be shared to be real.

On the last Sunday of the month she announced, without preamble, that she had decided she was a person who liked olives. She had hated olives the previous Sunday. No one questioned it. This is how it goes at nine — you become someone new on a Tuesday, and by Friday it's just who you are.