Beth’s luggage precedes her, which is horrifying, and as soon as she steps through the door, she immediately throws herself into making the house a “more positive place.”

“It’s all about how you choose to be,” she tells me as she sticks magnets with inspirational quotes all over the fridge. She also brought a few plants—ferns, mostly. I feel bad for them. No one is going to water them and they’ll die. “You need more light—” She walks to the window and pulls back the blinds, giving me a look like I’m the one who drew them closed in the first place. “Vitamin D! Essential. Do you know how many diseases a little bit of sun can prevent? I have a list somewhere in my purse.…”

She flits out of the room before I can respond. Mom is upstairs doing I don’t know what, so I guess I’m the welcoming committee. A second later, one of those Sounds of Nature CDs is filling up the entire house. We now live in a rain forest.

Beth reenters the room and notices the look on my face.

“For meditative purposes,” she informs me.

I roll my eyes. “Because we meditate so much around here.”

“Maybe it’s time you started,” she says. “Stress is a killer.”

“Then I should be dead really soon, because you’re stressing me out.”

“Oh, Eddie.” She comes over and pinches my cheek, something she used to do when I was five. I hated it then too. “I wish making you a more positive person was as simple as all this! You need to stop looking at me as the enemy and start looking at me as a reprieve.”

When her back is to me, I turn my fingers into a gun and aim it directly at her head.