Benjamin comes home from sixth grade today with an orange smashed between the pages of his Ecosystems textbook. Danny, his older brother by seven years, tries to clean it for him. The pages are wavy, sticky, stiff.

“Who did this?” Danny asks him.

“My classmates,” Benjamin says. “Do you want to play Mario Kart?”

Danny uses a sponge on the pages. They only wrinkle worse.

Their Aunt Jan comes home an hour later and asks where her ashtray went. Then she makes them stop playing Nintendo so she can watch TV.

In their bedroom Benjamin draws a map of an imaginary island. The shoreline is concentric rings of waves.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Benjamin asks Danny.

“What happened to silent study time?” Danny says. He adjusts the Y-axis on his graphing calculator. He still can’t find the mean.

“When you die, do you think you come back as someone else?”

“Benji, study. Stop asking stupid questions.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It’s not your homework, is it?”

“Well,” says Benjamin, “If we’re just reincarnated, I probably already learned this stuff anyway.”

“So why aren’t you getting straight A’s then?” asks Danny.

“Cause my true self doesn’t care about Algernon.”

“Your true self is going to have to do afterschool study hall.”

Benjamin considers this. “Have you ever kissed a girl, Danny?”

“Yes. Duh.”

“No but really.”

“Yes!”

“Where?”

“At Josh’s house.”

“No I mean on her neck? Or lips? Or where?”

“All three.”

“Ew. Who was it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Was it like kissing mom?”

Danny slams his calculator down. He is relieved to see he didn’t break it. Benjamin draws one last tree then scrutinizes his island.

“Danny, it’s okay if you didn’t really kiss her.” Benjamin holds up the drawing and says, “I’ve been to this island before, look.” Danny recognizes an almost perfect map of Angel Island, the big state park in the middle of the bay. “In a past life I lived here,” says Benjamin.

“Benji, that’s Angel Island. You went there on a field trip last year.”

“No, nobody’s ever seen this island.”

Danny closes his statistics textbook. Next year he will leave for college. Benjamin will be on his own. “Let’s go get some dinner, Benji. I don’t think Aunt Jan is making anything.”

“Can we go to the comic book place?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Danny, who do you think you’ll be in your next life? That’s what’s hard to think about.”

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