When Nathan Hughes and three other boys decided they were ready to fuse, he leaned in toward me and asked, in the middle of sixth-period English, if I would be their fifth. We were meant to be discussing Lord of the Flies; Mrs. Kelley had just given us a crash course in the basics of Freudian psychology, and our task was to decide which characters represented each of the id, ego, and super ego. Nathan looked at me with expectation, and despite the way I was always having to hide my glances at his body and the others’—Nathan was the shortstop on the baseball team; two of the other boys were JV wide receivers, and the last played soccer—I shook my head no. Before he could say anything, Mrs. Kelley approached, and Nathan said, “Obviously Piggy is the super ego.” The others nodded. She cracked a small smile and moved on to the next group. I felt my face go red.

Nathan tilted forward in his desk, eyes on me. They were almond-shaped, perfect on his swarthy face, tanned by hours on the baseball field.

“Oink oink,” he said, and I could do nothing but look away.

I told my brother Reggie about Nathan’s offer. He was sitting at his desk in our shared bedroom, hunched over a textbook. Unlike most students at our school, who spent classes pretending to listen to teachers and then scrambled to take photos of whatever was written on the board, Reggie liked taking notes, writing in his tiny script with an old-fashioned pencil in notebooks that became smeary with graphite as the side of his hand slid across the page. We had shared a bedroom since I was seven and he nine and our younger brother was born and needed his own space to cry and be fed throughout the night. Our parents bought us bunk beds, and Reggie suggested one of us choose who got which bed while the other controlled the decoration of the walls. He let me pick, and I chose the walls. He nodded and said, “Probably the better choice. Nothing has to be permanent.” Then he claimed the lower bunk.

He pulled off his glasses, thick black things that no one ever made fun of him for. Everyone in school loved my brother, even though they found him odd. Because he was smart and attractive—square-jawed, perfect complexion never barraged by teenage acne, athletic (he had run track until this year when he decided to focus on school work), nice—he’d been invited by any number of his classmates to fuse, but for whatever reason he always said no, shaking his head, pursing his lips in a mysterious smile, a glimmer in his eyes like he knew something no one else did, and thanked them for their consideration, as though he was a job applicant finishing an interview.

“Do you think you’re ready?” Reggie said. He had a way of looking at me that made it clear he wasn’t casting any judgment.

“Not really,” I said.

“Well. There you go.”

It couldn’t be that simple, I wanted to say. Why did Nathan Hughes and the other athletes want me, I wanted to say. Why would those four boys fuse together without even one girl in the mix, I wanted to say.

But Reggie was already paying attention to his notes—physics if the heavy tome next to him was to be believed—and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt. Instead, I climbed the creaky ladder up to my bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling, as if its pebbly surface might reveal the solutions to all of life’s mysteries.

Our younger brother, Nicholas, was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly within the first two years of their lives. He, like other children born with the disease, looked healthy and normal at first, and it wasn’t until his weight gain slowed but his head kept growing, his jaw and chin proportionally too small and his lips thin as matchsticks, that his pediatrician became concerned. No amount of heavy-fat formula or putting him on solid foods earlier than usually advised would make his weight go up, and finally, the doctor asked my parents if they would mind genetic testing. The gene that causes the Progeria mutation was discovered, and my parents were devastated. They couldn’t explain anything to me or Reggie without bursting into horrible tears, their voices going scratchy. My mother’s howling sobs carried into my dreams for months; I would wake, startled by the horrible noise as it echoed in my head. My father could only shake us off when we tried to ask a question, puzzled as we were by the notion that our brother would age with stunning, startling speed, that this was a problem that could not be fixed. Once, when Reggie, simply curious, said, “Will he, like, be able to drive before me?” our father whacked him, not on the face but on the arm, not hard enough to do any real damage or send Reggie flying, but enough to startle my brother, who was practically immune to fear or surprise. The look on his face, a kind of broken certainty, made me nauseous, and I decided never to ask questions about Nicholas ever again.

As Reggie pulled his car into its assigned spot at school the next day, he reached out and touched my wrist.

“Just be ready,” he said. “People will have questions.” Sunlight slanted through trees in a grid of spiky lines that lanced the windshield. Reggie squinted. “They’ll want to know why you said no.” I nodded. Reggie had been the one to explain fusion to me, how it sounded so final and permanent, and in a way it was. How it wasn’t sexual, exactly—I’d learned about sex from a ramshackle health class in seventh grade, augmented by Reggie’s more useful know-how, practical info—but intimate, a no-turning-back moment where you learned all there was to know about the people you blended with. How your bodies would become porous, able to be joined at any moment from then on.

I also knew that whispers followed Reggie for weeks when a pair of girls from his biology class asked him to fuse with them and two good-looking theatre guys. And the whispers only became worse the next time Reggie declined, this time to a request from the star left fielder, his girlfriend, and two kids from a private school a few blocks away.

All day I was nervy, waiting for something to come crashing down. Through homeroom and biology and Spanish, everything was, to my surprise, fine. Kids jawed and ignored our teachers as usual. I stared at quiz questions and took notes, feeling no heavy stares or the powerful mist of nearby whispering; my name never slithered from a foreign mouth, and no fingers were pointed my way. Eyes didn’t flick in my direction. By lunch, my stomach had settled enough for me to eat my turkey and cheese sandwich. I didn’t have a ton of friends—not nearly enough to be on Nathan Hughes’ radar, that was for sure—but the handful I possessed sat with me and talked about the usual: video games, the St. Louis Cardinals, which movie they might go see over the upcoming weekend.

An anxious choke started in my gut as sixth period loomed. Mrs. Kelley kept her classroom half-dark, the side nearest the door doused in gloom while the window side was bathed in fluorescence and sunshine. I usually sat on that side, preferring the brightness. But Nathan Hughes and his athlete friends sat in a cluster by her desk on the bright side, too. I slipped in as fast as I could into a desk in the dark. Because it was Honors English and there were way more seats than students, I didn’t displace anyone, didn’t create a domino of disruption to the usual order of things.

Nathan was the first of his group to arrive. They had not fused yet; Nathan didn’t have the giveaway connective glow. He slid into his seat on the bright side and looked across the room at me, the smile on his face a combination of amusement and pity. I immediately regretted my choice, and that regret only grew as the other athletes joined him, sitting in a phalanx as if Nathan was a precious commodity buttressed by Mrs. Kelley’s desk.

I couldn’t pick up on anything she said during the hour, which focused on the scene in which Piggy is crushed by the boulder. She asked questions about the symbolism of his glasses, and what we thought it meant that the super ego character had been killed, and what we thought might happen next. Mrs. Kelley liked these kinds of discussions, asking us to predict what we thought might occur next before we got there. I hated them: why not simply wait to see what was to come? What value, I wondered, was there in trying to anticipate rather than just turning the page and finding out?

Some doctor, my parents said, had come up with an experimental treatment.

“Treatment?” I said.

We were eating dinner. At least, Reggie, my father, and I were. My mother was trying to help Nicholas, who had grown weak, unable to hold up a fork, so she spooned food into his mouth after cutting up bits of whatever flank steak or pork chop my father had prepared. He loved cooking.

“For your brother,” our mother said, nodding toward Nicholas. His Progeria was aging him rapidly; he resembled one of those old men who plays a kindly accountant in a movie, or maybe a tiny Santa Claus. I cringed at the associations I made in my head, but I didn’t seem able to stop.

I looked at Reggie, who was staring down at his chicken cutlet. My father had drizzled a dark gravy full of chopped mushrooms over them, forgetting that neither Reggie nor I liked mushrooms, possibly because he had discovered that Nicholas loved them. I scraped my gravy into a coagulating pool next to my baked potato, which my father had piled with chives, something else I didn’t love. Neither I nor Reggie said anything, unsure of what would be acceptable. Finally, Reggie said, “What’s the treatment? I didn’t think there was anything.”

Our father cleared his throat. He said it wasn’t FDA-approved yet, but that they’d applied to have Nicholas participate in a study.

I thought but didn’t say, An experiment. I could see the same thought in Reggie’s eyes as he nodded but couldn’t look at our parents. They didn’t seem to notice. My father kept eating, my mother kept spooning, and Nicholas kept chewing. We made it through dinner, plates deposited in the dishwasher, cutlery soaking with the cast-iron skillet in which my father had cooked the chicken, Nicholas whisked off for a bath. Reggie and I retreated to our room, where I finished reading Lord of the Flies and he worked on calculus homework. He was done before me, but instead of saying anything, he went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and lay down. When he turned from one side to the other, I was jostled just-so, like a little dinghy on a lake being swayed by the breeze.

Mrs. Kelley told us we were going to do group projects.

We were leaving Lord of the Flies behind; our papers were turned in. Reggie had looked mine over and said it was good. I’d traced how the slow breakage of Piggy’s glasses parallels the breakdown of the boys’ group as a functional society. We were turning, now, to Hamlet.

“Shakespeare’s most famous play,” Mrs. Kelley said. “Perhaps his best. But often misunderstood.”

Mrs. Kelley drew four names out of a coffee can filled with slips of paper. These would be the group leaders, and they would choose their groups. Unsurprisingly, she called Nathan Hughes’s name first. After she selected the other three names, she prompted him to pick his first group mate and he pointed across the room at me. I was still sitting on the dark side, the back of a row in the deepest shadow so that, for a second, I wondered if maybe people wouldn’t know who he was looking at. But everyone saw, and although no one spoke aside from Mrs. Kelley saying, “Good choice,” and jotting my name down on a piece of paper where she was keeping the group lists, I could hear the buzz in the room: Nathan Hughes still wanted something from me. He wanted more.

My brother would be frozen in time.

“Those weren’t the doctor’s exact words,” our mother said, turning from our father to Reggie, who already had a question pursed on his lips. The look on our mother’s face, of utter tiredness undergirded by a tiny hopefulness that glowed in her eyes, made him keep his inquiry to himself. If I understood that this was not the time to be combative, so did Reggie.

“Basically,” our father said, “Nicholas will stop aging altogether.”

“Sounds experimental,” Reggie said.

We were seated at the dining room table, just the four of us. Nicholas was in his room, being quiet. He was always quiet for an eight-year-old, never acting like the rambunctious boys I know Reggie and I had been. I wasn’t sure if this was because of his Progeria or not, and if it was, whether it had to do with him being too physically frail for rowdiness or if his mind, too, had blasted past that age of untrammeled wonder at rushing through the world, settling into the slower pace of middle and now old age. Sometimes—and I felt bad about this—I would forget about him if he wasn’t in my immediate vicinity, or if, on rare occasion, my parents weren’t talking about him. He just slithered out of my head as though all memory of him was being sucked from my brain through a straw, his existence obliterated in both past and present.

My teeth ached as my father talked. What he said was incomprehensible to me, something about genetic freezing, severance of neural pathways, micro-cellular invasion. All of the words sounded violent and unpleasant, permanent. I imagined an invasive force marching through Nicholas’s body, wrenching him this way and that, totally transforming him from the inside out. I understood my parents’ desire to do whatever they could, to keep my brother alive and happy and well for as long as possible, but I wondered how and whether those things could all remain mutually inclusive of one another.

“What if something goes wrong?” I said.

My father, whom I’d interrupted mid-sentence, looked at me like I’d slapped him. My mother’s eyes widened. Reggie raised an eyebrow in my direction and smiled just so.

“That won’t happen.” “But,” I said, “how can you know that?”

All my father seemed able to do was shake his head. He sighed, planted his hands on the table, and pushed back his chair, which squealed against the hardwood. Then he was up and gone, my mother trailing in his wake. As happened often enough, Reggie and I were left alone, and neither of us could muster a thing to say.

Nathan had, of course, also picked the wide receivers and soccer player. After Mrs. Kelley gave us our instructions (step one was to take an assigned section of speech from the play and rewrite it in “contemporary” language), we sat together in a small circle. I could tell immediately that the boys hadn’t fused, had not chosen a fifth: nothing was different about them. Their skin was tan and taut from sun and exercise, from their jostling on various athletic fields and lifting weights in the school gym, but they did not buzz with the vibrational desire of fusion. When they slapped at one another, their bodies didn’t sink together. I wondered why they hadn’t just found someone else; they were all popular and good-looking, and most of the other girls and boys in our various classes wouldn’t reject them like I had. Surely, their placid lack of upset was some kind of trick, and a hammer would fall on me sooner than later.

But Nathan simply opened his copy of Hamlet to the relevant page and started reading aloud, his voice carrying throughout the room as he boomed:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

When Nathan paused, one of the football players said, “Sounds like a run-on sentence to me.”

“Nah,” the other said. “It’s grammatically sound. Just complex.”

“Well, rhetorically, it’s a bit dense.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.”

“I’m not saying Shakespeare didn’t know grammar.”

“You called it a run-on sentence.”

Nathan looked at me as they quibbled. “What do you think?” he said.

The others stopped arguing. I felt like I was under several heat lamps. “Well,” I said. “I think Hamlet’s father is talking about being stuck.”

“Like in purgatory?” the soccer player said.

“As a ghost. He’s haunted by what happened to him, and so he’s haunting his son.” “Dick move, right?” one of the wide receivers said. The others, except Nathan, laughed.

“I think he’s right,” Nathan said. “But what about this ‘certain term’ stuff?” He was speaking directly to me, and for a second I felt like I was a character in a movie, during one of those scenes where all of the lighting fades away except a spotlight while I was stared at by the attractive, popular protagonist.

“I think that means that he can’t be at rest until Hamlet does something. The term is however long it takes Hamlet to do something.”

“Seems uncertain to me,” Nathan said.

When the bell rang, Nathan hardly moved. I knew that he and the football players had a study hall during last period and had a tendency to skip out, helped by the fact that their classroom monitor was the football coach, who didn’t care what anyone who was on any athletic team did so long as it didn’t get them kicked off the field. While I packed my book and shouldered my bag to head to math, Nathan leaned back, watching. I felt his stare in my periphery. He didn’t say anything. I wished he would, that he would crack open whatever he was thinking. Instead, I left, not even turning to say goodbye, something burning at my center.

“It’s going to be a team effort,” my father said. He was talking about caring for Nicholas, adjusting to his new, frozen life. My parents had just brought him home from his first treatment. Five more, one every week for the remainder of February and the entirety of March, would take place at his doctor’s facility—that’s what my parents called it, rather than an office, the word facility sounding to me like the gnashing of teeth—and then, when Nicholas was no longer mobile, his doctor would come to our home. I bit my tongue, wondering why no one had asked me or Reggie if this was a commitment we were willing to make, but I didn’t want to be a total asshole.

My brother still looked like himself. Whatever it was they’d done to him at the appointment had no overt, obvious effects, at least not yet. Unlike the public afterimage of fusion, whatever was happening to Nicholas was entirely interior. He ambled inside the house with his hitchy, not-quite-right gait as always, plopped down at his chosen spot at the end of the couch nearest the television as always, and waited for someone else to turn it on, as always. Reggie, as usual, was the one to do so, whispering to Nicholas, asking him what he wanted to watch, obliging his interests, which rotated between sports highlights, the local news, random cartoons on Nickelodeon, or, weirdly, C-SPAN; he stared at coverage of Congress like he was under a spell.

We left him to the television. Reggie, I’d noticed, was starting to have a hard time being in the same room as Nicholas, which made me feel better about my own discomfort. His waning, wrinkling body was difficult to look at; my brain couldn’t compute that this was my little brother rather than some character out of a fantasy novel. I’d looked up Progeria when I was old enough to understand—and spell—what it was, at least the basics that my parents shared. That Google search had sent me down a rabbit hole of the many ways that the human body can go wrong. Or maybe be different was the better way to think of it. My brother wasn’t wrong, I had to tell myself all the time. His body just grew and changed—and deteriorated—differently than other peoples’. The trajectory of his life was simply arranged at a different angle. At least, that’s what I told myself.

“We could pick other people if you want.”

Nathan Hughes had appeared at my locker after English class. We’d spent the entire time working on our group project, the second phase of which was to craft the thesis paragraph for a group essay analyzing our assigned section of text.

I thought he was talking about that, so I said, “I think everyone’s pulling their weight.”

He frowned. “No. I mean the other thing.”

I shut my locker.

“What other thing?” I said. Around us, students were floating toward their final classes of the day. Nathan didn’t seem in a hurry, thanks to what was basically his free period. In fact, he seemed set on leaning there against the wall until I gave him whatever he wanted.

“Oh, come on.” He crossed his arms, little mountains of muscle bulging between the bones. “You know what I mean.”

I took a deep breath. “You could ask anyone you want.”

“I know I could. I did.”

I leaned against my locker, the door shutting beneath my weight. I crossed my arms, math book in hand. Nathan’s lips curled at the ends but he said nothing.

“Why me?” I said.

“Why not you?”

“You could have anyone.” I felt the book slipping and adjusted my grip. “Just look around.”

“You’re smart. You’re funnier than you think.” He leaned in close so I could smell his breath, pleasant and minty. Nathan’s teeth were perfectly straight. “You’re a mystery, like your brother.”

Something in the way he said brother, and then, straightening up, adding, “Reggie,” as if I didn’t know which of my brothers he was talking about, made me realize: he’d asked my brother. At some point, he had floated the same prospect to Reggie, who had not told me.

“Let me think about it,” I said, and the way Nathan Hughes smiled you’d have thought I had accepted a proposal of marriage.

On my way out of the building that afternoon, I kept seeing clusters of kids who had clearly fused. I saw it in their inability to keep their hands off one another, fingers trickling into chests or shoulder blades or palms, the way they stood in tight circles that clogged the hallways and doorways and stairwells, how they gave off that coppery sheen, an internal glow that made their fingers look like lit matches. Their cheeks were flush with energy, as though they’d hit a runner’s high on a long jog through the pungent afternoon and every muscle was screaming with pain that was also joyful. I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t let myself think about what they must know about one another, these things that would never leave their memories, these leaden, permanent fixtures. The idea of peeling so many parts of oneself back, letting other slip in so fully, made me shiver. Even—maybe especially—the prospect of someone like Nathan Hughes.

I found Reggie waiting in the car. He didn’t like listening to music, so the car was silent minus the whine of the heater. He had nothing to say on the drive home, and I was convinced that he knew that I knew about Nathan’s proposal to him. The silence was taut, thick, a viscosity that I could have clawed lines through in the air if I’d wanted to. At home, he cut the engine and then sighed and looked at me. “Ready?”

“For what?” I said.

“For whatever’s next.”

Next was a series of things, not that day but spread throughout a week, though they seemed to happen so quickly that, in memory, I can hardly remember their order.

First, our group project collapsed. We’d made good headway on our essay, selecting relevant passages, arranging the basic shape of our analysis, outlining the sequence of our argument with no problem. But then when we sat hunched over a shared computer in the school lab during class, we couldn’t put words to the page. Endless bickering between the football players and soccer player about verbiage, about how to structure our sentences, consumed our time. “You’re arguing about semantics!” one of them half-howled, and another said, “Semantics are actually important to an essay!” and the third said, “I think we’re actually talking about syntax.” Nathan simply sat with his hands curved like talons over the keys, ready to type but making no moves.

The second thing was that something went wrong with Nicholas’s treatment. This would have been his second or third, maybe fourth, round of whatever was being done to him, and Reggie and I both knew something was wrong when we arrived home and my parents were already there, upstairs in our brother’s bedroom, talking behind the closed door. Reggie, when he knocked and asked what was going on, received no reply. When he knocked a second time, the door flew open and our father said, “Will you cut that the fuck out?”

Reggie looked like he’d been punched in the face. He stepped back, nearly barreling into me, and pivoted, stomping to our bedroom and slamming the door. Our father stared at me, one eyebrow arched in a combination of appraisal and challenge. I backed away. Neither of our parents appeared that evening, and Reggie remained holed up. I heated up a can of soup and ate by myself, letting the laugh track of a bad sitcom wash over me.

And third, Nathan appeared at my locker, again, and said, “What about just you and me?”

I thought, at first, that he was referring to our paper, which was still stalled out, the deadline looming, Mrs. Kelley tsking at everyone to remember her policy on late work. But then he said, with a shrug, “I think fusing is a little overrated. Don’t you?”

“So we’d do what, instead?” I said, even though I had plenty of ideas. A tang of saliva filled my throat and mouth.

Nathan looked at me with hunger in his eyes. But it wasn’t predatorial, wolfish, demanding. It was desperate, yearning. I’d seen that look before: in my parents’ eyes when they talked about Nicholas and his illness, and then when they talked about his treatment, the idea that the unknowable failings of the body could, in fact, be known and thus corrected. An appetizing notion on the heels of starvation.

“Think about it,” Nathan said. He laid a hand on my forearm. We both looked down at his fingers, stuck there on the surface, unable to wriggle down deep into the space between my bones, his cells unable to truly plant themselves among mine.

“Why would you want that?” I said.

Nathan looked like I’d recited an unfamiliar passage from Shakespeare, one too dense even for him and his athlete friends. He tilted his head, as if looking at me from a different angle would give him a better understanding of what he was seeing. Behind him, students sparkled with connectivity, and I saw how hollow he was by comparison, how his wet eyes were filled with yearning, how his skin was tanned and beautiful but untouched. Nathan was desperate. Everyone around me was desperate. I thought of Hamlet’s own terrible longing, his father’s tormenting limbo. My parents. Nicholas, how despite the techno-tinkerings of a doctor thirsty for glory—or whatever—his body would progress the way it was designed to, whether we liked it or not. How the only person I knew that seemed nonplussed about his solitude was Reggie. How he and I would never quite be the same, that something permanent, unchanging, stood inside each of us that made us different.

I reached out and took my turn to touch Nathan, trying to grab at his arm in the same place he’d touched me. I was about to say, “I will think about it,” but then I changed my mind at the last minute and found myself saying something else, something without translation, something that slipped away into the noise of the glittering, gorgeous hallway as soon as I said it. The words came out so fast, flung from some instinctive part of me, that I didn’t even process what they were. But whatever I said made Nathan smile, and for a moment, I thought everything would be fine. All of the pieces would fall into place. Everything would be as one, connected and clear and a single, defined picture, stroked into the world by my own hand.