Right before Stéphane is supposed to arrive to take me up to New Hampshire, when I am all alone in the flat because Estelle left last week to celebrate Eid with her family, I get a call from him.

"Hey, Cole," he's speaking in English, but he sounds nervous.

"What is it?"

"Do you have your passport?"

Without a second thought, I hang up the phone. Those bastards. They can't just sneak their way into dragging me to Québec. I take my stuff back into the bedroom. I'm about to unpack it when the phone rings. He's calling back.

I pick up, "you had better be about to tell me that you're trying to be more like Bastien by pulling a prank and not that you are planning to force me into Québec against my will."

There is a pause on the other line.

"Stéphane Marc Andre I am not playing," I tell him. As much as French is a language of intimacy and secrets, it is also the language that our mother scolded us in when we were children, and so there is something quite uncomfortable in hearing it shouted at you in anger. Even as an adult, when someone tells me to stop in French, my heart holds in place as well as the rest of me, out of reverence.

"I told Caro it was a bad idea," Stéphane continues in French now. "It was two versus two though, so we tossed a coin-"

"Wait a second," I am not dropping the language so long as it makes him apologetic. "Two versus two? You mean to tell me that Bastien is on her side?"

The line goes quiet again. He had better be joking. There isn't any background noise, so I know that he is in a parking lot, probably a block away from my building.

"Bastien was on my side," he nearly whispers. "Caro and Cletus-"

"Shut up," I say, and he does. "Esti de câlice de tabarnak, you gave Cletus the fourth vote and not me? So, it's really three versus two. Really three versus one, because Cletus is not a member of this family!"

"Caro says that they're going to get engaged any day now and-"

He cannot even finish before I hang up the phone. I'm losing my mind. The whole world has gone topsy-turvy. My twin brother turned against me on behalf of Cletus. Leaving it up to a coin toss instead of letting me decide.

It's living on this continent, I swear. When I did my bachelor's in Australia, I was never this mad, and that country is much hotter, and the spiders are huge. I had all the reasons to be angry while I was there, but I wasn't.

The phone rings. I pick up.

"I'm not giving you another chance," I say. "If I hang up, I'm not picking up again."

"Listen," he says, and sighs. "I've talked them into driving up in the morning on Boxing Day. We'll get to Maman's in the late afternoon. None of us need to work until January second, so we are going to stay there that whole time. I told them you said you could get it off work. We'll tell them there has been a change of plans, and you can rent a car to drive back here. Perfect cover story. Just, bring your passport for me, and pretend to get a work call asking you to come back in."

"Okay," I tell him. "I'm trusting you."

"I'm not going to disappoint," he promises. "Also, I'm parked outside."

I hang up the call and grab my stuff. After locking up, I head out to the front of my building. He waves at me, and I get in the car. It's an eight-hour drive to Caro's place in New Hampshire. Last year, Caro's roommates were gone to visit their families, so we got to stay in their rooms. Now, she is living with Cletus in a two-bedroom, and their other room is dedicated to his artistic pursuits or whatever. Bastien's flat is disgusting, or else we would just stay there since all his roommates are away.

Instead, we're planning to sleep on air mattresses in the living room and kitchen. Perfect.

We talk a bit on the car ride over, but there aren't many details shared between us. He does let me know that Cletus is a bit odd about the bisexual thing. Caro gave him a stern reprimand when he made an off-colour joke last Easter. He tends to just get uncomfortably quiet now when the topic comes up, and so it's not worth the hassle for Bastien to mention his dating life anymore.

"Also, just so you know, Caro is trying to make me go on a date with Mylène. You remember Mylène, don't you?"

Mylène was the daughter of Maman's neighbours. If I recall, she was a year older than Caro. I guess that would make her twenty-five now. She was kind, from what I remember, but quiet. Stéphane tends to date adventurous women. Even though he lives in a national park and changes his job periodically, he doesn't try many new things. As far as I know, he has never travelled somewhere new without being dragged along, and I'm sure he cooks the same meals for himself every day. Whenever there is a girl involved though, she drags him to some new place or new activity. In high school, he went to several renaissance fairs with a girlfriend. They spent hundreds on costumes, and he had fun even if he never did it again after they broke up.

"Mylène?" I ask.

"Yep," he emphasizes the p, popping it out of his lips.

"Mylène, our neighbour," I say.

He nods again.

"They still talk?"

"I think I it wasn't for Cletus, Caro would move to Québec," Stéphane shrugs.

If it weren't for me, he'd be in Québec too. Caro and Stéphane love to be martyrs. At least Stéphane has the good sense to keep his martyrdom his business. I don't think I could tolerate seeing my siblings if both Caro and Stéphane were whining about how much they have sacrificed for our family. Dealing with Caro is enough.

"What does she think you and Mylène have in common?" I ask.

"She's twenty-five, I'm twenty-seven, we're both single, and we should have babies when we are spry and young?" Stéphane sighs. "Honestly, I don't think any of us should have children. At least, not now. I guess out of the four of us, I am the most adjusted, but still. It's not a well-thought-out plan."

"I'm offended," I mock a gasp, putting my hand to my chest. "I think Estelle and I would do a fantastic job of co-parenting. Certainly a better job than our parents ever did."

"Yeah, don't mention that to Caro or Seb," Stéphane says.

Seb was what we all called Bastien before he turned 10, and our baby brother decided he was too old to be little Sebbie, so Bastien it was. Now, the name only ever gets mentioned when Stéphane thinks that Bastien is behaving childlike.

"Why?" I ask.

"Well, Caro is in denial about the whole thing, and Seb was too little to remember most of it," Stéphane says.

Yeah, I remember. When our father died, I was overseas, in the middle of my bachelor's. Bastien was thirteen, Caro was sixteen and Stéphane, like me, was eighteen but nearly nineteen. Caro wanted to go back to Québec, but Bastien didn't, and it became a tug of war between the two of them while Stéphane tried to fight our mother for custody. I flew back that summer to help keep things in order. My presence only seemed to make everything worse. Eventually, Caro realized that she could go back but she couldn't make the rest of us go back with her, so she stayed.

It was one terrible year after the other, back then. The only thing that made things at all livable was that our father left a decent inheritance. He had been paying for us to go to a private school conducted in French, and our mother continued sending over child support. Eventually, it was decided that we would pay for Bastien and Caro to go to boarding school. The rest of the inheritance was split between the four of us. I had already paid off most of my undergraduate degree at that point, so the rest of my money helped me fund my masters. The others hadn't started college yet, so they weren't so lucky when all the money was drawn.

"Cole?" Stéphane asks.

"Sorry," I offer.

"Thinking about what it was like when we were in high school?"

No. That would be really bad. I shake my head, "thinking about what it was like when Bastien was in high school."

Stéphane taps the wheel of the car. I turn on the radio, and then we have a battle over the radio station, and even though we've barely made it through the ride, the day feels tolerable. The weekend itself is going to be far better than I had expected it to be.

Eventually, we get to Caro's place. She shows us around. Her rental is pretty bland, but the walls are covered in paintings made by her preschoolers and also by Cletus, who is visiting family in Texas before flying up to meet the others in Montréal. I am almost disappointed he's not here, mostly because Bastien and I spend an hour walking around the house and guessing which of the paintings were done by preschoolers and which of them were done by Cletus. I get 60% of them right and he only gets 40%. Maybe the profiling thing is rubbing off on me.

To avoid the drama, I decide that I will tell them all that I'm leaving on Boxing Day that morning instead of faking my phone call any earlier. Christmas is going to be stress-free. I'm right. Instead, we go through Caro's itinerary. She is used to planning for children, but I don't mind. We watch a parade, we go tobogganing, we make gingerbread houses, and we watch old Christmas cartoons. On Christmas Day, we exchange gifts.

Bastien gets me a patch from Shenandoah, a third that's nearly identical to the other two, and I'm actually impressed by the forethought that joke took. Stéphane gets me a digital photo frame so that I can keep a rotating set of pictures of the four of us on my desk. He also gives me a USB with copies of photos of us dating back to when we were children. There's going to be a huge gap in the photos timeline-wise, but I don't mind. Caro, as she did last time, rivals me with her gift-giving skills. She paid someone to make patches of the colleges and universities I've attended so that I can add them to my bag.

"I noticed you didn't have any last time," she says. "I couldn't find official ones, and when I could, I couldn't figure out how to ship them here."

Even though she is showing me up, it makes me smile. It's another thing that makes us feel like sisters.

For Bastien, I get a book for preschoolers called 1 2 3 Math with Me and a copy of Mechanical Engineering for Dummies. It gets a good laugh out of him, although he does pretend like he's going to fight me. Stéphane has the absolute pleasure of opening up a compass I bought him. I had each of our names engraved on the back, one at each point, so that no matter where he is headed, he is headed home. We all know that he is the sentimental one. He tries not to cry, and Bastien laughs at him. I got Caro a monogrammed toiletry bag, and inside there is a golden party cracker and a note promising to get her a map that marks the locations of her and Cletus meeting, him proposing, and where they get married once the location is set. It'll be something they can frame and hang up in the house that they'll share. She hugs me, and so I feel like I've won this round.

The next morning, I feel a bit guilty that I'm leaving them. However, I'm happy that I am not going to Québec. No one puts up a fuss. I'm sure Caro will send me an angry text once she's with Maman, but I don't even mind. I'm glad I came. Sometimes, I can be wrong.

~~~~~

You know, I like the siblings a lot. Do you have a favourite? Let me know in the comments.