The Imitation Game ✓

TWENTY-NINE | HOW COULD I EVER KNOW?

Every summer during college, Rasmus dreaded making the return to his parents' house, that dark place where his father's constant berating became more than just an argument over the phone. The best thing he could do for himself was to stay as busy as possible, so during the three months between his sophomore and junior years of college, his distraction of choice was playing Warner in one of the local theater's productions of Legally Blonde.

Ava wanted to come see him, of course—now that the vast majority of his performances took place on his college stage a few hours away, she never got to see him perform anymore. Even though Legally Blonde probably wasn't entirely appropriate for a ten-year-old to be watching, he couldn't hold back the grim thought that out there in the audience would still be a safer place for her than their own home, so he let her come to the show as many times as she felt like.

At first, he was paying the small fee for her tickets, but it only took so long for his director, Maria, to realize that the little girl who always scampered to her seat before anyone else was his sister and to recognize that his parents had yet to show up to a single show even though it was a well-known fact that the Norths lived here in town. Maria had been just seventeen when she became a mother, so she saw a little bit of herself in that boy who was clearly trying his best to take care of someone else while he was barely an adult himself. She pulled him aside one day and quietly told him that his sister was free to come free of charge whenever she liked—it wasn't like they were even charging that much per ticket to begin with.

So by the end of that summer, both Rasmus and Ava had every song from Legally Blonde permanently drilled into their brains. When the day of his last performance rolled around, she didn't have the money or the means of transportation to get him a bouquet of flowers as was custom, but that didn't hinder her determination. He was tired and therefore a little on edge that day, but his heart softened when she found him after the show, her sundress smudged with a spot of dirt from picking around in the weeds for as many daisies as she could find. Clenched in her hand was the little bouquet, the stems wrapped with a damp paper towel to keep them moist and tied together with a pink ribbon (à la Elle Woods, naturally). Rasmus knew they were bound to wilt in a day or two, but he would cherish them while he could.

The way home was a twenty-five-minute jaunt through the suburbs, sometimes a pain during the afternoon but pleasant this late at night when the roadways weren't clogged with cars. If he were alone, Rasmus would have found a way to make it twice as long just to avoid going back to the house, but Ava was already yawning in the passenger seat.

He kept quiet in case she wanted to doze off, but just when he thought she was going to rest her head against the window and close her eyes, she spoke up out of nowhere.

"I think I wanna be an actor when I grow up, too."

A startling, clenching sensation seized at his throat like an invisible force was trying to choke him, but Rasmus tried to play calm and lightly asked, "What, you don't like any of Mom's ideas?"

In his periphery, he could see Ava wrinkle her nose in displeasure. "Mom wants me to be a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist."

"Those aren't such bad things to be," he pointed out.

"But they all sound so boring. I wanna have a fun job like you do."

He bit back a sigh. He didn't want to have this conversation, didn't want to burst her bubble of optimism, and yet he knew she was getting old enough now to start understanding some of the nuances of life. And as her big brother, it was his job to ease her into them gently instead of throwing her off the deep end when she was older.

"There are a lot of fun jobs out there, Ava."

"Do you not want me to be like you?"

He glanced over at her as he coaxed the car to a stop at a red light; she had her head low, looking betrayed. The tightness around his throat grew. Fuck. He'd thought that this was all going to get easier as she got older, but he found himself missing the days when he could trust her to be naive to all that was bad in the world. It was so much easier for him to put up with all the shit their parents gave him back when he knew she couldn't see how it was tearing him apart.