The Summer Before He Left

The afternoon before Andy leaves for university, he fixes a hinge on the back porch that doesn't need fixing. His stepsister Mia stays close, handing him screws he could reach himself, asking questions she already knows the answers to. A promise gets made out there – half said, not quite named – about writing home, about coming back, about how nothing on this farm is supposed to change. She wants him to say it out loud. He doesn't, not yet.

The next morning a truck turns out of the yard and the gate swings shut on the last summer either of them will remember this way. The cicadas start up like they always do. Teach Me First opens right here, with two people who don't yet know which promises will hold.

On the last afternoon, Andy fixes a hinge on the back porch – the kind of task that doesn't really need doing. Mia hands him screws he could reach on his own. The house behind them is full of his stepmother's quiet bustle, so the porch becomes the only place in the world where the two of them are alone, the way they used to be before five years of school terms got in the way.

"You're going Tuesday," she says.

"For the term. Then back for winter break."

She nods. She has asked this already – probably three times this week – and he understands, the way he understood everything about her when she was small, that she isn't asking for information. She wants him to say it out loud, and he doesn't have a gentle way to name what she's doing, so he skips the naming.

"You'll write," she says. It isn't a question, exactly. It is not not one.

"I'll write. Every week."

"Every week."

She picks at a loose thread on the hem of her T-shirt while he finishes the hinge. The screen door swings shut behind her with its ordinary sound, and they sit on the steps a while longer, listening to the cicadas start up the way they have always started on this farm.

The next morning he rides in the passenger seat of his father's truck, duffel at his feet. Mia stands at the fence in a T-shirt that used to be their mother's, one hand in her hair. The truck turns out of the yard, the gate swings shut, and the morning goes on as if nothing has ended – which is what neither of them knows yet. The porch will still be there in five years. The person who sits on it will not be the same.

Teach Me First picks up five years later, in Back to the Farm.