The Ghost in Apartment 2R

The Great Injustice That Is Happening to Me

Okay, in the Grand Scheme of Things, as my favorite history teacher, Mr. Nordstrom, likes to say, maybe it’s not a great injustice.

Or as my dad likes to remind me, “Do you know how many kids would kill to be in your situation?”

Because this is really just about a closet.

Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except it’s where I sleep.

So, yes, there are kids much worse off than I am, and I totally get that. But for a normal thirteen-year-old kid living in Brooklyn, what happened to me is, I think anyone would agree, a pretty big miscarriage of justice. Not like being enslaved, or made to feel like a second-class citizen or anything . . . Well, that’s not true. I do feel like a second-class citizen. At least in my family nest.

We live in what is referred to as a two-bedroom apartment, since there are two bedrooms.

Which seems like a stupid detail but is actually a major part of this story.

Because I have an older brother and a set of parents (one of each sex--I only mention this because my friend Kyle has two moms and I want to be fair), that means two bedrooms for four people.

Now, in a typical family, I would share the bedroom with Jake (that’s my brother’s name), but since we’re six years apart, it was decided when I was a whining little kid that me being in there would be a distraction from Jake studying.

And then he was a teenager, and then it was really important that he have his own room because, well, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Well, I am older now, and a brand-new teenager myself, and nobody is saying I need to have my own room.

Okay, I do have a room.

Kind of.

Once I was too old to stay in my parents’ room, they took the closet near the front door and turned it into a room.

I mean, it’s a nice closet, as closets go, with a sliding door and shelves and room for a small futon. So that’s my room.

And please do not make any Harry Potter jokes, because I’ve heard them all. I remember when I was in like first grade and friends would come over and think it was neat, because they would have normal rooms and mine was so different. Or they had normal families and shared a room with a sibling. “You’re so lucky!” they would say.

Yeah, lucky me. Sleeping in a closet.

You might think that this is the injustice I’m talking about, but honestly, I didn’t mind it, because of a promise my father and mother made to me when I got big enough to start complaining about the situation.

The promise was that I would get Jake’s room right after he went to college. Which seemed totally fair. And Jake was cool with it, too. It’s our parents who made the decision that totally ruined my life and changed everything.

Because in my moral universe a promise is a promise. Not something you can take back because it’s not convenient. My dad says that there’s a difference between “never” and “not right now,” but I think that’s garbage.

Basically, what happened was that Jake got into Cornell University. Which is an amazing thing, and was his first-choice school, and he totally deserves to go. But Cornell, I found out, is unbelievably expensive. And we just don’t have that kind of money. Jake got a scholarship (I guess all that studying paid off), so I thought everything was fine, until the day after we dropped him off at school. It was late August, and I still couldn’t believe I was finally going to have a real room to myself. I was thinking about how weird it would be to not have Jake around, when my parents knocked on my closet door.

I hear my dad clearing his throat. Then: “We need to talk to you.”