I need to tell you about Jack first.
Because numbers can’t tell you who he was.
Eighteen years. Fourteen months. Seventeen days. Those are just numbers.
Jack loved terrible old horror movies. The worse the better. Black-and-white monsters with visible zippers in their costumes. He’d laugh until he couldn’t breathe.
He loved grilled cheese sandwiches. He burned almost every single one. He said the burnt part was “the flavor.”
He hated tomatoes. But he put ketchup on everything. Eggs. Pizza. Macaroni. Once, I swear, a pancake.
He knew the capital of every country in the world. Every single one. Burkina Faso. Kyrgyzstan. Bhutan. He’d quiz us at dinner.
But he could not remember to carry his laundry basket down the stairs. Not once in eighteen years.
And for almost his entire life, Theo was right there next to him.
They met in second grade. Theo’s family moved into a yellow house four doors down from us on Maple Street. The first day of school, Jack came home and said, “There’s a new kid named Theo. He’s going to be my best friend.”
“How do you know that, honey?”
“Because he said Godzilla was better than King Kong,” Jack said. “And that’s correct.”
By the time they were ten, Theo spent almost as much time at our house as he did at his own.
His parents had a hard marriage. They separated. They got back together. They separated again. They finally divorced when Theo was twelve.
There were nights the yelling at the yellow house got so loud you could hear it from our porch.
On those nights, our doorbell would ring around eight o’clock. And Theo would be standing there with his backpack and his pillow.
“Hi, Mrs. Harris. Can I sleep over?”
He never had to explain. I never asked him to.
After a while, we stopped calling the little bedroom at the top of the stairs the guest room.
It became Theo’s room.
He had his own toothbrush in our bathroom. His own Spider-Man pajamas in the dresser. His own seat at our kitchen table. The one by the window.
There were Christmases when his mom and dad couldn’t agree on where he’d be. They’d fight about it on the phone for days.
Jack always had a simple solution.
He’d come down to breakfast in early December and announce it.
“Mom. Theo’s spending Christmas with us.”
He never asked. He just told me.
And every single time, I said yes.
Theo opened presents under our tree for six Christmases in a row. I bought him the same pajamas as Jack every year. Plaid flannel. Different colors.
In the family photo on our living room wall, there are three kids in matching pajamas. Jack, our daughter Lily, and Theo.
Nobody who visits ever asks which one isn’t ours.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
Sophia holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Toronto, where she developed her skills in news reporting, media ethics, and digital journalism. Her expertise lies in identifying key stories, crafting compelling narratives, and ensuring journalistic integrity in every piece she edits.
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