“That must be nice,” my dad said under his breath.

“They’d freak out if they knew I was over there when they were gone,” he said. “Mom? Promise?”

“Mom won’t put it in,” Linnie said around a yawn. “Well, this has been fun, but I think we’ll say good night now.”

“Night,” we all chorused, and a second later, my screen went dark.

“And if we could also not tell Danny?” Mike asked hopefully.

“Scoff,” said J.J.

“I think it’s going to be hard to keep this one under wraps,” my dad said, shaking his head. “But it’ll stay just in the family.” Siobhan cleared her throat. “And Siobhan.”

“Well,” Mike said, getting up and edging toward the stairs. “I’m going to bed and to try and forget this ever happened. Night.”

“Don’t forget to put the floor mat back in the car,” my dad called after him.

“And maybe clean it first?” J.J. called, which started me laughing again.

I had thought that would be it—Mike went to Evanston to begin his winter term, J.J. went back to Pittsburgh, and I returned to being the only kid left in the house. It was about seven weeks later, in February, that Mike called when I leaving school, juggling three separate canvas bags and a stack of books, cursing the fact that the junior parking lot was so much farther away than the senior lot.

“Hey,” I said, tucking the phone under my chin after I answered it. “What’s up?”

“Have you seen today’s strip?” Mike asked, his voice tight.

“No.” I stopped walking. “What about it?” My mom had just wrapped up a storyline about Lindsay and Lawrence (the name of Rodney’s doppelgänger) in a fight with their neighbors, so I had no idea who she was focusing on next—she tended to rotate the storylines between characters.

“Read it.” Mike’s voice was serious enough that I set my bags down, put him on speaker, and pulled up the Sentinel website on my phone. Feeling my eyes start to get blurry from the cold, I read it. The panels intercut between me spending the night at home watching TV, with Waffles and a bowl of popcorn, and Mark, home from college, carefully getting ready and then finally showing up on the doorstep of his girlfriend, Alice. Alice had long been a fan favorite, and my mother had put her in the strip right around the time Mike started dating Corrine. But even though Alice physically looked like Corrine, she was the complete opposite personality-wise. Alice was sweet, nicer, and got along great with the family, like my mom was trying to will into being the girlfriend she wished Mike had.

“Okay,” I said, reading it once again, and then a third time, wondering if I’d missed something. “What about it?” I asked, picking up my bags and walking to my car—it was really getting too cold outside to keep standing around.

“She’s writing about what happened.”

“You mean the car mat thing?” I looked at my phone again. “This could be about anything.”

“Bet you twenty bucks,” Mike said, his voice clipped and angry. “After she promised—”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said, getting into the car. “At least see where she’s going with it.”

“Wow, you’re taking her side. I’m utterly, utterly shocked.”

“Mike—” But I didn’t get to say anything else, because he’d already hung up.

I wanted Mike to be wrong. I wanted this to be something my mother wouldn’t have done. But Mike had sensed it from the beginning, and the story started unfolding, nearly exactly as Mike had described it to us, culminating in his—or rather, Mark’s—near-naked run through the kitchen. (In the GCS version, he interrupted book club night.)

The night the story line ended, Mike called as I was emptying the dishwasher. My dad answered and put him on speaker—what he always did whenever any of my siblings called home, so that we could all talk. “It’s Mike,” he called, and my mom looked up from where she was reading the paper at the kitchen table. “Hey, son,” my dad said. “How’s—”

“Is she there?” Mike asked, his voice shaky, the way it got when he was really angry but trying not to show it. “Is Mom there?”

“I’m here,” my mother said, getting up from the table. “Are you okay?”

Mike let out a short laugh. “Um, no, mother, I am not okay. How could you do that to me?”

“Do what?” my dad asked.

“The strip,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, the strip,” Mike said through the phone, his voice getting louder and shakier. “Mom, I asked you not to put it in. I specifically asked you—”

“Put what in?” my dad asked, frowning as he put on his glasses and started flipping through the paper.

“Floor mat,” I muttered. “And . . . nudity.”

“Honey, I promise it’s not a big deal,” my mom said, leaning closer to the speaker. “When I mentioned it to my syndicate, they loved it. And I was just thinking about how funny we all found it—I mean, even you were laughing . . .”

“At something private,” Mike snapped. “At something that I didn’t want to go beyond our family. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Do you even get that this is my life? And that it’s not just there for you to get material from?”

“Mike, I think you should calm down,” my mother said, exchanging a look with my dad.

“Calm down? You’ve just wrecked my life with your comic strip!”

“I’ve hardly done that.”

“Oh, really? Well, guess what. Corrine’s parents read your stupid strip. And they figured out what happened. And she’s in trouble with them and just broke up with me over it.” Mike’s voice cracked on the last word.

I exchanged a glance with my dad. I didn’t like Corrine—none of us did—but that didn’t mean I’d wanted this to happen. Not like this.

“Oh, honey.” My mom had gone pale, and she put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t . . .” She took a breath. “What if I called the Nelsons? Maybe explained things?” She shot me a look, and I could see genuine regret on her face, like she hadn’t realized until right this moment what the consequences might be.

“Yeah,” Mike said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “That’s what I really want here. You making things better when you’re the one who caused this in the first place.”

“Michael,” my dad said, putting down the paper. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t speak to your mother that way.”

“Fine,” Mike said. “Then I won’t.” And a second later, the phone went dead.

* * *

I stared at the strips in front of me, still rooted to the same spot even though Danny had wandered into the next gallery. You would have thought the resolution in the fictional world of Grant Central Station was the end of it. But it wasn’t—nothing had been resolved as tidily as it had in four black-and-white panels.

Mike had stopped talking to our mother, but she was sure it was just a phase and would blow over. This was around the time that her newest collection was gearing up for publication, and a reporter from USA Today was reaching out to all of us for a human-interest piece on “Growing Up Grant.” I’d e-mailed my few sentences to the reporter after clearing them with my mom and hadn’t thought anything about it until I saw the interview, printed below the fold on the cover of the USA Today arts section.

Mike had apparently taken his opportunity to speak to a national reporter and ran with it—unloading everything he was currently feeling. He told the reporter that he loathed how our mother cannibalized our lives for strangers’ enjoyment. How he always felt like he was being pushed into the mold of a perfect son in a perfect family, when the reality was much messier than that. How much he’d hated being a Grant.

I’d heard the fight he’d had with my parents the night the article came out—I’d been sitting on the kitchen stairs, hidden from view but able to hear the conversation. My dad had tried to give him a way out, suggesting that maybe he’d been misquoted. But when it became clear that Mike had meant what he’d said in the national media, every word of it, the fight really started in earnest. And even though I couldn’t hear what Mike was saying, judging by my dad’s yelling and my mom’s crying, it was clear he wasn’t doing much of anything to fix the situation, and was in fact, doubling down.