After a while, she asks, “So aside from watching fascinating YouTube videos, what do you like to do?”

My perverted mind comes up with a few ideas of what I wish she means by that, and then I swallow those thoughts down. I think about it and come up blank. What do I like to do? Nothing. I like to do nothing. What’s wrong with me, and is it fixable?

“I don’t know,” I say. I click on a news video about this trend where kids sucker-punch strangers on the street. It’s a game called Knockout. We watch it, and I say, “Oh my God, people are stupid.” Aisha nods.

I click on another clip, a news story about two drunk guys stealing a penguin in Australia. Aisha laughs as they show the losers being dragged away in handcuffs. She says, “I wonder how they did it. Is it like, if you want to steal a penguin, you have to think like a penguin? Or maybe they dressed up like penguins and were all, ‘Come with us, buddy.’ And the little guy just went along?”

“So they dressed as fancy waiters?”

She laughs again, and I sigh a bit as I see how her tongue flicks up against the back of her front teeth. I think, I made that happen. I did that. Making Aisha laugh is like the big win I’ve never had. It’s what I like to do. It makes my insides flutter and my shoulders relax and I am home.

And then I think, Excellent, you are falling deeper in love with a lesbian.

“That’s not even the hard part,” I say. “The really hard part is stealing a penguin’s identity.”

Aisha leans back on her elbows. “What would you do with a penguin’s identity?”

I allow my eyes a little glimpse of her flat stomach and then I look away. “Maybe you’d give felons a second chance? I mean, it’s hard to start again, find a job and such when you’ve robbed a bank.”

“True.”

“So you go up to this felon, and you hand them a document, and you say, ‘You are now officially known as Mitchell T. Penguin. You have not committed any felonies, and all you’ve done thus far is mate for life with Lucille J. Penguin.”

“I think penguins are gay. I think I heard that somewhere,” she says.

“You know, not everyone is gay,” I say, and she gives me the finger. “Well, probably not all penguins are gay. I mean, that would be not the smartest strategy from a Darwinian standpoint.”

“You don’t know,” she says. “They could have surrogates.”

“Oh yes, penguin surrogates,” I say. “I’ve often heard of them.”

“You’re really weird,” she says. “I like you.”

“I like you too,” I answer, and I close the laptop. As the light in the room evaporates, I hear her exhale, and it sounds like the kind of breath you let out for the first time in a long time.

“Thanks, Carson. Really. Thank you. You are a good person.”

“No biggie,” I say, grinning widely because I know she cannot see me. “I simply saved your life.”

She snorts. I wrap myself in the blanket and settle in for a night on the carpet. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

I WAKE UP in the morning when I hear breathing in my ear. I open my eyes to find two eyes staring into mine from literally six inches away.

I start to scream, and a hand covers my mouth. Aisha’s hand.

“What the …?” I say into her palm.

“I always wanted to do that to someone,” she says, a silly look on her face. “Looked like you were about to wake up, so I just … hurried that process up a bit.”

I look around the still-dark room. “What time is it?”

“It’s six thirty,” she says.

“So yeah,” I mumble, turning over onto my stomach, a pale orange blanket the only thing between me and the carpet. “I probably wasn’t about to wake up.”

She pounces on me and wrestles me onto my back, and my ribs press hard into the floor, knocking the wind out of me. I can tell she’s kidding around, but I tense my whole body and fight against her.

It’s futile. She pins me on my back by holding my shoulders down with her hands, and she sits on my thighs. She looks down on me with this grin on her face, and I have to avoid her eyes. I’m in a pair of shorts, no shirt, with only a blanket over me, and she’s wearing just a T-shirt and panties. Girls don’t get it. They don’t get what they can do to us. It’s terrible and embarrassing.

“What?” she says.

“Leave me alone,” I mumble.

“Oh, come on,” she says, and when I don’t look at her, she gets off me. “Sorry. I was just foolin’.”

I sit up and curl my arms around my legs. I can feel the brooding coming on, but I don’t want to be that guy, so I shake it off. I yawn and stretch my arms out. “I’m not a morning guy. I am not a guy of the morning.”

“We need to talk,” Aisha says. She is sitting up on her bed, which is to say she is sitting on a fully deflated air mattress.

“Talk, woman,” I say.

“At what age did you become a hoarder? Have you considered going on the TV show?”

I raise an eyebrow, or at least I attempt to do Aisha’s one-eyebrow raise. I fail. “Huh?”

She points across the room at the boxes piled atop each other against the far wall. I saw those the first time I came downstairs, but the truth is I haven’t thought of them since. I look back over at Aisha, whose tank top is loose in all the right places. It’s early and my brain is barely functioning, and I have to remind myself not to gawk.

“Bring it up to the actual hoarder,” I say. “My dad.”

She stands and stretches her legs. “We’re living down here, not him. Can we clean this crap up? I mean, the smell.” She pinches her nose.

I sniff and I don’t really smell anything anymore. I must have gotten used to it. Is that a bad sign? Does that mean I smell too, and I don’t even notice anymore? I resist the urge to check my underarms.

“Ugh,” I say. “Cleaning? Really? Worst summer ever.”

She gives me that inimitable Aisha smile that engulfs her whole face and says, “Well, you’ve obviously never cleaned with Aisha before….” She does a spin and a little jump, and I watch her, wondering where the hell this is going. She stops with her arms out wide, facing me. “Sorry, I got nothing,” she says. “Can you take care of the boxes? I’d rather scrub floors than deal with boxes that have been gathering spiderwebs for decades. That freaks me out.”

After we do our morning stuff, we get to work. The boxes are, in fact, covered in cobwebs. Some have been numbered with orange Magic Marker — a “1,” a “3,” and a “4.” Some are damp on the bottom, like maybe there was a flood, and I imagine a box with an orange “2” on it floating down a river. When I lift “3” off the pile, it feels soggy on the bottom and begins to collapse into itself. I wrestle that one safely down to the ground and open it.

The box is filled with old photo albums. It’s pretty clear to me that this is my grandmother’s stuff, and that my father must have decided, upon moving in seven years ago, that everything should be put away and tended to at a future date that never quite arrived.

The top one is a wedding album. I flip through and the photos are all black and white — more like black and yellow, really — and the setting is some sort of banquet hall, in some town where smiling was illegal or at least really frowned upon. Of the posed shots, not a single one is even a little bit joyful. A few show strangers on the dance floor having maybe a moderate amount of fun. In one shot, my grandfather appears to be smiling as he dances with my grandmother, but she’s glowering up at him. When I get married, I probably won’t keep any of the glowering shots.

My grandfather looks even more like me than my dad does, which is weird because he’s, like, a missing person. His face is long and thin like mine. My dad, with his rounder face, looks a lot more like my grandmother.