Free The Kiss Test by Shannon McKelden Page A

have to worry about it suddenly wanting a commitment out of me.
    Pressing the button outside Robert’s building in the East Village, I waited in the tiny strip of shade provided by an anemic-looking tree stuck in the middle of the sidewalk. The building was a three-story, converted walk-up, a bit worse for wear on the outside, but perfect for a guy who never had visitors and rarely left his apartment. He made enough money to afford much better, but he was happy. Which, I guess, was all that counted.
    He buzzed me up and I headed for the second floor. The apartment door was open when I arrived, but Rob was nowhere to be seen.
    “Hello?”
    “Back here,” muttered a voice from the depths of the apartment.
    And, I do mean depths. “Apartment” was a rather loose term for the place my brother lived. It more closely resembled a tomb or a cavern. Stuff stood heaped in mountains everywhere—computer components, a multitude of unlabeled plastic bins holding God knows what and software manuals probably dating back to DOS. The couch was buried beneath months’ worth of probably unread newspapers, the threadbare carpet gritty with debris that hadn’t been vacuumed in forever, probably because a vacuum—if he even owned one—couldn’t make it through the obstacle course of junk. Through the breezeway into the kitchen, I saw it hadn’t seen a good scrubbing in years. The cupboards probably contained no food, as the counters were covered with boxes of cereal, bags of pasta and milk cartons. The sink held towers of dishes. I was afraid to even venture into the kitchen for fear of the size of the cockroaches that must be living in that heap.
    I didn’t remember the apartment being quite such a wreck the last time I’d been here. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure this particular change of address was the best thing for me.
    “Robert?” I called out again, afraid that maybe the door had been opened, not by my brother, but some mutant roach, living on my brother’s remains.
    “In the bedroom,” a muffled voice called—roach or Rob, I wasn’t sure.
    I made my way back toward my brother’s room, skirting more junk in the hallway, and actually having to step over a computer monitor completely blocking the bedroom door.
    My brother sat at his desk, bent over the keyboard, mere inches from the computer screen. Profoundly farsighted since childhood, he wore thick black-framed glasses, which, if you added a bit of masking tape around the bridge, would have completed his dork costume. He clenched a pencil between his teeth, which explained the muffled voice.
    He was a year older than me, the same age as Chris. Occasionally I wondered what would have happened if my dad hadn’t left and Rob hadn’t buried himself in computers and video games. Would he have been more like Chris, athletic and outgoing, or would he have turned out the way he did anyway? Sometimes I mourned the lost brother I vaguely remembered. The one who allowed his kid sister to tag along when he and his buddies built forts in the woods behind our house in upstate New York, and who bragged to everyone at school when I made it all the way down Dead Man’s Hill on my bike, with no hands. Would Chris and I and Rob have grown up close friends if Rob hadn’t dropped out of society at the ripe old age of eleven? I’d never know, but I still held a soft spot in my heart for the kid Robert used to be, though I hadn’t seen him in almost two decades.
    “Whatcha doing?” I asked, my nose wrinkling a bit at the smell of stale coffee and soured creamer, obviously coming from the multitude of coffee cups covering every available surface. It appeared that, instead of washing cups when he ran out, my brother just bought more.
    Rob never took his eyes off the screen as his fingers tapped out unintelligible words and symbols. He did spit out the pencil though before speaking. “I’m re-architecting the hardware abstraction layer in the proprietary OS my client ships in their