Everybody Says It's Everything

by Xhenet Aliu

Genres: General Fiction; Cultural Heritage; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In this unforgettable novel from the award-winning author of Brass, twins growing up in the United States in the nineties unravel larger truths about identity and sibling bonds when one of them gets wrapped up in the war in Kosovo.

“A glowing work of art . . . Aliu has used her many talents to craft a wonderful, vibrant, must-read book.”—Jason Mott, National Book Award–winning author of Hell of a Book

Raised in Connecticut, adopted twins Drita and Petrit (aka Pete) had no connection to their Albanian heritage. Their lives were all about Barbie dolls, the mall, and roller skating at the local rink. Although they were inseparable during their childhood, their paths diverged once they became teenagers: Drita was a good girl with good manners who was going to attend a good college; Pete was a bad boy going nowhere fast. Even their twinhood was not enough to keep them together.

Fast-forward to their twenties. Drita has given up on her dreams for the future, abandoning her graduate studies to move back home and take care of their mother. She hasn’t heard from Pete in three years when his girlfriend and their son unexpectedly show up without him and in need of help. Realizing that Pete’s child may offer the siblings a second chance at being family, Drita becomes determined to find her brother. But what she ends up discovering—about their connection to their Albanian roots, the war in Kosovo, and the story of their adoption—will surprise everyone, and become what brings them together, or tears them apart for good.

In Everybody Says It’s Everything, critically acclaimed author Xhenet Aliu tells the story of a family both fractured and foundering, desperate to connect with the other and the world at large, but not knowing how.

Release date: March 18, 2025

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

On her ninth birthday, Drita finally held in her hands the thing she’d asked for seven months before, at Christmas: Parisian Barbie, the one in the hot pink cancan dress and the kind of lacy black stockings she’d only ever seen on women in the sorts of magazines dads—­even ones that barely qualified, like Dom—­kept at the bottom of their toolboxes.

“Oh my god,” Drita said.

Her brother, Pete, had handed it to her, then punched his right fist into his left palm like he was waiting for something in return. He should have been; it was his ninth birthday, too, but all Drita could offer him was a face struck dumb by the box she held and some words that meant nothing to him, because Pete was only interested in things that went boom.

“That’s the one you wanted, right?” Pete asked. He knew very well that it was, a present so good there was no need to wrap it. At Christmas she’d received, naturally, Italian Barbie, not just because Mattel didn’t make an Albanian version but because their mother, Jackie, was always trying to impart a cultural legacy that her adopted children would never truly share. The doll Drita had really wanted—­the one staring at her at that moment from beneath the cellophane—­was beautiful and a little slutty, not dressed like a peasant about to milk cows the way her Italian Barbie cousin was.

Drita thought of the little box she planned to give Pete later that night, covered in a page from the Sunday comics. The key chain inside that she’d crafted for him out of a tumbled rock and airplane glue was objectively hideous, and stupid to boot—­they were nine, they were years away from possessing keys to anything.

A tear slipped over Drita’s eyelid, something she knew she was going to have to learn how to control soon, before the kids at school got meaner, which Pete had warned her was coming.

“But that’s the one you said you wanted,” Pete said, immediately defensive.

“It is the one I wanted,” Drita said. “It’s just that I don’t have anything for you.”

She’d been planning to present him the key chain over cake, after the song, when Jackie and Dom would give him the handheld Space Invaders game everybody already knew he was getting. It wouldn’t have mattered then how stupid her gift was, because handheld Space Invaders was the kind of present grown-­ups were expected to deliver for birthdays. Kids were supposed to give each other some trinket made out of the better things grown-­ups got them, like a preshrunk Shrinky Dink, or a chewy brownie baked for an hour under an Easy-­Bake lightbulb, or a key chain made from a rock tumbler kit. Nine-­year-­olds didn’t have the money for real presents. She didn’t have money. How did Pete have money?

Pete shrugged. “It’s okay if you just made me something.”

“Wait, how were you able to get this?” Drita asked, turning the box over in her hands. On the side of the box, Barbie explained what life was like in France. The part of Paris on the right side of the Seine River was where French fashions came from. The cities that weren’t Paris grew grapes to make into wine.

Drita knew from the way Pete smiled that he was desperate to tell her, despite shrugging and saying only “I have my ways.”

School is free and children work very hard, the box said. School was also free in America, but Barbies weren’t, which made the box in Drita’s hand take on a different weight when she looked down on it again.

“Pete, how’d you get this?” Drita asked again.

“I pulled it from a hat,” Pete said, pantomiming a magician’s flourish.

“But really,” Drita said.

“I delivered newspapers.”

“You did not.”

“I rode to Bradlees and stole it,” Pete said, giddy, finally, with the truth of it.

“Pete,” Drita gasped.

“What? I did it for you.”

Drita wasn’t sure how to respond to that, except to stop crying. She recognized that her gut reaction was even more childish than holding a doll was: stealing is bad, lying is bad, those were lessons they were supposed to have taken from those Little Golden Books Jackie read to them when they were small. But those lessons seemed too simple now that they were nine; they didn’t allow for all the not-­that-­bad choices in between. Pete had ridden his bike all the way to Bradlees, for example, which must have taken over an hour, meaning he technically spent more time on Drita’s present than she did on his, the six unattended weeks the rock tumbler ran in the basement notwithstanding. And he had at least paid more attention to Drita’s wish list than Jackie had, which was touching and which, despite what people believed about twins, hadn’t previously proven to be based on some innate biological bond.

But still, she knew by the smile on his face that he didn’t do it just for her. Even if the booty was for Drita, he’d gotten something for himself out of it. He’d gotten to graduate from Dennis the Menace mischievous to at least a middle school level of dangerous, trouble being the only subject in which Pete was ever ahead of the curve.

Meanwhile Drita was still playing with dolls and making toys for her brother’s birthday out of toys she’d received from her last one.

Drita looked at Parisian Barbie again. She shouldn’t have been playing with dolls anymore, not when her brother had already moved on from Cops and Robbers to flat-­out robbery. But around Barbie’s neck was a choker with a cameo, so alluring even in satin and plastic instead of velvet and ivory. She did want the doll. She wanted a portal to the kind of life that could only be lived in far-­off places, and in exchange she had to give Pete something, even if it was just the suggestion of respect.

Cool, she wanted to say, because it was the word he’d most appreciate, but she’d feel like a fraud using it, and it seemed inadequate besides, so she hunted for something better. On the side of the Parisian Barbie box was some French vocabulary, and she looked there for help. There was the word for mother, there was the word for father, the one for house, dog, I, but no thank you, and no brother.

The only words left on the box translated to goodbye, and so that was what she said to him.

“Au revoir, Petrit!” she said, using his real name because it was foreign, if not French. “Au revoir!”

1999

Au revoir indeed.

Drita remembered every exquisite detail of that Barbie seventeen years later, between the third and fourth rings of the phone call coming in at 6:34 a.m., when she was certain that whoever was on the other end of the line would be calling to tell her that Pete had au revoired for good. That was the only reason for calls at that hour, something she understood despite never having taken any previous middle-­of-­the-­night phone calls about the deaths of various loved ones, the sole fortunate by-­product of what had become, since returning to Waterbury to nurse both the strangers who provided her paychecks and her own mother, an otherwise excruciating loneliness. The aunts and uncles and grandparents she and Pete had acquired through Jackie and Dom had lived like they were supposed to—­within blocks of the places of their birth, taking all the time-and-­a-­half a human body could withstand at Chase Manufacturing so their children could attend St. Margaret’s–­McTernan, despite its obvious affiliation with some goddamn Mick or another—­and they died like they were supposed to, in hospice from aggressive lung cancers no one would dare suggest had anything to do with lifelong exposure to asbestos or Merit Golds. Even the phone call about Dom had come at a reasonable afternoon hour, and his left anterior descending artery blockage seemed inevitable enough that she hardly remembered the details of the message.

Drita’s hand hovered over the receiver until the ringing stopped, when she let herself take a breath and indulge the possibility that it was just a wrong number. That gave her a minute to excavate some good memories of Pete, just in case.

Like the way they used to steal church wafers together at all those funerals despite Dom’s occasional reminders that, underneath their Reeboks and Lees, they were still born Moslems taking what they shouldn’t from the body of Christ.

Like the way they’d slip away from their adopted Catholic great-­aunts and cousins, who’d grieved for every corpse like pros, wearing something from the Dress Barn Burial Collection and using the phrase “God’s will” about everything from the final comatose hours to the catered potato salad.

Like the secret twin language they used to pretend they shared, each of them blurping out a consonant-­heavy dialect that made no more sense to them than it did to anyone around them. Let’s make a fort in the woods, Drita would attempt to say, and Pete would shake out some pellets from the purple side of a box of Nerds, and they’d laugh knowingly despite not knowing the intent behind the other’s sounds at all.