Brother/Sister by Sean Olin Read Free Book Online

special. But at that point, I’d had about all I could take. If this was how special felt, he could have it back.
    And yeah, in the last message I sent him, I said, Drop dead, Craig!! But, I mean, it wasn’t a threat. I was just trying to make sure he understood how totally pissed I was at him.
    Then I turned my phone off. Let him be the one to suffer for a while. I sat there in the dark along the side of the road for, I don’t know, half an hour, listening to my iPod and trying to talk myself down from hyperventilating.
    I was overwhelmed, you know? Not really thinking about what I was saying. You can’t really think I meant I wanted him dead. I swear, I didn’t. He was my boyfriend! I loved him!

WILL
    That’s when Skeezy Keith showed up.
    Or, not exactly. He’d been there for a while, hovering in the dark outside the glass doors, hidden by the reflections, watching us go at it. He’s always doing this. He’s a total lurker, tugging at the bottom of his flannel shirt, his big bug eyes bulging into his giant plastic glasses like they’re trying to pop out and run across the room. But that’s when he decided to stop creeping around and do something to help.
    He slid open the door and wandered onto the little step-thing that leads down into the room. “Hey,” he said. And he threw his hand up above his head and gave a kind of loose wave. “Maybe it’s time for us all to chill out a little, huh?” No matter how tense the situation, no matter how crazy and out of control, Keith talks like he’s some sort of half-wit cowpoke, slow as ice, like he’s messing through the information coming at him and gradually, gradually, putting it together into an intelligent thought. Too many drugs. That’s what you get.
    Mom gave him a look, like, you want a piece of this too? And then she let loose this tirade. “Oh, look at the big man coming to save the day? Is that it, Keith? You think you’re gonna protect him?” And then she, like, hissed at him—actually hissed! Like a cat! She was spraying spit everywhere while she talked. “Try me. I’m just getting started.”
    Keith just stood there, staring, like he’d taken a handful of Valium or something. That’s his way. He thinks somehow that if he stays completely passive, she’ll realize how crazy she’s acting and give up. Which never happens. It just spurs her to get more hopped up and spiral completely out of control.
    “What’s it to you, anyway? You’re not his father. Ha. If only. What a laugh that would be.”
    Nothing from Keith. Just more of that staring. He dug his fists into his jeans pockets and waited.
    “Good thing it could never happen, huh?”
    She was so focused on Keith now that I’d been forgotten and part of me thought I should make my escape, crawl out of the room and flee back to the cliffs, where the hard stone and wilderness were more predictable and I might be able to sink back into myself.
    “Huh, Keith?” she said.
    I don’t know what kept me there, honestly. I kept thinking about my trophy. Staring. Fixated. Wishing there was some way I could snatch up the pieces and pull them to me and press them back together and make them whole.
    “Good thing. You’re broken down there. Didn’t know that, Will, did you? Good thing, too. Imagine, little Keiths running around? Leering at all the little girls they can’t have?”
    By now Keith had slipped down to sit on the step. Holding his phone like a threat between his legs. That same defeated look plastered across his face.
    “Right, Keith? Right? Say something, you asshole!”
    She kept at him like this, pulling herself up from the couch sometimes to shove her finger at him and stomp her foot, then tumbling back, falling over herself. She must have drunk a gallon of vodka at least before I got home. The alcohol was metabolizing in her system now. She was getting so bombed she could barely hold herself upright. And wherever she landed, she’d swear at Keith, and me too, if she noticed