Taylor
In my family, it was tradition to not leave someone alone after something as scary as what had happened last night, no matter how much they wanted to be left alone. But today was an exception. Isaac had ended our game of Monopoly when Zac and I started to not-so-good-naturedly fight over the amount of money he owed me for landing on a property that I not only owned, but had hotels on. The amount of money would have left him bankrupt and out of the game and, since Zac was not a very good loser, we had started to argue over it. Isaac had broken us
up and, since it was eight o’clock in the morning, folded up the gameboard and they had gone downstairs to have breakfast. I had told them I wanted to be alone for a little while and, with a warning of what
they would do to me if I tried to turn into Parker, had left me in the room.
Absently, I had begun to organize the play money and put the pieces and cards back in their respective places in the box. While I did so, I began to think but not about what I had intended to think about in my time alone. I had intended to think about the nightmare, like I always did after I had it. Something Isaac and Zac had prevented me from doing by starting the game. And I had been good. Throughout the entire game, it had barely entered my mind. So now it was my time to think about it. Over-analyze it. Get angsty.
But instead my thoughts drifted to my brothers. Not Parker, but Isaac and Zac. The last few months had put a strain on our relationship like no major event in any of our lives had. It had often crossed my
mind when I was living with Annie that if me living with her was a test of loyalty for us, we had all failed with flying colors. We weren’t the indestructible brothers we had always claimed to be in interviews. We could be nasty to each other. We could hurt each other. We could drift apart from each other.
The way things had been between us during my time back home, in a house I didn’t live in anymore, it had made me feel like I was kicking and punching and screaming at a wall, knowing that my brothers were standing on the other side. Together, Zac and I had managed to push one of the bricks loose and see a little bit of what was on the other’s side. He had told me when I was first there that he felt he wouldn’t apologize for the way he felt, but he didn’t want me apologizing either. That had meant a lot to me and we had managed to get along fairly well throughout this disaster.
With Isaac, it had been a lot different. We had fought like we had never fought before. Not just little petty arguments, but actual fights. We said things...We said things with the intention of hurting each other. And then after a while we had pretty much stopped talking. He had gotten so far away. Not only from me, but from everyone. Isaac was often in his own little world, there was nothing unusual about that. But he didn’t usually stay there for days at a time. I had thought it was because of me and how I had chosen to live with Annie. I hadn’t known the truth until he had approached me about the knife. I had figured it out eventually, when I started thinking that his silence had come about the same time I had left the knife in the bathroom.
But now for the first time since I had gotten there, it was truly getting better. The game we had played with each other earlier, the soccer game we had played in the backyard after they had told me not to be so uptight about Parker. It was coming back to us like an old talent to a person with amnesia. We were slowly remembering how to be around each other. We were slowly becoming brothers again. We talked and joked with each other like we had always done. We had teased each other and comforted each other. It wasn’t like nothing had ever happened. It was more like they had come to accept what was inevitably a part of me. At least with Parker. They didn’t pretend he wasn’t there and never had been. They acknowledged who he was and who he was to me. They recognized that that didn’t change what they were to me in any way. For the first time they saw that, in some ways at least, that part of the situation made sense.
With Annie, it was harder. Maybe it would come in time. Maybe it wouldn’t. I would wait and see before trying again to make them understand that. I would wait for the time when I understood it myself.
Because now, more than ever, I didn’t understand. I understood that I liked Annie, the more I got to know about her. I might have even loved her, as a friend. But when I was at her house, when I was with just her and just Lawrence...I didn’t get the same feeling of home that I got when I was here, at my former home. There was a warm enough feeling to it, but the warm feeling didn’t embrace me the way it did here. I didn’t have little kids constantly bugging me to play dress up and Barbie and Candy Land and tag and hide and go seek. I didn’t have Isaac depriving the rest of the room of oxygen with his snoring above me at night and I didn’t have Zac’s absent murmur as he tossed and turned in bed, never a still sleeper. Annie’s home gave me a feeling of a place I could be comfortable in, but not a place I could go to like a beacon in the night if I ever lost my way.
I realized as I puttered about the room just how homesick I was. My home had turned into my home again. In a few weeks I would have to leave again, after Parker left and there was no reason for me to stay. It had been hard the first time and I didn’t know if I would be able to do it again. I didn’t know if I wanted to do it again.
Maybe...Maybe I wouldn’t have to.