Zac Hanson
I'm not really sure what to say. I'm here. It's nice. It's small. It's quiet. I haven't been here too long--about an hour or so. Parker showed me his room. He's got a lot of photographs on his wall, including one of us from when we were babies, apparently. It's strange to think that he has something like that.
I hope your plane ride went well. What did they try to pass off as food this time? I hope it wasn't the same thing we had on our last plane trip. That was just...awful. There's no other word. I'm not even sure what it was (althouth I'm sure you can recall Isaac :).
Well, just writing to let you know I'm all right so far (and that I haven't forgotten our e-mail address). I'll get the phone number for you soon. Write back.
Love, Taylor
It was hard writing back to Taylor. His e-mail was so short and curt. Not that I had expected novels of information about everything from what their house looked like to the way they brushed their teeth, but the briefness had surprised me.
Every time I typed something on the screen, I didn't like what I had said and immediately went back and deleted it. I had so much to tell him, but it had been made clear to me that there were restrictions on the content of my e-mail. This only made the task more difficult.
"Are you done yet, Zac?" Isaac asked casually as he entered the room where I was sitting at the computer, staring at the still-blank screen.
"I can't think of anything to say," I said, turning around to look at him.
"Why?" he asked.
"Well, what am I supposed to say? The plane ride sucked, we miss you, come home?" I replied sarcastically. "He didn't exactly give us a lot to respond to in his e-mail. It's so short."
"He probably wasn't in the best of moods when he wrote it," Isaac said reassuringly. Reassuring himself. "Or he just didn't have a lot to talk about. I mean, he did say that he'd only been there an hour or so, didn't he?"
"Yeah, but still," I said.
"What do you have so far?" he asked, coming over to where I was sitting and reading the lone "Hey Taylor," on the screen. "Why don't you talk about that weird message we got on our answering machine from that Annie woman? Or maybe you could talk about the weather or something."
"That's stupid," I said, recalling the strange message on the answering machine (one of the many strange messages on the answering machine) from a woman named Annie who was talking so fast and crying so hard (or so drunk) that it was difficult to understand what she was saying. Something about talking to Mom and Dad, but it was too hard to understand what her phone number was when she said it because of how upset she was. Even more odd was the fact that my parents had no idea who she was.
"Well, what do you want me to say?" he said back.
I sighed and covered my eyes with my palms, frustrated.
"I hate this," I said suddenly, sitting back in my chair. I'm not sure what inspired me to say it at that exact moment, though I had been thinking it since the day we found out what was really going on. "I hate having to censor everything I want to say to him. I hate not being able to tell him how much I miss him and I wish he was home because if I did that, then it would make him feel bad and he'd come hom and then Parker would be hurt or something stupid like that. I hate not being his brother anymore."
My eyes widened when I realized what I had said. I covered my mouth, unable to believe that it had just slipped out like that. After a moment, I uncovered my mouth and, realizing that it was just true, I repeated it.
"I hate not being able to be his brother anymore."
Don't make me beg...Please?
Index
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Seven