Status: yes, it's slow-paced. sorry//new layout??//not on hiatus, I'm just depressed and busy

Brothers/Sisters

12/thought about it. and you know what the answer is

The fire spins into the night, sparks disappearing into the star-filled sky. The clouds have cleared, other than a cluster of what might be thunderheads on the horizon. I put away my phone, having given up on trying to conjure up the radar. Lacking daylight, fire is the only light left, ours and the other campers’ fires that burn in nearby pits. Although most of the other fires are less than a hundred feet away, they might as well be miles away.

We’re all so self-contained.

Carina offers me a bottle of whiskey; she’s got her water bottle next to her. I hold up my hand and shake my head. She just shrugs, and the four of us sit in silence, hypnotized by the flames.

“You don’t like guns, don’t like to drink...’ey, Gare...” Carina starts, well on her way to being drunk. I never knew she drank. Next to her, Jason dozes on his side, his head resting in the crook of his arm. Carina reaches over and strokes his hair, which—despite being stuck to his sweaty forehead—glimmers golden in the light of the fire.

“Yeah?” I say, leaning my head against my knees.

“So I know you’re all about…like, clean ’n stuff….but...you ever been drunk?”

Had I? Ask looks over at me as I suck in a breath, but Car, who’s still watching the firewood pop, doesn’t notice. Her dark, almost black, eyes look orange from the reflected flames.

Had I ever. I suppress a bitter laugh. The first time: thirteen years old, at some family thing. Maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas or something, though Orthodox Christmas is in January (not that it mattered; the family was at least marginally diverse and my father was always rather secular, anyway). We drove to North Dakota, to some uncle’s farm that was large enough to support an entire extended family. Some second or third cousins had thought it funny to give me Colorado moonshine. Despite this, it wasn’t a big deal; I’d just gotten a bit woozy and gone to bed. Though there may have been an incident with a trampoline.

But the second time. That, I’d thought, had been a revelation in closeness, in bonding with another person in a way I’d never bonded before. Amber Boone, junior year. That’s the memory knocked the breath from me.

That’s the memory that starts in the trailer park at the bend of a river, in vague area of the place full of generic rectangles we referred to as our homes, often with wood stoves we called hearths. That’s where, in the back room of one such house, Amber pulled a bottle of vodka from under a pink pillow—a remnant of a childhood that had nearly reached its dusk—and where we bet on who could stomach more. The answer: neither, and relatively little.

But’chere Russian...mostly,” Amber said after I-have-no-idea-how-many swigs. “You should have more.”

“Nah,” I replied. “Itsas-stereotype.” Besides, I thought, I was only half Russian. At this point, I think I had about seven swigs. Eight? But they were small mouthfuls, right? I think ten or eleven is where I started to regret things. My throat burned, but it wasn’t a strong burn. The drink itself was all but tasteless. We slumped against her bed as the light outside waned, the evening’s golden glow caught in floating dust. Looking back, the beginning was almost comical, as if we were tiny children with no notion of what we were doing. In truth, that’s exactly what it was.

I ended up drinking more than Amber, though not by much. Though I don’t remember the entire conversation, I remember the important parts.

I remember telling her everything, thinking that she was the best person in the world. There may have been a legitimate friendship, but at that point it didn’t even matter. I would’ve told a stranger my life’s story at that point.

“Tr...ans...gender-r-r,” Amber repeated after I’d finished.

I think I might’ve confessed some undying love or something equally as stupid. She unstuck a blond wave from her face and stared at a poster-covered wall for a moment, her brain having to work extra-hard to comprehend my words. I don’t know how or why it happened, but we found our hands clasped together, palms cold but warming.

“Garrett.” Amber leaned close, tasting my name, her breath hot on my cheek. “I kinda figured…”

I laughed, feeling lighter than air. “Figured?”

At this point, we were close and we were warm. My palm had started to sweat, or maybe it was hers. Still, our cheeks were pressed against one another’s, and I’m not entirely sure how it happens, but all it took was a small roll of the neck and the space between dissipated, like something out of a wildly optimistic fever dream. I felt something hard against my chest—I’d bound my chest that day, thank God—and realized that our palms had disentangled themselves, but it didn’t matter because there were far more interesting places to warm ourselves. Someone flung the bottle away, but that didn’t matter, either, because all that spilled from it was a few drops of that torrid spirit, three small tears. And maybe my throat wasn’t burning as much as I’d expected it to, but I was igneous. So it could’ve been because of this heat that I lost track at this point, my inhibition a lost ember.

It was as if I’d stared into the sun for too long, because everything after that was splotchy and soft at the edges, but somehow it became dark outside and somehow I found myself stumbling home under the pale orange glow of the streetlights and somehow I collapsed on the sofa and woke up with something dribbling down my chin. I weaved in and out of consciousness; in one waking episode, I saw my father look at me and narrow his eyes, his head swishing left to right in a gesture of disgust that dizzied me at the time. But what could he do? He’d done worse at my age. Far worse. In another, I actually stood up to go to the bathroom, to peel the tape off the sides of my chest, where it left pale marks over my ribs. I drank water from the sink and collapsed against the counter, telling myself it was worth it—all of it, because people are good, because people say what they mean—and I wholeheartedly believed that at the time, even when I woke for the third or fourth or fifth time with my head screaming.

Better vodka than nightmares, I think now. At least I slept dreamlessly that night.
I didn’t go to school the next day, and nearly an entire year before I realized just how wrong I’d been. About everything.

Ask prods me in the rib. I start, and have to tear my eyes from the fire to look at him. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“What?”

Carina gazes at me through the corner of her eye, not bothering to move her head, though the corner of her mouth twitches. “So should I take that as a yes?”

It takes me a moment to remember the question. “What? No, no,” I lie. “You know me. I’ve always been pretty boring.”

She grunts, then: “I’m not sure about that.”

“What do you mean?” Back a ways from the fire, we’re both huddled close to Ask, who seems to emanate heat. The warmth, too—although it’s a different sort of warmth—reminds me of that day.

“Well, lookit me.” She pauses to cough unscrew the cap off the water bottle. “I didn’t do...anything in high school. Nothing interesting, at least. I was a good. A good student.”

This actually does surprise me, though there were a few things she could have meant by interesting. I don’t say this; instead, I try for a joke: “I thought you would’ve been one of the popular kids.”

Her face is solemn, the shadows from the fire moving ponderously across her features. “Little bit.”

“Really?”

Carina shrugs. “I don’t know about popular, but I schooled hard. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I wanted to be the best at it. But…” She gulps down a mouthful of water and screws the lid back on. “I dunno.”

A short amount of time passes and I think she’s finished, but she takes a stick from the pile next to her and throws it into the fire before continuing: “Then senior year. Well, late junior year. My class rank started to slip from first to third.”

“That’s not bad.”

She scoffs. “Out of forty? Yeah, right.”

“That’s still not bad.”

“Sure...anyway. Senior year. I didn’t know what I wanted, so why try? What was the point? I thought about that a lot. And do you know what I found? Do you?”

I don’t answer; to her, I’m not here right now. Or maybe I am; maybe I’m just a shadowy apparition at the edge of her vision. Either way, I don’t matter.

“Well, I thought about it. And you know what the answer is?” I jump as she hurls the half-full bottle of whiskey into the fire pit, where the flames give a wild, second-long roar and then settle down. Her eyes have taken on a stark clarity.

Nothing! Absolutely goddamn nothing. I didn’t even get to give a Val speech. Or any speech. I don’t even like speaking, but—I got t-to be—third. I worked so hard for—for that. Not like I got any scholarships or anything. No. Colleges said, they said, ‘Oh, Oh! Third, she’s third!’ And then they saw...they saw that it was out of forty.” After the initial shock of the shattering glass, I look over at her to see tears streaking down her face.

“That’s not—Car…” I start, but it’s too late. I’ve never seen her this miserable, and for a moment I feel honored that she’d share these things with me. And ashamed that I couldn’t do the same. And I don’t have a chance to, because she gets up and stalks to her tent, not even bothering to wake Jason. I hear the sharp hissing sound of the zipper and the three of us are left alone. I don’t go after her; the best thing she can do is go to sleep and forget about the entire conversation.

Or maybe I’m just being selfish.

Ask moves away and turns so that he’s facing me. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to; at hardly a year old, he’s mastered the art of asking questions with his eyes. Questions that usually don’t have answers.

In reply, I shake my head and stand, leaning forward to use what remained in Carina’s water bottle to extinguish the fire. But I stop and sit back down.

“Jason,” I say. I raise my voice. “Jason.”

He takes a deep breath, but he doesn’t wake, so I turn to Ask.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” Now it’s his turn to stare into the fire. If Carina didn’t find the answers she was looking for in it, he sure as hell won’t. And neither will I.

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“You’re being nosy.” It’s the second time I’ve ever heard him speak this softly. “You don’t need to know.”

I’m probably red right now, but it’s not because I’ve had anything to drink. “I swear to God, if there’s a way to deactivate you—”

Quietly, still: “Don’t. Garrett, don’t do that. Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Are you like this to your friends? Are you like this to other people?”

“W—”

“You know, Garrett. Callous. Condescending.”

“Ask—”

Now it’s his turn to get up and walk away. But before he goes, he adds, “You’re right. I’m not Alessandro Passerini. Alessandro Passerini died four years ago.”

And he’s gone.

They both are.