Segment VI: unedited

***

Under cover of the first thunderstorm, the infraction began.

Monday loomed like another raincloud – grey and suffocating. It had been raining all weekend, and Gideon couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. The water streaked his windowpane, transparent as tears, reminding him of the Friday where Keane and Lumi stole themselves away.

He hated that he couldn’t fill the shoes that Keane left vacant on the doorstep. He was too small, too hunched, shouldering the wake of his twin brother. Responsibility pinched too tight on his toes, and justice was the aglets that cracked and unwound beneath his fingers.

These were his first coherent thoughts as he lurched back into the world. His eyes were swollen shut, the aftereffect of a brief bout of pink eye. The floorboards scratched the soles of his feet as he stood, stumbling towards the small mirror above his dresser. He rubbed the crust from his eyelids, straining to see.

When the haze cleared, he noticed all the usual morning things – the fat mole on his chin, the awkward flip of his sandy bangs. The lackluster pallor of his grimace, and the bare, freckled edge of his jaw. The usual uncertainty, which seemed to characterize his every movement.

Sunlight had begun to drift in, and the shower had begun gushing downstairs when he finally turned away. It wasn’t that he hated what he was seeing; it was just that, every morning, it never failed to strike him as unusual. He felt like a stranger in his own body, a skeleton owning a set of second skin. His bones didn’t quite belong, and his head ached in protest to his silent words.

“Gideon!” It was his grandfather, standing below the trapdoor. He was likely in the same position as he was every morning – hands curved into half-fists, bucket hat shadowing his puckered features. “It’s eight o’clock!”

He dragged one last unblinking look across the mirror before turning away. Silently, he shook his fingers through his hair. He undressed and redressed, buttoning the collar of his polo up to his chin. His denim jacket rested solidly across one shoulder, a dead weight in the Louisiana heat.

Keane was waiting in the kitchen. His face was tilted towards the morning newspaper, hands fiddling with his spoon. Creases cut jagged lines through his jeans, baseball cap facing backward on his head. “Hey,” he said, turning to his brother. “Ready to go?”

Gideon glanced purposefully at the kitchen table, were a cluster of empty cereal bowls and a drained milk jug were loitering. “I was going to get…”

“Breakfast?” Keane planted one sneakered foot in front of himself and scraped his chair back across the floor. He unfolded himself, lithe and quietly athletic. “It’s eight fifteen. I’m meeting Lumi in five minutes.”

Gideon shifted, dropping his jacket over the back of an empty chair. He was testing the boundaries – Keane’s boundaries. The unspoken code of conduct that involved his girlfriend.

But since he was teaching himself to become indifferent, he decided to stop thinking. “So?” Reaching out for the box of Cheerios was an almost painful endeavor. Gideon took a shallow breath through his nose, praying his palms would stop sweating. “I can walk to school.”

“I told Lumi I would meet her in five minutes,” Keane repeated impatiently. “Move!”

He lunged forward, knocking the box from Gideon’s hands. Cereal sprayed across the tile, an angry hail of wasted indifference. One meaty hand grabbed the denim jacket, and the other gestured towards the door. “Get in the car.”

The blood rushed to Gideon’s face. He was so tired of this. So, so tired. And so useless, he realized. His grandfather was gardening. His grandmother was sleeping away her sorrow. There was no one around to stop his brother, who looked inches away from snapping his neck. He tried to raise his arms in defense, but his limbs felt like rubber, tongue thick in his mouth.

Beneath his brother’s hulking shoulder, the kitchen clock was glowing. It was too late, and his breakfast was wasted for nothing.

“It’s eight twenty,” he said tersely. “You’ll be late anyways.”

Keane swore under his breath. He started for the door, grabbing Gideon’s arm on the way out. He hauled him through the foyer and down the front steps, mumbling profanities. “Get in the car,” he ordered, “or I’m going to kill you!”

Gideon stopped just short of the car door. His heart, still hammering from the near-fatal collision of his own frustration and his brother’s rage, lurched to a violent halt. He retracted his hand carefully. The stereo was screaming and his thoughts were whirling and he couldn’t bring himself to sit inside that car.

Kill you. Would he? Shared blood did not constitute shared affection, as he knew well. He feared his brother – at times he was almost certain that he hated him. But his hatred was a tiptoe, an intricate balance of a tightrope line. There was a chasm below him, and he wasn’t sure what he would find once he tumbled, arms flailing, to the bottom.

Did Keane hate him? Hate him enough to kill him?

“Gideon!” Keane pounded the steering wheel, making him jump. “Get in the car.”

He took one small step back. Then another. Two indefinable words, and his spine was crawling. He couldn’t bring himself to crack open the door, smell the varnish and crumpled wrappings, inhale the toxic fumes of rage. “I’m walking.”

Keane hissed. Angry, he reached over and slammed the passenger door shut. He jerked on the wheel, pressing his foot on the gas. As he zoomed past, he gestured through the window, lips jerking as his words filled the car. “Go to –”

Gideon turned before Keane finished his sentence. He had no interest in repeating this familiar, wearying pattern. Insult. Return. The morning had been a strange discovery of usual things. How he felt in his skin, how it somersaulted from being loose and unrecognizable to tight and suffocating, pressing against every notch in his windpipe.

His feet were moving. He realized this as the horizon expanded, widening beyond the curvature of the slight hill. The outskirts of town was spread before him, as desolate as he remembered. And the car was going as slowly as it usually did; he could see the shine of the black paint, nosing along the dirt road. Keane was probably swearing, blasting his classic rock and thinking of Lumi. The girl he had managed to capture, an exotic force of nature that he, a mere mortal dreaming of immortality, did not deserve to have.

The clouds pressed down on his back as he walked. He was sweating through his polo, the denim jacket on his shoulders bearing along like a set of iron vices. His head was aching – caffeine deprivation, he thought. Or something else. Something much more serious.

That was perhaps the only thing he and Keane had in common. Not the hair, or the eyes, or the sloping freckled cheekbones. It was merely this: that they were both addicted to something.

Most people thought breaking free was easy. Those were the people who had never been addicted. Who had never been encircled by chains, clawed down by their own desperation. Those were the people who lived along the dusty roads in town, piddling idle, useless existences.

Gideon knew. Keane knew. Addiction was insufferable. It was the sun in the sky and the darkness of night, a cacophony of pleasure and terrible pain. A cocktail of sugar and salt, one that left his head tilted and his brain sloshing about in his ears.

It made him hate his own skin. Addiction was the face that stared him down from the mirror, smiling slyly, fingernails extended. It could rip and pierce and drag away whatever it pleased.

And this time, it was going straight for his soul.

***

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