I only contemplated suicide for fifteen minutes.

Okay, an hour tops.

I’m not sure if that hour was better or worse than the full ten minutes I spent clutching the door frame to my brother’s room with debilitating laughter.

I tend to find odd things funny. Or, as Adrian would say, I tend to find serious-as-shit things funny. Like the autopsy in Stephen King’s The Body. Hysterical!

So, imagine my intense sense of irony when I opened Neil’s door to find him in bed—naked—with another naked someone on top of him. This wasn’t the cause for alarm; Neil, in his senior year in high school, frequently brought home various girlfriends to sleep with, rarely introducing them to the family, and when he did it was with arrogant chagrin; in other words, he only let us know there was a girl in the house when we caught them in…well…a very deep embrace.

This time, it didn’t feel any different—well, maybe the fact that they were being quieter than usual about it was a bit weird, but I figured the reason was that Neil had finally snagged a virgin. Then I realized if that were true they’d definitely not be quiet, so I peeked my head back in again. Everything seemed normal (other than the fact I was currently spying on my little brother having sex, that is).

Neil’s room was pretty bare. He had blue walls (from when it was his nursery room), a desk (void of paper, pens, trophies), a black swivel chair, a bed, and a nightstand with a radio/alarm clock on it. I’d never heard the radio turned on, either, but I think that might be due to the horrible reception we got in my house. Everything was…pristine. It made me feel empty just to look at it.

It still felt like…like something was new. I wanted to call Adrian and ask him if he’d noticed anything up with Neil lately—they were friends, hung out a lot. I didn’t mind. I had full intentions of marrying Adrian once our careers were on track (or his career, anyway; because I skipped out on college, my big ambition was to work in the record store until Adrian and I popped out our first kid) and having my husband and my brother close was just icing on the cake that would be my big, happy family. I wanted that life, picket fence and all, though my dyed, fire-engine red hair and uneven pigtails (one on the top left of my head, one on the bottom right) would give you a completely different impression.

Everything might’ve been fine. Everything might’ve worked out—not in the happy family sort of way; no, that picture was ripped to pieces the moment it struck me that I needed to ask Neil a question and trudged up the stairs. Or perhaps the dream became just that, a dream, an illusion, the day, the hour I introduced them. But if they’d had it their way…if they let me down easily, gradually…

I let out a sigh—the involuntary kind that escaped me whenever I was feeling exasperated, worried, or bored—and two bodies froze, two heads turned to look at me for the first time, standing in the doorway. I looked at Neil, his blue eyes horrified, no longer cocky. I looked at Adrian, his beautiful middle eastern skin glowing even in the dim light of Neil’s room, just looking sad.

“What ith thith?” I screeched, my lisp making my speech almost incomprehensible, but I could hardly care.

“Lynne—” Adrian choked.

“Don’t tell Dad!” Neil wailed.

And I laughed. I had thought my own would-be husband was a woman. My own would-be husband was sleeping with my brother. I thought about all the times they hung out alone, going down to the basement to do “guy stuff” and laughed harder, honestly amused. It was only after my guffaws died down that I felt the wetness on my cheeks.

“Why?” I asked, then realized this wasn’t the right question. “How? Er—When?”

Adrian gathered Neil’s drab gray comforter around his waist and stood up, coming towards me. I shirked back, stumbled.

“Lynne, honey. I know… We didn’t want it to be this way. We wanted to wait. To tell you when Neil was ready.”

I loved his voice. I loved his voice when he told me that he loved me, I loved his voice when he sang in the shower, hell, I loved his voice when he told me I was burning the pancakes. I hated this voice. “Get away from me!” I snapped, crawling backwards on all four limbs, belly up. “You jerk! How could you do thith?” My speech impediment acted up when I was agitated—on top of my “s” being a “th” sound, my “how”s sounded like “hao”s. I spoke like a deaf person, and I hated my voice, too.

“We need to talk about this!” he yelled at me, still clutching the comforter around his dark, lean body. I loved that body. I was still crabwalking on the floor, kept slipping on our deep red, plush carpet and bruising my elbows in my rush to get to the door. I saw a picture of Adrian and I on the wall, smiling lovingly at one another—and something in me cracked.

“Why didn’t you jutht end it? Why’d you lead me on, Adrian? I had planth! Did you think I’d jutht thacrifithe my dreamth so you could be little gay fuck buddieth with my little brother?” I wasn’t a homophobe, and I wasn’t a bigot, not like my father. I had no issues with sexual preferences at all, in fact, it just—this. This was different. This was my life.

Adrian stopped walking after me, his black eyes sorrowful and his dark eyebrows ashamed. “I had to be near him. It was the only way of being near him.”

“Tho you uthed me thith whole time?” I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to understand it. It didn’t register as anything but bad, negative, wrong. Error. Malfunction. Shut down.

“No!” he cried. “No, of course not, honey. I loved you! I still love you. Just not,” he looked down at the rest of my body, “you.”

“Don’t call me honey,” I growled, narrowing my eyes. “And thtay away from my brother!”

“But Lynne—” said Neil breathlessly, coming up behind Adrian fully clothed. “I love him.”

“You’re underage,” I snapped, climbing to my feet. “And you don’t know what you’re thaying.”

“But Lynne,” cried Neil, always one for dramatics. He grasped my shoulders and I tried not to flinch. His blue eyes seemed—I don’t know—old. Like I was the stupid one here, like I had done something wrong. “I do know. I do.”

I felt that thing—the thing that had cracked out of place—reattach itself in my mind. I sighed. My lip quivered. I cried. I even allowed Adrian to hold me—I still loved him, after all. My body still recalled the perfect cuddling place on his smooth, broad chest, and I instinctually put my head there, relaxed my shoulders, and sobbed. After I’d quieted down, Adrian pulled me from his chest and looked at me with determined eyes.

“You don’t have to leave,” he said. “We’ll go.”

I snarled at this. “There ith no way in hell I’m letting you go anywhere with Neil. And anyway, you don’t have anywhere to go.”

“We’ll stay here then. We’ll all stay. You just have to promise us you won’t let anything on to your father.” Neil is nodding vigorously behind Adrian’s shoulder, standing too close for comfort—but I see it’s the same he’s always stood, I just never…never thought…

“I’m not going to thtay. But—” I looked into Neil’s pleading eyes and realized I couldn’t deny him anything. Even if he had ruined my life. “I won’t tell. I can’t tell.”

Apart from the fact that my father would murder him if he found out—his only son, gay?—I had this inexplicable need for Neil to be happy. Adrian, too, I realized, turning to gaze up at his beautiful bronze face and wanting to trace his cheekbones with my fingernail. And if he couldn’t be happy with me, then…who was I to stop him? I’d curse my logic later and wish I’d chewed his scrawny ass out more but at that moment…I was spent. Angry, but spent.

--

“This is Cricket.”

“Cricket, it Lynne.” It was almost impossible for me to say “it’s.” My eye twitched every time I tried, and so I trained myself to stop, no matter how stupid leaving off the “is” sounded in normal conversation.

“Lynne! I’d recognize that voice anywhere!” Cricket’s voice was high and chirpy—I assumed that’s how she got her name. “And to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“No pleathure,” I deadpanned. My show of emotion the night before—my yelling, my screaming, my crying—I had never done that before in my life. Never.“I need to athk you a huge favor.” Hooge. I said hooge.

I could hear her eyes widen, feel her heartbeat quicken. She, too, was one for dramatics. “What’s wrong? What happened? Sure, I’ll do anything, just tell me what!”

“I’ll tell you later what happened, I jutht need a plathe to crath for a while,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t insist on details.

“Family troubles. I got your back, babe. I’ll leave right now, be there in forty-five. Pack your shit.”

She hung up the phone. I sighed, picked up the duffel bag full of stuff I’d packed last night. I always tried to be productive—I couldn’t sleep, so I packed my clothes. I called Cricket at nine, as soon as I’d showered, done my hair and makeup, and tried to desensitize. The meditation worked until I remembered Adrian was the one who taught me.

My and Adrian’s room was clean, nearly as bare as Neil’s, but not so dark. Everything was whitewashed, from my walls to my dresser. It wasn’t that I was organized—even my night in here alone made clothes appear on the floor and drawers hang open over night—it was Adrian. He was the neat freak. He was the planner, the organizer. I had the future and he had the present. Now I had nothing and he was lying in the same bed as my brother two doors down. I sighed, ran my tongue across the whitening strip dissolving in my mouth, and dragged my overstuffed duffel bag to the front door.

Thirty minutes to kill, I thought.

I curled up on my father’s armchair like a cat, as was my tendency. I suppose it made me feel safe. After fishing underneath me for the remote, I turned on the news and did not react to the thirty souls that had died in an office fire down the road, though I read the flashing red headline five times over. I was too busy weighing the very few pros and many cons of my continuing to exist, and wondered how long the requisite roadblock on 5th would detain Cricket.

--

A/N: This just sort of ... came to me. I'm all finished plotting out Love Ya, Unc, so this won't affect that, I just really wanted to write a not-neurotic, original chick-lit story that doesn't involve high school drama (not that it won't contain other kinds, of course). So. Here we are. :)

Please let me know what you think. I'd offer you cookies, but I ran out; enlisting people for the dark side takes a lot of cookies, you know. Reviews are almost as scrummy, though!

Julia.