Electric Blue Eyes.

Prologue.

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I was 10 years old when Brayden was murdered.

The day is a vividly clear picture in my usually blurry, dream filled head. The bright green outside of the front door of our house pulled wide open, not matching the white and gold interior decorating of the inside. The vase that usually sat on the gold decor table next to the door lay on the floor, shattered. The flowers spilled there, dying even quicker than their usual slow draining death, helpless, as the water trickled in a long narrow line down the hallway, ending at my feet where I stood- motionless. Dressed in a pair of pajamas, my slippers material soaking up the water at my feet but I didn’t notice. I only stared at the men in uniforms who were trying to hold my mother up who seemed to lose all feeling in her legs as her body sank to the floor in front of me.

The picture so clear. The world so silent.

I didn’t hear a thing after the crash of the vase. None of the sirens that brought all of our neighbors running from their houses. None of the hushed voices as they all watched the scene unfold in front of them. Not the voices of the police as they ushered me from the room and into our den. Not the shrill phone ringing endlessly over and over. Not the cries of agony from my mother or the panicked outrage from my father.

Not even my own breathing.

In fact, I don’t remember hearing anything until the following week after my brothers funeral. My world had remained silent.

The week was a blur. One thing molding into the next to a point where I couldn’t tell which day was which and what happened when. Nothing like that clear picture of our front door. Solid, still, as clear and bright as a water color painting. Where the days that followed were like a rain ruined portrait. The colors no longer in perfect lines, displaying a clear picture. But now, all the colors formed one giant blur of confusion.

I remember the funeral, vaguely. Brayden had only been 16 when he died, the age bringing everyone from his school, whether they were his friends or not, to the huge church that sat at the edge of town. Hundreds of people, most who didn’t even know him sat there around us as if they had the right to. I remember looking around in disbelief at the people who dared show up there. The people who hated him. Tormented him. The people who ultimately destroyed him.

But my emotions couldn’t even turn into any form of anger. Everything was just black. Just like Brayden had been in the end.

I hadn’t understood it all at the time but looking back, thinking about what he used to tell me all over again.. The picture became so much clearer. I began to understand, see things differently than my 10 year old self did then.

The little details that started to piece together. Brayden starting to dress all in black. The day he came home, his light brown hair cut in uneven pieces and dyed the blackest black, making our mother scream and me watch in fascination as she yelled at him but he just stood there with a grin on his face, loving his new hair style. Looking the proudest I’d ever seen him.

Then there was the way he always dreaded going to school, coming home to tell me how they didn’t accept him there at his fancy private school. Who he was. Who he wanted to be. I didn’t really understand it but I knew it was what made him rebel even more. The black clothes shifted and became more flaunting. He traded in the band t-shirts for mesh, the straight leg levis for extra baggy black jeans with dozens of zippers and pockets in them. His bright green eyes no longer visible under the heavy layer of black eyeliner, his usually tan skin looking unbelievably bright white against the contrast of his appearance.

Little memories. The constant war between him and my parents. And then him coming in my room and laying with me on the floor on my bean bags as we stared up at the glow in the dark stars that littered my ceiling he had put there my birthday before, talking about the place he discovered. In the city. Filled with people just like him. People who understood him. But I couldn’t tell mom and dad, no. They thought he was at his friends houses every weekend.

Friends? He would say bitterly and laugh. What friends? All my “friends” turned there backs on me at the first sign of finding out who I was. They’ll never turn on me though, they never will. They’re just like me. It’s like a whole other world there, Tiny. They have their own separate world.

He always talked about them. The people from the city. The people from the place he went when he was there. Never really telling me who they were.

It went on for months. But then he started coming home less and less. He stopped going to school. And on the rare occasion that he did come home, it just started a war between him and my parents. He didn’t fit into their perfect world anymore. My mother with her pearls, my father in his suit. My brother with his piercing’s.

“You have to be who you want be, Tiny.” he’d always tell me, calling me by the nickname he‘d came up with from looking pint size next to his 6’4’’ frame. “You become the great person you’re destined to be. Promise me.”

That’s what he had repeated to me the last time I seen him. Before he grabbed his book bag he had filled with his clothes and jumped out my window.

One week before the cops knocked on the door. One week before they whispered the words I last heard before the world went deaf to my ears. “We found your son, Mrs. Thomas. We found the necklace you told us about and the tattoos were the same but… he was… the body was beaten pretty bad, Ma’am, we need you to come down and give a positive ID.”

It wasn’t until I returned to school that I found out what really happened to him. Not the “He got into a fight an it turned serious…” that my mother had told me. No, the kids at school hadn’t held back at all. He was beat, brutally. By more than one person with hands and pipes and someone even said knifes were involved… but they didn’t know who had done it. They didn’t even have an idea.

Gang related. And they left it at that.

Brayden, in a gang? The thought was ludicrous. But people accepted it because there was no other reason.

And now 10 years later, they still didn’t even have one lead. In their eyes, he was just another runaway who got into some trouble. The only reason the case had even been kept going because he had been a “Rich boy from the East side.” I was told. Where other runaway found dead cases were dropped even before they were picked up.

My parents had faded away. They barely talked and when they did it was lifeless. My father went to work, came home, worked some more and went to sleep, only to repeat the same thing all over again. While my mother busied herself with anything and everything, living in fear that one moment of an unoccupied mind would have her thinking of the past.

Thinking of Brayden.

And I was here, 19 years old. Finally finished with my first year in college. As quiet as them, only for different reasons. When Brayden died he took a part of me with him and since then I felt like there was a missing piece. I always assumed it was just him. He was my missing piece.

Until the other night changed everything I ever thought.

Taking the bus home from my final class of the year back to my apartment on the east side was a routine thing I‘d done hundreds of times before. Only that night a road was closed, causing the bus to detour, taking a route through the south side, deep into the city where I had never been before, never dreamed of going. And that’s when I seen him, while the bus was at a stop light. Leaning back against the brick wall of a building, a cigarette in his hand as he brought it slowly to his mouth. His wore a black long sleeve t-shirt under a short sleeve black one. A pair of black work boots under a pair of black baggy jeans. His hair cut short and bright bleached blonde, pulled into tiny spikes.

I was captivated and I didn’t even know why.

And then he looked up.

His eyes, shining bright silver even with the dark eyeliner surrounding them, met mine. Locking there and for a full second I couldn’t breathe.

My heart raced as my mind screamed that I knew those eyes.

And then the bus shifted and started moving and I turned in my seat to watch him as we pulled away. Watching him push himself off the wall with a foot and stare at the bus as it pulled away, dropping his cigarette to the ground as if his hand went limp and then as if waking up, sticking his hands in his pockets and disappearing behind a corner.

And the blur of my past started to space out and become clear.

Me, sitting at my brothers funeral. Surrounded by black. All black. Motionless. And then looking up, over to the door, to a shadow that moved against it and then a pair of silver eyes meeting mine. He wasn’t dressed like someone from where we lived. He wasn’t dressed like anyone else there. He was dressed just like Brayden. He wasn’t sitting, he was just standing in the dark corner as if not wanting to be seen. But I saw him. I saw him see me, his eyes meeting mine before looking away, up at Brayden’s closed casket and then disappearing out the side door of the church where he had been standing in the shadows.

A memory that had faded in with the rest of the blur. A memory I had forgotten. But I had seen him again. I seen a look of acknowledgement in his eyes as he saw me on the bus. And I suddenly felt the part of me that felt like it had been missing. The missing piece to a puzzle I didn’t know I had been trying to solve in my head. He knew what happened to Brayden.

All this time the missing part of me was the need to find out just what happened to my brother.

And he knew.