First thing’s first: This is not an incest story. Go away if that’s what you wanted. Just thought you should know.

Julian kicks the ball to me, laughing and smiling, the sun shining through his dark brown hair. I trap it with my feet, then pass it back to him. It’s a Saturday. Julian likes to play soccer on Saturdays. He calls it Brotherly Bonding Time, and he thinks I need to get out more. “You’re so introverted, Ryan,” he tells me. “You need to get more friends than Sara Moscovitz.”

I shake my head and grin. “Sara and you are the only friends I need.”

He smiles, too. “That’s true, I guess. But I’m your brother, Ry. Brothers don’t count as friends.”

I pretend to be insulted. “They do too. Am I or am I not your best friend?”

Julian thinks. “Yeah. I guess you kind of are.” He shoots the ball between two trees and shouts, “Goal!”

I laugh as I run to retrieve it. When I come back, Julian is sitting on the ground, picking at the grass, his hazel eyes watching some boys on the other side of the field as they play baseball. I sit down beside him, hugging the ball to my chest, and say, “Whatcha looking at?”

He shrugs, looking a little bit startled. “No one. Nothing.”

“You know those guys?” I press, nodding my head at the baseball players.

Julian shrugs again, and I think for a moment that he’s blushing. Then I figure the redness in his cheeks is simply from playing soccer in the sun for two hours. “Some of them.”

“Who?” I ask, interested. Julian rarely tells me who he hangs out with anymore. He used to be friends with Matt Moscovitz, Sara’s brother, but I suppose they grew apart or something. I see him at lunchtime with lots of different people, so I can never tell who’s really his friend, and who is just an acquaintance.

Julian shrugs for a third time in the conversation. This indecision makes me curious; it’s almost as though Julian is hiding something. “Aaron Richter. Jack Lewis.”

I sigh. Julian looks at me, his facial expression silently asking me what’s bothering me. I shake my head. It’s not worth saying it out loud, just in case I’m wrong. But there seems to be something in his voice as he says Jack’s name that is different than the way he’d said Aaron’s. “They all play well,” I offer instead of an explanation.

Julian nods. “I s’pose so.”

“So, um… Any girls ask you to the Sadie Hawkins?” I ask.

“Yeah. A couple.”

“And you don’t want to go with any of them?” I am incredulous. If a girl asked me to Sadie’s, I’d say yes right away.

Julian laughs, stealing the ball from me and tossing it from hand to hand. “Not all of us are desperate like you. Ah,” he reminisces. “Sixteen. So naïve.”

“Oh, please,” I say. “You’re only seventeen.”

“Eighteen in two weeks,” he reminds me, like I don’t know that.

“So are you waiting for someone special to ask you, or… or do you just not want to go with anyone?” I try.

Julian’s eyes stare into my identically hazel ones. “If I wanted to go with anyone, they probably wouldn’t be the type to ask me, anyhow.”

“So,” I say, “I see that you gave up on that whole ‘cryptic’ thing you used to do.”

Julian chuckles, ruffling my chocolate brown hair—the same color as his. “You’re so weird, Ry. Look, it’s not that I… it’s just… you know?”

“Yep. I know. It’s really a good thing you stopped that ol’ coded language.”

“Fine, look. It’s just…”

“It’s okay, Jules,” I say softly. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about whatever it is, and I figure I should just let him be. For now. My curiosity can, as of now, accept the fact that my brother wants to be left alone. “It doesn’t matter.”

Julian’s shoulders automatically relax, and he lies back on the grass, staring up at that sky. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” I lie down next to him. “How’s things?”

“How are things,” he corrects me, tossing grass in my face.

I sputter. “Sorry. How are things?”

He laughs. “Things are fine.”

“Your classes okay?”

“Sure. Hey, Ry?”

“Yeah?”

“No one’s bothering you or anything, are they?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason. Just figured I should be watching out for you, that’s all.”

I smile to myself. “Thanks.”

“It’s my job.”

“I know.”

We lie there in silence for a long time. Finally, Julian jumps up and says, “We should get home. It’s almost four.”

“Okay,” I say, scrambling to catch up to him.

Everyone says I look just like him. I get most of that—we have the same hair, the same eyes, the same general face shape and body build. But he has this confidence radiating from him, this vibe that shows everyone that he’s not scared of them. That he’s better than being cool. He and his friends aren’t quite the popular crowd, but they’re close enough that everyone pretty much respects them.

See, me? I hang out with Sara Moscovitz. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sara Moscovitz—she’s small, extroverted, intelligent, and beautiful. She speaks Hebrew like she’s been doing it her whole life—which, I suppose, she has—and she corrects my English like it’s her job. Everyone fancies her and Julian a couple. They’re perfect, people say.

I don’t agree. You can’t have so much beauty, intelligence, and confidence in one couple. It wouldn’t work. I’m all for people having things in common, but there’s gotta be a balance somewhere. Well, they have the fact that he plays soccer and she hates sports, and that she loves reading whereas he’d rather watch a movie. And he lives for chocolate ice cream, but Sara can’t stand it. And there are more, too. They have a lot in common, but they also have their differences. So I guess they are kind of perfect for each other. But that doesn’t mean I like it.

Okay, so maybe I’m kind of in love with Sara.

But Jesus, don’t tell Julian. He’d laugh, saying that I was only in love with her because she was the only girl I’d ever said three words to. But I know it’s not that. It’s different than that. I know I love her.

But she doesn’t. Not that it matters or anything.

When we get home, Julian goes to shower, and I sneak into his room and sit on the floor facing the mirrored closet doors. Julian has a much better room than I do. For one thing, it’s bigger, and has the window seat and the mirrored closets. Aside from that, though, he just seems to be able to keep it clean, whereas I can’t see my own floor sometimes. I like to go into his room, when all the lights are off and no one knows where I am, and just sit there, and wonder what it would be like to be Julian.

He doesn’t have any problems, does he? I mean, everyone just likes him and they don’t even know why. It’s just who he is; he can’t help it—they can’t help it.

He comes out of the shower a few minutes later in nothing but boxers, drying his hair with a towel. He sees me on his floor and nods at me. This isn’t the first time he’s found me here. He puts pajamas on even though it’s barely five o’clock and sits on the edge of his bed, meeting my eyes in our reflections. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I reply.

“Whatcha doing?”

I shrug. “Just thinking.”

He nods as though he understands, though I know he can’t. “You should take Sara Moscovitz to that dance,” he says suddenly.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“It’s a Sadie Hawkins, Jules. Girls ask the guys? Remember the Relient K song?”

Julian laughs. Of course he remembers; it was all the rage in 2001. “Yeah, I know. But you’ve been pining over her for years. You should get her to ask you.”

“I have not been pining.”

“Yes, Ryan, you have,” he says, reaching down to ruffle my hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug. “I figured you’d laugh at me.”

Julian frowns. “Maybe I would, if I thought talking to other girls would make you love them. But it won’t. You and Sara are like… I don’t know… pick something that fits together real well—like peanut butter and jelly. Macaroni and cheese. You know?”

“I guess,” I respond. “Hey, Jules?”

“Yeah?”

“How come you don’t go on dates and stuff? I bet you get asked a lot.”

I watch his reflection shrug. “I don’t like the whole dating scene. I guess I like to keep things under control. Going out in public with someone seems like… I don’t know… stepping onto a battlefield with a red arrow painted on your ass that says ‘shoot me.’ It’s like, a real big opening for someone to come and ruin everything.”

I have no idea what he means. “I have no idea what you mean,” I tell him.

He laughs. “It’s okay, Ry. I don’t know what I mean half the time.”

We sit there in silence for awhile, just staring at each other in the mirror. It’s almost creepy how much I look like him; if I wasn’t two years younger, we might have been twins. But I am two years younger, if only one grade below, and we are not twins. Simply brothers. And real brothers don’t keep secrets from each other, do they? I guess they do. They have to. If someone knows all your secrets, then you don’t have any, do you? And everyone needs a secret. It’s like having a heart. You need a heart to keep living. Same thing with a secret.

But now, isn’t it true that Julian knows all of my secrets? Isn’t it true that Julian knows everything there is to know about me? He finally knows my last secret—he finally knows about Sara. Isn’t there anything else I have that’s just mine?

And then I realize it, as I’m staring into the reflection of my brother’s hazel eyes. I realize that the reason I’m so freaked out about him knowing everything is because deep down, I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him not to break me. We’re brothers, maybe. But that doesn’t make a broken heart from Julian any less bad than a broken heart from a girl. A heart can be broken in many ways. And even though he’s never done anything but love me my entire life, I know there’s something he’s hiding from me. Something he feels like he can’t trust me with. And if he can’t trust me, how am I supposed to trust him? He said it himself: We’re brothers, best friends.

What is so important about his stupid secret?

“Boys!” our mother calls up the stairs. “Dinner!”

Julian hops up immediately, grinning. When he reaches the door, he turns to look back over his shoulder, and his smile drops a little bit. “You coming, Ry?”

“Yeah,” I hear myself say. “I’m coming.”

OoOoO

The thing about school sports is that everyone always goes to games. Every sport. Swim meets, water polo, football, basketball, baseball, soccer. Games are where all the drama happens, here. It’s like, if you don’t go to games, you miss out on like, half of that day’s gossip.

So I’m sitting with Sara in the stands of the baseball field, while Julian sits with his whores Katie and Rachel up closer to the dugout. Sara turns to me and says, “Ugh, I hate dances. Dances are so pretentious.”

“Right, pretentious,” I repeat dully.

“I mean, what’s so special about a stupid Sadie Hawkins? I mean, it’s like, can’t a girl ask a guy to a normal dance?”

“You bet, Sara,” I reply.

“And also, it’s like, you have to ask someone, or you can’t go. I mean, I suppose you could still go, but… hey, what about gay guys? Are they excluded from Sadie’s just because they don’t want to go with a girl?”

“I have no idea,” I tell her.

“I don’t want to go,” she says firmly.

My heart sinks. “Yep,” I agree. “Me either. Besides, it’s not like any girls would ask me, anyways.”

She looks at me for the first time since the beginning of this conversation. “Plenty of girls would ask you, Ryan.”

I raise my eyebrows. “What girls?”

“Katie and Rachel would,” she says.

“Only because Julian’s already turned them down,” I point out. “They both just see me as replacement Julian, and you know it.”

“Ella Gardiner would,” Sara says, an edge to her voice. Sara has never liked Ella Gardiner. I am still not sure why.

“I don’t want to go with Ella Gardiner.” I want to go with you.

“Hmph,” Sara sniffs. “Too bad for her, then. You know, we should just go.”

“What?”

“To Sadie’s. We should go to Sadie’s.”

I blink. “What?” I repeat.

Sara rolls her eyes. “We should just go to the Sadie Hawkins dance because we’re not lame.”

I feel as though I am missing something. “Sara…”

“Oh, goddammit. I can’t talk to you right now. Don’t talk to me right now.”

Girls are soweird. “Sara?” I say tentatively, about ten minutes later, after Julian’s friend-or-acquaintance-or-something, Jack Lewis, hits a home run.

“What?”

“I’m so confused.”

She laughs. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m not good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“Asking people out.”

It is as if I have found a piece of a puzzle under the box lid—finally, something I’d not known the existence of makes sense. “Just try again,” I tell her, biting my lip lightly. “Practice makes perfect, and all.”

She blushes, and gives me this shy sort of smile that I have never before seen on her face. “Do you, um, want to come to Sadie’s with me?”

“Yes,” I say, maybe a little too quickly. But she doesn’t seem to mind. She just smiles a little more. I continue to bite my lip.

“Cool.” She doesn’t say anything else, which is, I guess, a little unlike her, but I notice that she moves closer to me where we sit on the bleachers.

I smile. Cool indeed.

OoOoO

“Did you see him?” Julian asks us for the eighty-seventh time. “I mean, he was like, bam, and then he was like, pshheww!” A look of complete adoration steals over Julian’s features. “That was so cool. Wasn’t that cool?”

Sara and I exchange glances. You’d think he’d never seen someone hit a homerun before. “Yeah, Julian,” I say for the eighty-seventh time, “it was very cool.”

Julian’s ecstatic smile fades. “What’s wrong, Ryan?” I can’t help but notice that his hazel eyes flicker toward Sara as he asks this.

“Nothing’s wrong, I just… I mean, first, you act like you barely know this guy, and here, like, a week later, you’re all obsessed with him.”

“I’m not obsessed with him,” Julian snaps.

Sara’s eyebrows shoot up. It looks as though she is just as surprised as I am at Julian’s anger. Julian doesn’t get angry—ever. “Whatever,” Sara says, throwing her hands up. “You’re not obsessed with him. Anyway. Subject change. Um. Oh! Julian, Ryan and I are going to Sadie’s together.”

I feel a grin return to my face as one comes to Julian’s, too. “Really?” he says. “That’s great! Sadie’s is fun. I went my sophomore year, with Amicila Kwan. That was fun. Sluthole,” he recalls of his date, a fond tone coloring his voice.

Sara and I laugh. “Was she really?” I ask.

“A sluthole? Yeah. Yeah, she was.”

We walk to Sara’s house and drop her off before continuing to ours in near-silence. Julian hums some song I’m sure I vaguely know, and I walk a half-step behind him. “Hey, Julian?”

“What?”

“Do you trust me?”

He turns around and blinks at me. “Of course,” he says curiously. “Why?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. I just feel like you… I don’t know.”

Julian gives me a soft smile and drapes his arm across my shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I ask in amazement. What did he have to apologize for? When had he ever been anything but perfect?

Julian’s teeth attack his bottom lip nervously as we turn up our front path. He releases me to open the door. “I promise I’ll tell you,” he says earnestly. “When I… you know.”

I blink. And something falls into place in the back of my mind. Another piece to the puzzle that is my older brother. We eat dinner with our parents, Julian happily explaining Jack’s homerun for the eighty-eighth time.

After dinner, I decide to take a shower. When I return to my room, Julian is sitting on my floor, which is surprisingly clean. “Did you just clean my room?” I ask him.

He smiles at me. “Yeah. You don’t mind, do you? It was just bothering me. You know how messes bother me.”

“Yeah,” I reply. “No, I know. I just—thanks.”

“No problem.”

I sit on my bed, and he joins me. “Julian,” I say plainly, “what is it that you’re not telling me?”

Julian’s face becomes downcast very suddenly, and I feel almost ashamed for being the one to cause this. “I don’t know,” he whispers. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs me off, sending me a frightened look. “I can’t… I can’t tell you.”

I bite my lip. “I thought you trusted me,” I say. “I thought you… I thought…” I thought a lot of things. I thought we were friends; I thought he loved me. But he can’t even tell me a thing. I don’t say any of this aloud, of course, because what kind of guy even cares? I don’t know. I wonder if I’m just weird, if I'm the only male in the world who actually cares about people. It’s hard to tell, because we never talk. I have never, in my life, had a discussion with another boy—or even a girl, for that matter—about how I was feeling. We don’t talk about feelings, boys. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have them.

And then I see that Julian is crying. I am alarmed. Julian has not ever cried in front of me. When he broke his leg in the fifth grade, I could hear him screaming through the wall that separated our bedrooms. But the moment I walked in, he stopped and wiped his face off, and asked me how school went. I didn’t think much of it at the time, though. It was just how it was. Yeah, Julian got hurt. But then he got over it. And he didn’t let anyone see him in his moment of weakness. “I…” he whispers. “I… I shouldn’t be like this. I n-need to be better than this.”

I gape at him and put my hand firmly back on his shoulder. “Julian,” I say, mystified, “you’re the best person I know. How are you supposed to be better?”

This apparently doesn’t help, because he just sobs harder. “I—I should be better,” he repeats.

“Julian,” I say desperately. “Tell me what’s wrong? Please, just tell me what’s wrong!”

His watering hazel eyes meet mine. “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why not?” I whisper shakily.

He doesn’t trust you. He doesn’t trust you. “Because you won’t look up to me anymore.”

“What?”

“You—you’ll hate me. And you can’t hate me, Ryan, you can’t! You always… you always thought I was so great. You always said I was perfect. And I tried to be perfect, because you loved it so much. When we were younger… you wanted to be just like me. I wanted to be your hero, Ry. I still do. And that’s why I can’t tell you. If I say it, I’m not perfect anymore. You won’t… you won’t love me anymore.”

“Julian,” I say quietly. “I don’t give a shit about your stupid complexes. I…” I don’t say things like this. I am never this honest. This is weird and almost mortifying, but this is the truth. “I’ll always love you,” I say. “I don’t care what you think is wrong with you. You’ll always be my hero.”

Julian dissolves in tears again, hugging me. “I knew that,” he whispers. “I knew that. I… I should have… Ryan, I…”

I pull away from him to open the window, letting the cool spring night air permeate the room. “Just say it,” I advise him.

“I… think I’m gay.”

The last piece of the puzzle falls directly into place. There it is, sitting in front of me. Maybe I should have known; maybe Julian really had been trying hard to keep it from me. But whatever the case, I know now, and he has finally told someone. “So are you dating Jack or just pining for him?” I ask snidely.

Julian wipes at his eyes, looking up like he can’t believe I’m not screaming and running away. Then it appears to register that I’m making fun of him. But he sighs, smiling and rolling his eyes. “Pining.”

“I see.” A pause. “You should ask him to Sadie’s,” I mock.

Julian laughs. “Girls ask the guys, Ry. Besides, I’m not going.”

“Well… whatever, then. Is he gay?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well, you should ask him.”

“Oh, yeah, ‘Hey, Jack, are you gay?’ When I come home with a black eye and a broken nose, I’ll know who to thank, Ryan.” Julian pauses. “You’re taking this rather coolly.”

I shrug. “I’m a rather cool person.”

Julian laughs again. “Yeah, but… I don’t know. Isn’t it weird? I thought you would think it was weird.”

“Jules, you forget that I’ve known you since I was born. I know that whatever you do, you’ll always be weird.”

“Oh, haha,” he says sarcastically, but he’s still grinning. “Everyone complains about their little brothers, but I never got that. I guess you’re one of the cool ones, huh?”

“Guess so.” A smile is on my face. I know it’s kind of dumb, but even after all that, it still feels good when he compliments me. I don’t know. I guess when the person you probably love the most out of everybody loves you the most out of everybody, too, you automatically feel good. Just like that. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to tell me.”

Julian ruffles my hair. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say. And I mean it.

OoOoO

Seven long weeks later, and not much has changed. Sara and I are doing this thing where we’re pretty much dating, but get all anal whenever anyone asks. Which pretty much means that Sara gets all anal whenever anyone asks. I don’t mind, though, because I knew going in that she was a psycho. So it’s cool.

Julian drags me to the next baseball game—Sara can’t come, because apparently she’s deemed her brother’s Hebrew school teacher incompetent, so she’s giving him Bar Mitzvah lessons instead—and we take a seat in the bleachers. “Have you ever even spoken to him?” I ask my brother when Jack is up at bat.

“Yeah, we’re… we’re actually pretty good friends now. It’s weird. It makes me nervous. I sound like a girl. I’m gonna shut up now.”

I laugh. “Well, whatever happens, you still have me. And Sara. I promise, if he hurts you, she will whup his ass. Better, she will whup his ass in Hebrew.”

Julian cracks a teensy smile. “Thanks.”

When the game is over, Julian insists that we stay, so he can congratulate Jack. Turns out, he needn’t have worried, because Jack came our way the second the coach was done giving the team their endgame pep talk. “Hey, Julian. Oh my god, is this your brother?”

I nod dumbly, wondering how anyone in the world could possibly think Jack is straight.

Jack chuckles. “He looks just like you.”

Julian laughs nervously. “Yeah, we get that a lot.”

“He’s dating Matt’s sister,” Jack observes. I love when people talk about me like I’m not there.

“Yep,” Julian confirms.

“Hey, listen, Julian…” Jack looks at his cleats. “I don’t mean this in like a… like, no offense, right? I was just, you know, wondering, like… are you gay?”

I burst out laughing. Neither one of the seniors pays me any mind. They’re too busy staring at each other. How typical, ugh. Julian bites his lip like he always does when he’s nervous. “What’s it to you?” he says, sounding almost dangerous. But if you looked underneath the danger, you could see the quivering little puppy dog just trying not to get hurt.

But Jack’s arrogant. I can already tell. He knows Julian wants him—it’s written all over Julian’s face, for one thing—and he’s just gonna mess around until Julian admits it. “Oh, I was just wondering,” Jack says innocently.

“Are you gay?” I counter, near-glaring at Jack.

He takes one look at me and bursts out laughing. “Oh my god, he’s precious. Someone, get me a fuckin’ lollipop, I want to give candy to this kid.”

I raise a single eyebrow. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? “I’m going to take that as a yes,” I mumble. “Come on, Jules, he’s a complete psycho.”

“I’m not a psycho,” Jack defends. “I’m just… I get awkward when I’m nervous.”

“He’s nervous? Oh, he’s nervous, then. Well, that’s just great, because that means he’s actually not an asshole, and so I’m not even allowed to hate him or anything, no matter how much I—shit, in public, really?” I cut myself off because now my brother’s kissing Jack.

I shake my head. Well, at least that worked out, even if Jack’s so weird I could sell him to the circus. The good part of this is that I know even if Jack ends up breaking Julian’s heart, I’ll still be here. Because that’s what brothers do. Maybe brothers have the power to break each other’s hearts, but they won’t do it. At least, I won’t. That’s what brotherhood does, sometimes. It makes you love each other. Just like that.

A/N: Oh, I like this one. I don’t know quite why. The brotherly love? The homosexuality? The Jewish girl? It’s all too lovely. I don’t know. What do YOU think? (I am TOTALLY NOT singing Seussical in my head.) Review?

Hahaha, I have three oneshots that start with “Just” now. This amuses me. Not sure why. Anyway :)o