“I know you’re not hungry,” Rowan replied. “But I’m gonna make you somethin’ anyway. And you can eat it or not. But it’ll be there. And you’ll have something to draw strength from. So tomorrow you can make calls. So you can do whatever you need to do.”
Tomorrow.
Such a benign word. An everyday concept. There was always a tomorrow, wasn’t there?
But now there wasn’t. There wasn’t a tomorrow. Because my brother was lying on a cold slab in a morgue somewhere.
“There’s a word for orphan,” I whispered. “For widow. But there’s no word for this. There’s no label to give the woman who lost her brother. But he’s not just my brother—”
My voice broke, agony spearing through every cell in my body. Rowan’s presence, his touch, usually so strong and reassuring, did nothing now.
“I didn’t feel anything,” I choked out. “Everyone says that twins have this connection. And we have that—” I stopped speaking abruptly, realizing I could not talk about my brother in the present tense anymore. Because he wasn’t alive. “What we had,” I corrected, sucking in a breath that felt like poison, creeping along my insides. Mixing with all the poison that was already in there.
“What we had was the twin thing,” I continued. “I liked a boy at school. I thought he liked me back. He was nice. His friends weren’t. And when they found out that I liked him, they told me that I was a freak and to leave their friend alone.” I shook my head. “Boys learn to be cruel to women at a young age.” I stared into his pale cerulean eyes. “Some boys, at least.” I sucked in an unsteady breath. “I locked myself in the girl’s bathroom, thinking it was the worst day of my life and that I would die of shame because there was no way I could leave that bathroom.”
I smiled sadly, nostalgic for that teenage naïveté when you truly believed the worst day of your life could be facilitated by boys who still washed their faces with Proactiv.
“Ansel found me in that bathroom,” I sighed. “We didn’t have phones. Everyone else did back then, but not us. Our mother wouldn’t dream of spending that much on us. And all of the money we earned from our part-time jobs went to food, bills and clothes.”
Rowan’s features, which had been soft yet pained, now hardened, his nostrils flaring. “Your mother is really fuckin’ lucky I’ve got a code about committing violence against women.”
“Yeah, well, cockroaches can’t die anyway,” I smiled sadly. “She’ll survive the nuclear apocalypse." I pushed away thoughts of my mother, instead focusing on my brother’s teenage face in that bathroom all those years ago.
He’d been pissed off. Murderous in a different way than Rowan was because Ansel was just a boy then, but he was feeling a man’s rage because it came from a place of love.
“He sat there with me,” I whispered. “Redid my makeup for me. At least he tried to. He cursed himself for ‘not being that kind of gay.’” I choked out a laugh that sounded empty and cold. “Then he linked my arm with his and walked me up to that group of boys.”
Afraid and mortified, I just wanted to go home, and for the first time I could recall, our house actually felt like some kind of safe haven. But Ansel wasn’t going to let me slink off and let them win. And though I was still upset, I wasn’t scared. Not with my brother by my side.
“He told them off. All of them.” A grin tugged at my lips. “He threatened to tell the school which of the jocks were much more interested in staring at his teammate’s junk than washing his own. Of course, he’d never actually out someone, but the threat was enough.”
I thought about my brother, being unapologetically himself at that school. It was in a small town in Missouri, where being gay was dangerous in and of itself. But Ansel didn’t hide himself, who he was. Not for a moment.
“The last time he overdosed, I felt it,” I said back in the present. “I felt cold. I felt lost. And I knew, I just knew that something had happened to him.”
That day was branded into my brain. The way I’d known that something had happened to my brother. I’d dropped everything and driven an hour back to the house he was living in at the time.
“I had Narcan because even though I didn’t want to believe my sweet, strong, unyielding brother had demons inside of him that I couldn’t wrench out, I knew that forcing myself to be ignorant could be the reason he died. So, he didn’t die. Not that day, at least.”
I didn’t sleep for a month after that, every time I closed my eyes, I saw my brother, lifeless, covered in vomit, a needle still sticking out of his arm.