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When the van left the parking lot, I didn't even bother to look. Justin was in there, smirking at me from behind the tinted windows as the other guys laughed and made jokes about overprotective sisters. The van beeped at me as it pulled out onto the road and I glared at it, hoping some semi would crash into it and kill all its passengers. At this point, it almost seemed like it was better if Justin could die now, rather than get more and more screwed up while hanging with those psychos. God. What the hell was wrong with him? I turned back around as soon as I was sure the van had gone and marched towards my dorm, about a two-minute walk away. Vanessa, my roommate, would probably be over at her boyfriend's place by now. If I had any luck, no one would want to come in today and see me glaring at the walls, tearing up little pieces of paper, wishing I was tearing at my brother's face instead. Maybe I was overprotective. So what?! If Justin wanted to go and mess up his life, it was fine by me. Mom and Dad, however, wouldn't take it nearly so well. I almost tripped over a jutting concrete block, I was so angry. I knew exactly what would happen if they ever found out. Mom would start crying and moan about how she should've been home more often when we were little. Dad wouldn't say anything. He'd just sit and concentrate on not screaming and hitting anyone. But then, later on, he would explode, in a fury of swearing and breaking whatever he could get his hands on, the stress of his dead-end job and asshole bosses just adding to the mix. Dad sure as hell didn't need anything else to make him miserable. Neither did Mom. And neither did I. I reached the corner of White Oak, the street that my dorm was on. But instead of turning right like always, I stopped. There wasn't any traffic today, considering it was Monday afternoon and everyone was either at class or studying for the upcoming finals. I could go anywhere, if I wanted to, and not get questioned. An idea struck faster than an abusive boyfriend after a keg, as my roommate was fond of saying. Looking around one last time, I turned left, towards Justin's dorm. It wasn't that far away, maybe five minutes, but it seemed like hours before I got there. If I could get him in trouble for something less….nasty, then maybe that would straighten him out. Mom and Dad would be pissed, yeah, but at least they wouldn't know what else he was doing. Justin was always getting high before class. Maybe I could report him for drug use, get his room searched. His roommate wouldn't be there; I saw him in the van with Justin. I entered the hallway of the co-ed dorm and headed up the stairs. His room was on the third floor, the first on the left. The way my footsteps echoed as my heels tapped the metal stairs was weird, like the sounds you hear in the background of some horror movie when the heroine is being chased by a psycho-killer…. I mentally slapped myself. Now was not the time to be thinking of some stupid slasher flick! I grabbed a strand of my hair and tugged, sharply. The pain immediately helped me focus my attention instead of daydreaming. I was probably going to be bald by the end of college. That might shock Dad out of his slump. Third floor. I opened the door and looked down the hall, but it was dead quiet. Most of the guys on this floor were computer engineerers, constantly studying, locked in their rooms every night trying to learn C++ to the minutest detail. How Justin ended up in this section of the building was beyond my understanding. Still, that made breaking into his room a lot easier than if he had been living in a hallway full of wannabe actors or English majors or something. It was like no one lived here, it was so quiet. And it smelled bad, too, like… I stopped breathing for a second as a memory, sharp as cyanide, flooded into my brain in a seemingly relentless flow of images. Green walls, a messy floor, bright light burning into closed eyelids, the buzzing of flies in my ears… And then it was gone. I forced the memory away like I did bad dreams right after I woke up and I stood there in the hallway, trying to breath again, getting over the intensity of the colors echoing in my brain. He was still doing it. I couldn't get past that. I had confronted him once in seventh grade and he had quit immediately. I had checked his room everyday, even followed him when he went outside to hike the forest trails behind our house in Puget Sound to make sure he had stopped. And he had. …But then he went to college and met the other boys with no overprotective sisters to scream at them, no one around to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. God. This was all such idiocy. I stopped in front of his door, painted this disgusting shade of jungle green to distinguish this floor as the boy's floor, and dug into my pockets for my credit card. In all reality, it had expired 6 months ago, but I kept it around for situations like this. Like my roommate had taught me, the doors of my college were so easy to open this way. I slid the credit card into the crack of the door and wiggled it a bit when it came to the bolt, sliding the plastic underneath the declivity of the metal and….I frowned, the concentration giving me a headache…I pushed the plastic towards the door while thrusting downwards….click! Looking around again to make sure no one had seen me, I turned the knob and entered Justin's room. The stench was enough to make me gag. The sweet, cloying scent of rotted meat seemed to flow down my throat like some sinister wine, spreading its filthy taste inside of me, clinging to me like boiling tar. Oh god. I knew this smell. At home, in seventh grade, in Justin's room…. "Come on, girl..." I murmured, getting ahold of myself long enough to shut the door behind me and step inside. The floor was covered with dirty clothes and old food containers. I had to look down constantly to make sure I wouldn't trip. Some small part of my brain was hoping that maybe the smell was just old food, but I doubted it. Rotted food didn't smell the same as rotten meat. There was a big difference in between the two; a difference I knew all too well. I wondered how many people on the floor had complained to Justin about the stench. It didn't matter, really. Even if they told the RA, nothing would happen. The RA was Justin's buddy; one of the guys in the van that smirked at me when they had pulled out of the parking lot. Pretty soon Justin would be throwing it out anyways; but I had to see it before he did. I had to know for certain, not just suspect and accuse without backup like I had been doing before. Wrinkling my forehead in disgust, I inhaled through my nostrils, trying not to gag. The smell was coming from the closet, probably buried in the back like the one I had found in seventh grade. As I carefully walked towards the closet door, the old saying, 'Follow your nose', echoed through my head moronically like some cereal commercial. Oh god, I was going to go insane if I had to stay in there much longer. How could Justin stand sleeping in his room? How could he not choke? Practically tripping, I grabbed the closet door and pulled it open. Justin had gotten one of the nicer dorm rooms, with a built-in closet big enough for most of his clothes. The bottom of it was covered in a fairly large pile of old socks and underwear. Wrinkling my nose, I pushed the clothing aside, trying to ignore the visible stains on the boxers. At the bottom of the pile, as I pushed the last sock out of the way, was a shoebox tied shut with twine. "Shit." I swore under my breath. With trembling hands, I picked the box up and walked over to the bed. Inhaling sharply, I pulled off the twine and lifted off the lid of the box. One of the kittens was already dead. From the looks of it, it had probably died a week ago from the cuts on its back. Justin had tried to carve his initials, the sick bastard. God, why didn't I tell anyone? This wasn't normal, wasn't right. The other kitten was almost dead. Its fur was white, but with all the blood it looked it was almost pink, like some Easter kitty decorated for the holiday. At first I thought Justin hadn't done anything to it, but then it looked up at me. With a strangled cry that sounded like a drowning man just getting his first gasp of air, I slammed down the lid and backed away from the bed, accidentally tripping over a tee-shirt and falling onto my butt on the floor. Oh god. What the hell was wrong with him? What the bloody hell?! I pulled myself up and ran to the door, pulling it open almost hard enough to force it off its hinges. The hallway air, even though it still smelled like rot, was the sweetest I had ever breathed. My clothes probably reeked of his room, like when I hung out at smoky bars, I smelled like cigarettes afterwards even though I don't smoke. I needed a shower. I had never so longed for a shower in my entire life. Home. I needed to go home. Maybe my roommate would be there. She'd know what to do. Sometimes it seemed like Vanessa knew everything. I raced down the stairs, more aware than ever of the echoes reverberating from my heavy footsteps. I tried not to look at all the graffiti scrawled on the walls with magic marker, because who knew how much of it was Justin's. Almost gasping from lack of breath, I pulled open the door that lead out into the main hallway. I could almost hear Fate laughing at me. Justin stood there, his arm out stretched to reach for the door handle. He looked surprised, like a bunny rabbit being caught in a trap. He looked so innocent with his eyes wide open. I almost wept right then, almost just fell on my knees and sobbed at how messed up it all was. But I didn't. I took a deep breath and I let it out slowly and I looked at him, closely, closer than I'd ever looked at him before. His hair was carrot red, the color matching his freckles and his blush. Although he was 19 years old, his face was as smooth as it had been when he had been 13, the year when I had first caught him in his room. He had never grown any facial hair. No one knew why. Screwed up hormones was the assumption, however. How right they probably were. He was taller than me, at least by 4 inches, and his hands were constantly clinched tight into red, little fists. But he always looked so innocent; that was the thing that made him so damn confusing. Even when I had stood over the tortured body of the puppy in seventh grade, he had looked so childlike, so blameless. If I hadn't felt like gagging at the time, I would've immediately relented and demanded a less upsetting explanation from him, despite the evidence to the contrary. As I looked at him, however, I kept on seeing the kittens instead of his freckled face; the poor, mangled creatures lying piteously in the shoebox. If ever there had been a truer definition of my brother than that box on his bed, I don't know what it would be. His soul was as wretched as the dying kittens, if not more so. I narrowed my eyes and balled my fists in turn. Never again would I relent to him, let him go on hurting little creatures. I would be strong for once. I wouldn't give in. "I saw what you had hidden in the closet." I said, my voice void of any emotion to betray what I was feeling. The words echoed throughout the stairwell, repeating the accusation. He looked around, wild-eyed, perhaps searching for one of his twisted friends, but no one else was around. They'd probably just dropped him off. "Look, Jessie, I can explain. They aren't mine! They're my roommates. Chuck caught them. He did that to them. He…" I stamped hard on the ground, "God, Justin! I saw your freakin' initials, for God's sake. How stupid do you think I am?" He stopped and looked hard at me, reminding me more and more of a raccoon caught in the headlights of my car. "Jessie…" He muttered, but his voice cracked midway and he suddenly fell on his knees, crying strange, choking sobs that reverberated around me like some godforsaken music being played in the depths of my personal Hell. I stood there, unaware of what I was going to do. I never even knew what to say when one of my friends was upset, let alone what to tell my psychotic brother mid-breakdown. While I fought internally with myself, knowing I had to say something but entirely uncertain as to what I should tell him, Justin curled his knees up towards his chin and wiped his eyes with his long fingers, each nail perfectly manicured. Inhaling sharply, he cleared his throat and looked at me as though he hadn't just broke down crying at all. Only his red eyes betrayed any change in his emotions. "Look, Jessie. I know that I shouldn't have done that. It…it was wrong of me. But I swear, I will never do that again! I'll even stop hanging out with my friends, if you want me to. But don't tell anyone. And for chrissakes, don't tell Mom or Dad. They'll flip. They'll send me to some military institution or something where I'll get beat up everyday. Just don't tell anyone. Please, Jessie?" He paused and looked at me. He wanted me to back down, to agree. But inside my head I could hear him saying the exact same speech back in seventh grade, when he was the school nerd and I was the junior high princess who dreamed about being homecoming queen during algebra. He had made the same promises, sworn the same lies, on that mirror day six years ago. I should never had kept silent then. I should have gotten him some help. "I'm going back to my dorm, Justin." I said, trying hard to keep my voice from shaking too much but not succeeding. "I need to think about these things for a while." Justin breathed a sigh of relief, evidently taking my statement to mean that I wasn't going to tell on him. He smiled at me, with his raccoon-in-the-headlights eyes and I could almost see inside of his brain, could almost hear him internally plotting how much time should pass before it'd be safe again to torture some small animal again. "Thanks, Jessie." He said and, not liking the expression on my face, turned and walked quickly upstairs, presumably to dispose of the kittens. I watched his back disappear up the stairway, then turned and walked out the stairwell and out of the building. Almost like a statue, my brain feeling numb and my body stretched as tall as it possibly could go, I walked over to the payphone located a block away next to the 7-11. Picking up the receiver and inserting the money, I began to dial that oh-so-familiar number that I had used so many times before. The air seemed sweet to me, even though it was tainted by the exhaust from passing cars and trucks. As I heard the phone ring on the other end, a breeze began to blow my hair away from my sweaty neck. It felt utterly wonderful, utterly precious. "Hello?" came the voice at the other end. "Hi, Mom." I said, my voice scratchy, but audible. "I've got something to tell you about your son." Feeling the breeze caress the back my neck as I internally strengthened my resolve, I began the conversation. |