46,282
I have become oddly addicted to a free copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 that came from a box of cereal. This is not good for my writing health.
46,382 / 50,000
(92.8%)
He feels the back of his head hit the wall under the window and he groans, shoulders pressing back, hips moving forward.
“Fuck.” Brian’s mumbling, one hand knotted in the hair at the base of Justin’s neck, the other around his wrist. He pulls back and shakes his head, watches Justin’s eyes for a split second before he’s pressing back, his lips open and wet. Another mumbled, “Fuck.”
Justin nods and tightens his fingers on each side of Brian’s head, his hips pressing up into Brian’s stomach, work shirt ridden up and undeniably wrinkled already. He feels his stomach tightening and releasing over and over, as though he’s just run nine miles before sunrise.
One of his hands slip up the front of Brian’s shirt, fingertips moving over the warm skin above his bellybutton. He presses himself back and then forward, unable to decide where he really wants to do.
Brian pulls the blond’s body tighter against his, and decides for him.
“We shouldn’t… fucking…” Brian is muttering, his words coming out broken and soft against Justin’s mouth. Justin shakes his head and pulls Brian’s head closer, his fingers pressing against the muscles in his neck. “Fuck, Justin.”
The blond nods and tries to untangle one foot from the other, sprawled in front of him with Brian’s leg between them. He slides one up around Brian’s hip and arches his back, gasping when he feels Brian’s hand move down to his hip, pull him even closer.
These are the things wrong with this situation:
Justin is sixteen, still legally considered a minor in Berlin. Brian is his lawyer, in what should be a strict client/attorney relationship. Justin has had his kidneys removed, not by choice, and jumps at the slightest of surprise touches. Brian should know better, especially since Justin has been a street hustler since the age of thirteen -- Justin has not known sex outside of this occupation. Brian should know better.
But these are the things that are right:
He slides his tongue into Brian’s mouth, every single second minute hour day before this moment building and festering until it explodes into one action, one action that makes Justin’s shoulders ache, makes his toes curl. He moans but it disappears down Brian’s throat, arches but makes impact against Brian’s hips, bones touching bones.
And then the lights come back on.
“What the fuck?” Justin mumbles, hands still in Brian’s hair, Brian’s palm still flat against his hip, fingers curling around the hard edged bone. He squints and tries to focus in on the ceiling.
Brian presses his mouth against Justin’s shoulder, pulls away.
“Lights came back on.” He whispers, eyes flickering up to the ceiling before they drift back down to Justin’s face, cheeks pink and lips swollen to perfection. A corner of Justin’s lips curl up unto a half smile, and he nods.
Runs a hand through Brian’s hand, and murmurs, “Yeah. They did.”
…
“Korina, Korina.” Brian smirks, closing the front hall door behind him. The air is warm and smells like the food that he knows the woman has been cooking all day.
She hurries down the hall, brown hair only half pulled up into an elastic. The woman smiles and throws her arms up and around his shoulders, tightening them to a mother’s perfection, until he’s trying to gently ease out of the vice grip.
Behind him, Jack laughs.
“Braune Augen, you have grown again!” She insists, smacking the side of his cheek lightly with the palm of her hand. He smiles and shakes his head, leaning in to kiss her cheek. It’s red and spotted with faded freckles. “I tell you, you have! Has he not, Jack?”
Brian nods and throws his arm around her shoulders, listening to her natter away as they make their way through the hallway and to the kitchen where Adeline already sits, tucked behind the head of the old table.
…
He can’t help it.
He really, honest to god, seriously cannot help it.
“Why do you keep smiling like that?” She asks, all eight year old attitude tweaked to perfection, her eyebrows blond and raised into her hairline, green eyes wider than Justin’s own.
A half-scowl forced at her, and he pulls his cup of noodles from the cafeteria microwave.
“Shut up. I already told you to leave me alone.” He tells her, keeping his nose in the air as she rolls her eyes and leans a little harder against the side of the rickety table everything sits on. He kinda hopes one day it’ll collapse, and he’ll be here to see it.
She sniffs the air and wrinkles her nose, says, “That stuff stinks. You’re not really going to eat that, are you?”
“You’re not really going to eat that, are you?” He mimics, his voice dramatic and high like a chipmunk cartoon character. She scowls at him, her chubby cheeks pink. Really she looks as though she’s had a root canal performed, only to then be subject to a hive of angry bees.
A moment of quiet passes between the two, though it isn’t truly silent because there are other children around them, all making or eating their own two cent dinners.
“So why are you smiling?” She asks, blinking up at him.
He rolls his eyes at her and turns back to the microwave, hiding a grin into the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He can’t help it.
…
He picks the manila folder up from his desk and flips through it, standing with bad posture despite himself, his hips thrown out as his fingers leaf through the photocopy-shiny papers.
“Adeline, did we ever hear back from this guy?” He asks, glancing over his shoulder to where Adeline is standing beside the window, watering the one plant he has in the office of all fucking things.
She pokes her fingers into the dirt and shakes her head.
“Not yet.” She finally answers, eyebrows knotting together. “I haven’t gone through my inbox this morning though, so you never know.”
Brian gapes at her for a moment, before proceeding to toss the small stack of paper down onto his desk, littered with others much like it.
“Can you check my fucking mail before you start watering the goddamn plants?” He hisses, fighting the urge to cross the room and hit the back of her head with the stack of paper, like he imagines people who discipline dogs do.
She rolls her eyes and leaves the room, water can in hand.
“Christ.” He mutters to no one in particular, shaking his head. Just as he goes to reach for his half filled, mostly cold cup of coffee, the intercom on his phone starts to buzz. Rolling his eyes, he changes his plan of direction and reaches for the ‘talk’ button instead of his usual fix. “Yeah.”
He hears shuffling papers and muted laughter, then, “Shit, I forgot I called you. Justin’s here, I just sent him right in.”
“Thank you Adeline.” Brian mutters dutifully, hitting the ‘talk’ button again to effectively cut her voice off.
Despite himself he feels his mouth rapidly turning into what he hates to call a grin, all twisted at the corners and more sincere than he’d really like it to be. He glances over his shoulder just in time to see the body making its way past the glass wall, and manages to cross from his desk to the door before Justin even has his hand on the knob.
He swings it open and the blond hurries in, laughing and already halfway to being breathless. Brian gets to door closed and falls back against it, Justin’s deceptively small body pushing his back until his hips are square against the surface.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” The blond is mumbling, his lips open and moving and a few moments away from Brian’s.
Brian feels his grin widen and he shakes his head, mouthing ‘me neither,’ and then that’s it because his fingers are knotted in Justin’s hair and they’re kissing again, all mouths and lips and tongues and teeth.
…
One day he will wake up, and there will be reporters at his front door.
His face will be all over the newspapers, name slain with bold headlines printed in black lettering, and everyone will know his last name. Housewives will see his face on CNN, the pre-recorded clips of him hurrying in and out of the court room, features hidden behind whatever would be in his hands at the time.
In New York his mother will see the coverage. She’ll be half passed out at the kitchen table, an old gray cat walking circles around her legs, and she’ll see his name and drop the glass in her hand like some 1950’s black and white drama. When the press finds out her location they’ll request interviews, and she will grant each major publishing network one.
His identity will be destroyed, and he will be helpless to fix it.
…
Brooklyn, New York - August 31st, 1992.
The slap rings throughout the cramped kitchen, the skin on skin sound sinking into the pots and pans and the only half attempted child’s drawings scattered on the front of the refrigerator.
In the middle of it all they stand, staring each other in the eyes, identical and breathing hard. He feels the inside of his cheek with his tongue, but does not bring his hand up. Refuses to bring his fingers to his own skin, to move and show her that’s she’s caused a reaction inside of him.
He feels as though this is about the time that he should spit out blood and the ding ding ding! of the round bell should ring behind him, announcing his opponent this year’s boxing champion.
She lowers her hand though, looking shocked, staring at him as though they’ve just been the sole subjects to a truck wrapping around a telephone pole. Her mouth moves but he doesn’t hear her, doesn’t listen as he turns away and begins to walk towards the door.
And this is where it starts.
…
He’ll be trapped inside of his own home, subject to the flashes from photographer’s cameras and requests for an updated statement. He’ll watch as his face is splashed on anything and everything, and he’ll listen as his name becomes the punch line of too many comic’s jokes.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
He waits until she falls asleep that night. He knows her, he knows every minute of every one of her days. Knows how long it will take before her breathing begins to even out and she falls into a haze, a haze that is for once induced by sleep and not a more than mild sedative.
And that’s when he does it.
His clothes are thrown into a ratty suitcase that he digs out from underneath the front hall stairs, covered in chipped tourist stickers from stands around the United States. He had to brush the cobwebs off of it, though, because for as far as he can remember it has never been that much of a Kinney family tradition to take that many holiday trips or vacations. But he does, and it looks fine.
It’s good enough.
So he packs away his small collection of t-shirts that the girls at his school call ‘pseudo vintage’ and the few pairs of pants that he owns -- they all have established rips in the knees, earned from too many hours spent crawling underneath cars and over everything else.
He doesn’t have many possessions, but the ones that he does he packs away for safe keeping -- he leaves the photographs of his family on top of his worn down dresser. His mother grimaces back at him. She always frowned her smiles, he remembers, even on the best of days.
The only picture he takes is of his brother. It’s worn at the edges and he has to slide it out of a double frame before he can slip it into the pocket of his suitcase and zip it closed.
He leaves the lowest light on as he sneaks out of his room and down the hall.
…
He’ll have to buy a plane ticket, one day, and the woman at the counter will squint at him. He’ll want to scream at her, ‘for fucks sake, yes, it’s me!’, but something will hold him back.
And so he’ll sit in the uncomfortable chairs in the airport lobby and wonder how hard it would have really been to pack away a blond body in his suitcase. He bets that Justin would fold nicely, all small and warm and pliable, and if they were careful, maybe nobody would know.
When his flight is called, he will get up out of the plastic chair, and he’ll say goodbye no nothing and nobody, but he will feel the burn all the same.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
His mother keeps an old jam jar full of money inside her closet. He doesn’t think it was cleaned properly before she began to use it as a makeshift bank, though, because the rim is still kind of sticky in some places, and it makes his wrist feel tacky to the touch.
But this old jam jar, whenever she would go to get the grocery money from it, she would make all three of her children stand in the kitchen with hands over their eyes, each counting back from a hundred. He remembers that between the three of them they would hear each other’s counts and get confused, and have to start from the beginning, a minor farce in the Kinney track record.
Either way, she always thought that she had effectively hid it from her children, but Brian always knew. It sat right beside where she kept the hand gun that his father left behind.
And that’s why it isn’t hard, isn’t hard at all to find the jar that he figures easily contains at least nine hundred dollars, all in crinkled bills, the highest a mere twenty.
He sends a weary glance over his shoulder at his mother, even though he knows that she’s still deathly asleep, just by the way that she breathes. He says she snores, but she will deny it every time and brandish a wooden spoon to prove her point.
So the jar is tucked under his arm and he crawls back out of the room and to the door, not once looking back. That feeling in his chest and hands and heart and head is beginning to face already. He can feel the schedules melting away, he can feel the “make Claire’s lunch, mommy’s going to bingo” fading away until it’s nothing.
He begins to run when his feet hit the carpet in the hallway, and when he starts, he doesn’t remember how to stop. His body goes frantic, hands shaking with something that he’s never known.
The money is packed away in the suitcase before he creeps past his brother and sister’s rooms, sneaking two glances along the way. His brother isn’t laying in his bed -- most likely at some party, and his sister is asleep like the princess she’s been led to believe she is, her ratty old stuffed unicorn snug under one curled arm.
It isn’t until he reaches the end of the hallway that he stops, and hesitates.
…
The ticket will say that he’s headed back to New York, but he will stop at a layover in Toronto and never get on his second flight. Instead of moving backwards he will run sideways, his luggage forgotten in the belly of the plane, his wallet still stored in overhead.
And he will disappear, melt under the sun until he’s nothing, flooding the street gutters and dripping down sidewalks. He will begin to bubble inside, his stomach and lungs and heart and veins twisting and turning until he aches so much that it feels as though there is a person inside struggling to get out.
But he won’t do it. He won’t phone them, will continue to pretend that he doesn’t miss a second. He will refuse to wonder about the kid and his continuous colds, and the secondhand father that is never beginning to regret the five letter name tattooed on the inside of his wrist.
And he will lie.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
He only waits long enough to prop his suitcase up against the wall and run back the way he came, sneaking down the hallway with quick steps until he’s entering his brother’s dark and empty bedroom.
A perfected stack of fake IDs hide between the bed’s mattress bed and box spring, and he knows this so he slides them out, one by one. There are six of them, all in different names, all with the same Kinney resemblance - brown eyes brown hair black heart.
Brian pockets them, and hurries over to his brother’s desk.
In the scrawled writing that his mother always berates him for having (“chicken scratch,” she always said, “like a doctor’s.”) he reaches for a piece of lined paper and a pen that has blank ink.
Writes, I took your fake IDs, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll mail them back to you.
The light streams through his brother’s window, then, and that’s when Brian knows that he is too close to being caught. Stomach jumping, he knows that they’re car headlights, car headlights that most likely belong to his brother’s friends.
“Fuck.” He mutters, and with shaky hands, re-reads the note, making sure his punctuation makes sense. His brother flunks English every year, but is a stickler for proper grammar.
Brian hesitates for a moment, before he sticks the note under another stack of paper, so Adam will find it one day. One day, but not today.
The IDs are stashed in the pocket of his jacket as he hurries back out of the room, listening for his mother’s snores as he checks his sister one final time. His skin begins to prickle and his breath doesn’t work as well as he wishes it would as he hears the lock in the front door turning.
He runs down the hall and through the kitchen. Steals one last glance at the clock above the oven. 3:12AM, it says, ticking with a short red hand.
The back door slides open just as the front door begins to creak, and Brian vaguely hopes that someone doesn’t sneak in between now and his mother wakes up, because he leaves the door open an inch -- he doesn’t want to chance the noise it makes when it closes, because he knows that it always squeaks and squeals.
And then he’s running across the backyard, faster than he did when he was eight and absolutely terrified of the imaginary monsters that he was sure used to chase him. He runs faster than the time Claire fell out of the apple tree, and it was only last year but he heard her scream from three doors away. She broke her arm, he remembers, and the memory is already more than a little vague as he throws his suitcase over a fence, and hopes that it doesn’t crack open.
It doesn’t. It lands against the neighbor’s backyard grass with a soft thump, and after he scales the fence, his feet do too. Through the crooked wooden slats he looks back at his own home, and watches as the kitchen light flickers on. Adam.
Brian watches through the gap as the back door cracks open and his brother looks out, studying the backyard with a drunken intensity that Brian recognizes from this far away -- so much like Jack, he thinks -- before the door is closed again.
The light turns out after a few moments, and Brian feels his wrists begin to drain of everything, everything except for the blood that keeps him alive.
He bends down to pick his suitcase up, and he keeps running.
…
One day, one day after the first day, he will be sitting in a cheap diner, and he will begin to wonder. He will remember days like this, days where the rain was pouring and he would laugh, his teeth crooked and just as they are now.
And he will remember them, every single one. He will remember them all, and when he has finished constructing the image that is left in his memory of them, he will begin a new one. A picture that is dated and holds a boy with blond hair and a scar on his back.
He will keep that picture, tucked away in the recess of his mind. It will be the second that he has held onto, number two only to the faded photograph that he’s had for too many years, kept in too many pockets and looked at too many times.
It’s a picture of him and another boy, a boy that looks like something that he knew too long ago, before the news broke of the incestuous relationship between a lawyer and his client, a client of sixteen none the less.
This photograph was taken way before that, when Brian was still working on those crooked teeth, banging them on playground equipment and wiggling them with cookie crumb fingers as they would grow loose.
A picture of him and his brother, smiling.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
It wasn’t as hard as he thought that it would be.
All he really had to do was go to the local pharmacy (“Open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, Fred’s Drugs are there for you every moment of your life” -- cut to winning smile, white teeth pink lips) and buy some hair dye. Buy a new life, stashed between the mints and condoms.
He felt nervous in the checkout line, like he was purchasing cigarettes at twelve or soliciting sex at thirteen. But the cashier didn’t look at him twice, passed the purchases over in a white plastic bag, and wished him a good night.
Told him to make sure his mother knew her prescription was ready for pick up, that he had called over a week ago but so far no one had come.
And it wasn’t that hard to buy a ticket to get on a train heading out of New York, either. All along he had known where he was going, all he had to do was get there.
Back in New York, his mother phones the police when she realizes he’s gone. And five weeks after that, Adam finds the piece of paper, tucked away between a failed English exam and an aced Physics.
And one year after that one single piece of bleached white paper, one year after those few words that had been scrawled in black ink were written, Brian boards a flight that would take him back to the start.
…
Berlin, Germany - November 14th, 2005
He twists their bodies around and presses the blond’s to the back of the door. Grins down at him, and slides their mouths together.
46,382 / 50,000
(92.8%)
He feels the back of his head hit the wall under the window and he groans, shoulders pressing back, hips moving forward.
“Fuck.” Brian’s mumbling, one hand knotted in the hair at the base of Justin’s neck, the other around his wrist. He pulls back and shakes his head, watches Justin’s eyes for a split second before he’s pressing back, his lips open and wet. Another mumbled, “Fuck.”
Justin nods and tightens his fingers on each side of Brian’s head, his hips pressing up into Brian’s stomach, work shirt ridden up and undeniably wrinkled already. He feels his stomach tightening and releasing over and over, as though he’s just run nine miles before sunrise.
One of his hands slip up the front of Brian’s shirt, fingertips moving over the warm skin above his bellybutton. He presses himself back and then forward, unable to decide where he really wants to do.
Brian pulls the blond’s body tighter against his, and decides for him.
“We shouldn’t… fucking…” Brian is muttering, his words coming out broken and soft against Justin’s mouth. Justin shakes his head and pulls Brian’s head closer, his fingers pressing against the muscles in his neck. “Fuck, Justin.”
The blond nods and tries to untangle one foot from the other, sprawled in front of him with Brian’s leg between them. He slides one up around Brian’s hip and arches his back, gasping when he feels Brian’s hand move down to his hip, pull him even closer.
These are the things wrong with this situation:
Justin is sixteen, still legally considered a minor in Berlin. Brian is his lawyer, in what should be a strict client/attorney relationship. Justin has had his kidneys removed, not by choice, and jumps at the slightest of surprise touches. Brian should know better, especially since Justin has been a street hustler since the age of thirteen -- Justin has not known sex outside of this occupation. Brian should know better.
But these are the things that are right:
He slides his tongue into Brian’s mouth, every single second minute hour day before this moment building and festering until it explodes into one action, one action that makes Justin’s shoulders ache, makes his toes curl. He moans but it disappears down Brian’s throat, arches but makes impact against Brian’s hips, bones touching bones.
And then the lights come back on.
“What the fuck?” Justin mumbles, hands still in Brian’s hair, Brian’s palm still flat against his hip, fingers curling around the hard edged bone. He squints and tries to focus in on the ceiling.
Brian presses his mouth against Justin’s shoulder, pulls away.
“Lights came back on.” He whispers, eyes flickering up to the ceiling before they drift back down to Justin’s face, cheeks pink and lips swollen to perfection. A corner of Justin’s lips curl up unto a half smile, and he nods.
Runs a hand through Brian’s hand, and murmurs, “Yeah. They did.”
…
“Korina, Korina.” Brian smirks, closing the front hall door behind him. The air is warm and smells like the food that he knows the woman has been cooking all day.
She hurries down the hall, brown hair only half pulled up into an elastic. The woman smiles and throws her arms up and around his shoulders, tightening them to a mother’s perfection, until he’s trying to gently ease out of the vice grip.
Behind him, Jack laughs.
“Braune Augen, you have grown again!” She insists, smacking the side of his cheek lightly with the palm of her hand. He smiles and shakes his head, leaning in to kiss her cheek. It’s red and spotted with faded freckles. “I tell you, you have! Has he not, Jack?”
Brian nods and throws his arm around her shoulders, listening to her natter away as they make their way through the hallway and to the kitchen where Adeline already sits, tucked behind the head of the old table.
…
He can’t help it.
He really, honest to god, seriously cannot help it.
“Why do you keep smiling like that?” She asks, all eight year old attitude tweaked to perfection, her eyebrows blond and raised into her hairline, green eyes wider than Justin’s own.
A half-scowl forced at her, and he pulls his cup of noodles from the cafeteria microwave.
“Shut up. I already told you to leave me alone.” He tells her, keeping his nose in the air as she rolls her eyes and leans a little harder against the side of the rickety table everything sits on. He kinda hopes one day it’ll collapse, and he’ll be here to see it.
She sniffs the air and wrinkles her nose, says, “That stuff stinks. You’re not really going to eat that, are you?”
“You’re not really going to eat that, are you?” He mimics, his voice dramatic and high like a chipmunk cartoon character. She scowls at him, her chubby cheeks pink. Really she looks as though she’s had a root canal performed, only to then be subject to a hive of angry bees.
A moment of quiet passes between the two, though it isn’t truly silent because there are other children around them, all making or eating their own two cent dinners.
“So why are you smiling?” She asks, blinking up at him.
He rolls his eyes at her and turns back to the microwave, hiding a grin into the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He can’t help it.
…
He picks the manila folder up from his desk and flips through it, standing with bad posture despite himself, his hips thrown out as his fingers leaf through the photocopy-shiny papers.
“Adeline, did we ever hear back from this guy?” He asks, glancing over his shoulder to where Adeline is standing beside the window, watering the one plant he has in the office of all fucking things.
She pokes her fingers into the dirt and shakes her head.
“Not yet.” She finally answers, eyebrows knotting together. “I haven’t gone through my inbox this morning though, so you never know.”
Brian gapes at her for a moment, before proceeding to toss the small stack of paper down onto his desk, littered with others much like it.
“Can you check my fucking mail before you start watering the goddamn plants?” He hisses, fighting the urge to cross the room and hit the back of her head with the stack of paper, like he imagines people who discipline dogs do.
She rolls her eyes and leaves the room, water can in hand.
“Christ.” He mutters to no one in particular, shaking his head. Just as he goes to reach for his half filled, mostly cold cup of coffee, the intercom on his phone starts to buzz. Rolling his eyes, he changes his plan of direction and reaches for the ‘talk’ button instead of his usual fix. “Yeah.”
He hears shuffling papers and muted laughter, then, “Shit, I forgot I called you. Justin’s here, I just sent him right in.”
“Thank you Adeline.” Brian mutters dutifully, hitting the ‘talk’ button again to effectively cut her voice off.
Despite himself he feels his mouth rapidly turning into what he hates to call a grin, all twisted at the corners and more sincere than he’d really like it to be. He glances over his shoulder just in time to see the body making its way past the glass wall, and manages to cross from his desk to the door before Justin even has his hand on the knob.
He swings it open and the blond hurries in, laughing and already halfway to being breathless. Brian gets to door closed and falls back against it, Justin’s deceptively small body pushing his back until his hips are square against the surface.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” The blond is mumbling, his lips open and moving and a few moments away from Brian’s.
Brian feels his grin widen and he shakes his head, mouthing ‘me neither,’ and then that’s it because his fingers are knotted in Justin’s hair and they’re kissing again, all mouths and lips and tongues and teeth.
…
One day he will wake up, and there will be reporters at his front door.
His face will be all over the newspapers, name slain with bold headlines printed in black lettering, and everyone will know his last name. Housewives will see his face on CNN, the pre-recorded clips of him hurrying in and out of the court room, features hidden behind whatever would be in his hands at the time.
In New York his mother will see the coverage. She’ll be half passed out at the kitchen table, an old gray cat walking circles around her legs, and she’ll see his name and drop the glass in her hand like some 1950’s black and white drama. When the press finds out her location they’ll request interviews, and she will grant each major publishing network one.
His identity will be destroyed, and he will be helpless to fix it.
…
Brooklyn, New York - August 31st, 1992.
The slap rings throughout the cramped kitchen, the skin on skin sound sinking into the pots and pans and the only half attempted child’s drawings scattered on the front of the refrigerator.
In the middle of it all they stand, staring each other in the eyes, identical and breathing hard. He feels the inside of his cheek with his tongue, but does not bring his hand up. Refuses to bring his fingers to his own skin, to move and show her that’s she’s caused a reaction inside of him.
He feels as though this is about the time that he should spit out blood and the ding ding ding! of the round bell should ring behind him, announcing his opponent this year’s boxing champion.
She lowers her hand though, looking shocked, staring at him as though they’ve just been the sole subjects to a truck wrapping around a telephone pole. Her mouth moves but he doesn’t hear her, doesn’t listen as he turns away and begins to walk towards the door.
And this is where it starts.
…
He’ll be trapped inside of his own home, subject to the flashes from photographer’s cameras and requests for an updated statement. He’ll watch as his face is splashed on anything and everything, and he’ll listen as his name becomes the punch line of too many comic’s jokes.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
He waits until she falls asleep that night. He knows her, he knows every minute of every one of her days. Knows how long it will take before her breathing begins to even out and she falls into a haze, a haze that is for once induced by sleep and not a more than mild sedative.
And that’s when he does it.
His clothes are thrown into a ratty suitcase that he digs out from underneath the front hall stairs, covered in chipped tourist stickers from stands around the United States. He had to brush the cobwebs off of it, though, because for as far as he can remember it has never been that much of a Kinney family tradition to take that many holiday trips or vacations. But he does, and it looks fine.
It’s good enough.
So he packs away his small collection of t-shirts that the girls at his school call ‘pseudo vintage’ and the few pairs of pants that he owns -- they all have established rips in the knees, earned from too many hours spent crawling underneath cars and over everything else.
He doesn’t have many possessions, but the ones that he does he packs away for safe keeping -- he leaves the photographs of his family on top of his worn down dresser. His mother grimaces back at him. She always frowned her smiles, he remembers, even on the best of days.
The only picture he takes is of his brother. It’s worn at the edges and he has to slide it out of a double frame before he can slip it into the pocket of his suitcase and zip it closed.
He leaves the lowest light on as he sneaks out of his room and down the hall.
…
He’ll have to buy a plane ticket, one day, and the woman at the counter will squint at him. He’ll want to scream at her, ‘for fucks sake, yes, it’s me!’, but something will hold him back.
And so he’ll sit in the uncomfortable chairs in the airport lobby and wonder how hard it would have really been to pack away a blond body in his suitcase. He bets that Justin would fold nicely, all small and warm and pliable, and if they were careful, maybe nobody would know.
When his flight is called, he will get up out of the plastic chair, and he’ll say goodbye no nothing and nobody, but he will feel the burn all the same.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
His mother keeps an old jam jar full of money inside her closet. He doesn’t think it was cleaned properly before she began to use it as a makeshift bank, though, because the rim is still kind of sticky in some places, and it makes his wrist feel tacky to the touch.
But this old jam jar, whenever she would go to get the grocery money from it, she would make all three of her children stand in the kitchen with hands over their eyes, each counting back from a hundred. He remembers that between the three of them they would hear each other’s counts and get confused, and have to start from the beginning, a minor farce in the Kinney track record.
Either way, she always thought that she had effectively hid it from her children, but Brian always knew. It sat right beside where she kept the hand gun that his father left behind.
And that’s why it isn’t hard, isn’t hard at all to find the jar that he figures easily contains at least nine hundred dollars, all in crinkled bills, the highest a mere twenty.
He sends a weary glance over his shoulder at his mother, even though he knows that she’s still deathly asleep, just by the way that she breathes. He says she snores, but she will deny it every time and brandish a wooden spoon to prove her point.
So the jar is tucked under his arm and he crawls back out of the room and to the door, not once looking back. That feeling in his chest and hands and heart and head is beginning to face already. He can feel the schedules melting away, he can feel the “make Claire’s lunch, mommy’s going to bingo” fading away until it’s nothing.
He begins to run when his feet hit the carpet in the hallway, and when he starts, he doesn’t remember how to stop. His body goes frantic, hands shaking with something that he’s never known.
The money is packed away in the suitcase before he creeps past his brother and sister’s rooms, sneaking two glances along the way. His brother isn’t laying in his bed -- most likely at some party, and his sister is asleep like the princess she’s been led to believe she is, her ratty old stuffed unicorn snug under one curled arm.
It isn’t until he reaches the end of the hallway that he stops, and hesitates.
…
The ticket will say that he’s headed back to New York, but he will stop at a layover in Toronto and never get on his second flight. Instead of moving backwards he will run sideways, his luggage forgotten in the belly of the plane, his wallet still stored in overhead.
And he will disappear, melt under the sun until he’s nothing, flooding the street gutters and dripping down sidewalks. He will begin to bubble inside, his stomach and lungs and heart and veins twisting and turning until he aches so much that it feels as though there is a person inside struggling to get out.
But he won’t do it. He won’t phone them, will continue to pretend that he doesn’t miss a second. He will refuse to wonder about the kid and his continuous colds, and the secondhand father that is never beginning to regret the five letter name tattooed on the inside of his wrist.
And he will lie.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
He only waits long enough to prop his suitcase up against the wall and run back the way he came, sneaking down the hallway with quick steps until he’s entering his brother’s dark and empty bedroom.
A perfected stack of fake IDs hide between the bed’s mattress bed and box spring, and he knows this so he slides them out, one by one. There are six of them, all in different names, all with the same Kinney resemblance - brown eyes brown hair black heart.
Brian pockets them, and hurries over to his brother’s desk.
In the scrawled writing that his mother always berates him for having (“chicken scratch,” she always said, “like a doctor’s.”) he reaches for a piece of lined paper and a pen that has blank ink.
Writes, I took your fake IDs, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll mail them back to you.
The light streams through his brother’s window, then, and that’s when Brian knows that he is too close to being caught. Stomach jumping, he knows that they’re car headlights, car headlights that most likely belong to his brother’s friends.
“Fuck.” He mutters, and with shaky hands, re-reads the note, making sure his punctuation makes sense. His brother flunks English every year, but is a stickler for proper grammar.
Brian hesitates for a moment, before he sticks the note under another stack of paper, so Adam will find it one day. One day, but not today.
The IDs are stashed in the pocket of his jacket as he hurries back out of the room, listening for his mother’s snores as he checks his sister one final time. His skin begins to prickle and his breath doesn’t work as well as he wishes it would as he hears the lock in the front door turning.
He runs down the hall and through the kitchen. Steals one last glance at the clock above the oven. 3:12AM, it says, ticking with a short red hand.
The back door slides open just as the front door begins to creak, and Brian vaguely hopes that someone doesn’t sneak in between now and his mother wakes up, because he leaves the door open an inch -- he doesn’t want to chance the noise it makes when it closes, because he knows that it always squeaks and squeals.
And then he’s running across the backyard, faster than he did when he was eight and absolutely terrified of the imaginary monsters that he was sure used to chase him. He runs faster than the time Claire fell out of the apple tree, and it was only last year but he heard her scream from three doors away. She broke her arm, he remembers, and the memory is already more than a little vague as he throws his suitcase over a fence, and hopes that it doesn’t crack open.
It doesn’t. It lands against the neighbor’s backyard grass with a soft thump, and after he scales the fence, his feet do too. Through the crooked wooden slats he looks back at his own home, and watches as the kitchen light flickers on. Adam.
Brian watches through the gap as the back door cracks open and his brother looks out, studying the backyard with a drunken intensity that Brian recognizes from this far away -- so much like Jack, he thinks -- before the door is closed again.
The light turns out after a few moments, and Brian feels his wrists begin to drain of everything, everything except for the blood that keeps him alive.
He bends down to pick his suitcase up, and he keeps running.
…
One day, one day after the first day, he will be sitting in a cheap diner, and he will begin to wonder. He will remember days like this, days where the rain was pouring and he would laugh, his teeth crooked and just as they are now.
And he will remember them, every single one. He will remember them all, and when he has finished constructing the image that is left in his memory of them, he will begin a new one. A picture that is dated and holds a boy with blond hair and a scar on his back.
He will keep that picture, tucked away in the recess of his mind. It will be the second that he has held onto, number two only to the faded photograph that he’s had for too many years, kept in too many pockets and looked at too many times.
It’s a picture of him and another boy, a boy that looks like something that he knew too long ago, before the news broke of the incestuous relationship between a lawyer and his client, a client of sixteen none the less.
This photograph was taken way before that, when Brian was still working on those crooked teeth, banging them on playground equipment and wiggling them with cookie crumb fingers as they would grow loose.
A picture of him and his brother, smiling.
…
Brooklyn, New York.
It wasn’t as hard as he thought that it would be.
All he really had to do was go to the local pharmacy (“Open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, Fred’s Drugs are there for you every moment of your life” -- cut to winning smile, white teeth pink lips) and buy some hair dye. Buy a new life, stashed between the mints and condoms.
He felt nervous in the checkout line, like he was purchasing cigarettes at twelve or soliciting sex at thirteen. But the cashier didn’t look at him twice, passed the purchases over in a white plastic bag, and wished him a good night.
Told him to make sure his mother knew her prescription was ready for pick up, that he had called over a week ago but so far no one had come.
And it wasn’t that hard to buy a ticket to get on a train heading out of New York, either. All along he had known where he was going, all he had to do was get there.
Back in New York, his mother phones the police when she realizes he’s gone. And five weeks after that, Adam finds the piece of paper, tucked away between a failed English exam and an aced Physics.
And one year after that one single piece of bleached white paper, one year after those few words that had been scrawled in black ink were written, Brian boards a flight that would take him back to the start.
…
Berlin, Germany - November 14th, 2005
He twists their bodies around and presses the blond’s to the back of the door. Grins down at him, and slides their mouths together.