Brother
I'm just going to quickly post this and then I'm off to bed.
Brother.
I never knew Brother was different. He was perfect in my eyes, he could do no wrong. And yet, Mother hated him. She would yell and throw things when Brother was being Brother.
The first time Mother made Brother bleed was the day I started first grade. Brother was dressed in one of my spare uniforms, the one with the pretty plaited skirt. Mother was angry, she said that he was a sick boy and needed to be punished. She said she would put a stop this nonsense. Neither of us wore that uniform again, blood is very hard to get out.
We kept it a secret after that. Brother would play dress up after school let out and before Mother came home from work. Together we mastered the art of being women.
When I began middle school, I noticed that Brother wasn’t really like the other boys. They never wore make-up or high heels. I never saw any of them kissing their best friend. To me, they were lacking, they were beneath him.
It made me sad to see Brother always hiding. No one knew of the real Brother, just me and Will. He hid away in our room when he wanted to feel pretty and put on a dress. When he wanted to love Will, it had to be in the dark, away from everything else. It made his love seem cheap. Brother would cry at night when he thought I was asleep. It broke my heart.
But his moment came eventually.
Senior Prom.
He wore the most beautiful red dress I had ever seen. I even convinced him to wear his hair down instead of the bun he usually kept it in. Brother was breath-taking.
Brother had to sneak out of the house that night because Mother was in the kitchen drinking. I can still picture him running across the lawn barefoot (Mother would have heard the heels) and jumping into Will’s car with a laugh.
Brother didn’t come home that night.
Brother never came home.
Some of the normal boys, the kind Mother wanted Brother to be, hurt him. They made him bleed all over his pretty red dress.
I’m happy Brother died being Brother. I’m happy that he got to run across the lawn, laughing.
But he can’t continue being Brother anymore.
Mother even buried him in a suit. She wouldn’t even give him that.