Chapter 12 Monster #3
Connor’s car was blocking the driveway, so I came in through the front door, which is how I find him the way I do.
He’s curled in a ball on my couch, a full ashtray in front of him, puffing away on a cigarette he holds between his thumb and forefinger, nose red, eyes wet, hair pulled back so tight it takes a year off his young face.
We don’t smoke in the house, but I refrain from mentioning that. He looks rough. I linger near the door. “Are you okay?”
My voice startles him. I don’t think he even knew I was here, and I wasn’t exactly stealth in my entrance, drunk as I am. It’s disturbing—like he’s in a trance. Or high.
Goddamnit, he better not fucking be high.
His eyes are wide with fear as he focuses them on me. Then I watch the fear give way to something more despondent, and he resumes his position, staring at nothing. “Leave me alone.”
“I just asked if you were all right.”
“And I just asked you to leave.”
Drunk must bring out the monster in me. Either that or he does. And I’m suddenly done. I’m done walking on eggshells in my own house. I’m done with his bullshit. I’m fucking over it. “It’s my house, Connor. You don’t get to tell me where to go in it.”
“Your house,” he says with disgust. “Go to hell then.”
Words I’ll probably regret pour out of me—unfiltered and mean.
“Fuck you. Fuck you for your judgment and your shitty attitude. Fuck you for making me feel like a piece of shit every day. You don’t know me.
” Connor flinches at my rising volume, but I keep going.
“You never even tried. But I tried with you. I stayed here for you. Do you think I wanna be in this town? I’m here for you—so you can finish school.
Stop being such an ungrateful brat. Stop hating me so fucking much, because I don’t deserve it. ”
He sits straight up, his eyes gleaming like onyx. “You don’t deserve anything Archer. Not the house—not the money—you left. And you got everything.”
“You’re goddamn right I did. He owes me.” I point at the screen porch like my father is still standing there. I rub the inheritance in partly because I hate my brother right now, and also because my father does—he fucking owes me.
“For what? For raising you and putting a roof over your head? Making sure you always had everything you needed?”
“Everything I needed?” I counter, coming closer to him, but remaining on the opposite side of the coffee table. “What do you know about what I needed?”
“I never wanted to believe her, but she was right about you. You are one of the most horrible human beings I've ever met in my life. You have no heart. You have no idea what love is or family or any of it. There’s something wrong with you. You're a fucking monster.”
His words are like stabs. With each new sentence, he yanks the knife out and plunges it in again.
I waver between destroyed and enraged. I could go either way.
If I weren’t so drunk, the destruction would win like it usually does, but as it turns out, his words flip another switch in me.
All my anger comes roaring to the surface—the same way it did when I was eight years old, and I finally realized I didn’t have to take any more of her shit.
I come around the coffee table, bending over my cruel little brother until I’m in his face. He doesn’t flinch. “You want a little history lesson, Connor? 'Cause I can tell you all about my life, if that's what you want. You wanna know the truth about me?”
“Shut up,” he shouts.
I wince and close my eyes, but it only takes a moment for me to start in again. “There is not a fucking thing wrong with me. She lied to you. She lied to your dad, she lied to the doctors, she lied to everyone, but she didn’t fool me. I was on to her. From the very beginning, and she knew it.”
His dark eyes widen with something more like terror. I lean in an inch closer, and he takes a sharp breath before he shuts his eyes and turns his head to block me out.
But it won't work this time. No fucking way. He went too far. He pushed the red button. “Do you know what I’m talking about? Did she do it to you, too? Did she do it to your other brother?”
I feel the hit before I even see it coming. It knocks me back against the coffee table. He gets the side of my head with his knuckles. And his rings, as it turns out, are no joke.
The coffee table breaks my fall and itself in the process. Wood splinters. The room spins around me.
He’s breathing heavily, tears streaking his cheeks. Ashes from his cigarette drop with disregard onto my custom made couch. I’m shaking from alcohol and rage—from the memory of that mortar and pestle.
I get up, brushing splinters off my clothes. “You were the golden boy, weren’t you? I bet you never fucked up. I bet you were her dream come true with your violin and your pretty face. I remember you, you know? From back then? She let you sleep all the time.”
His gasp is terrible, enough to shut me up and make me really look at him. Enough to make me question whether he got out of that house as unscathed as I did.
Quickly he covers his face with his hands and screams into them. It lays chills all up and down my spine. And here’s the broken thing in me. The thing that knows how to shut down and get the fuck out. The thing that says, it’s not you, it’s him.
It’s. Him.
Looking at my brother now, I know something I never would have believed before. Connor got it worse. I don’t know why or how, but I know with nauseating certainty that he is far more broken than I am.
But more than that, I know I’ll never be able to put him back together.
I wasn’t raised that way.