32. Aeron
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
AERON
Ican’t get the fucking ink right.
I’ve been sitting at my desk for twenty minutes, pressing a loaded brush against silk, and every stroke bleeds where I don’t want it to. Maybe the fabric is too thin for what I’m trying to do. Or my hands won’t stop shaking long enough to control the line.
The bedside lamp is the only light source. Just the lamp throwing a single cone onto my desk while the rest of the room is dark.
I set the brush down and flex my fingers. Ink stains the creases of my knuckles. My jaw aches from clenching.
My sister is a real—
She stood in the hallway earlier with her arm against the wall like a barricade. Like I’m a child who can’t be trusted to walk ten feet to his own room without being intercepted and interrogated about my eating habits and my decisions.
I know I shouldn’t have shoved her though.
The memory keeps replaying. My palm connecting with her shoulder. Her back hitting the wall. The look on her face, all of the fight draining out of her.
I don’t even remember deciding to do it. My body just acted on its own, all my anger forcing its way out.
I glance down at my hands as they tremble. I pick up the brush again to try another stroke. It feathers out on the silk, ruined.
There’s acid in my throat. I don’t want to be someone who puts his hands on his sister. That person is every man Mom warned June about.
(That person was me, twenty minutes ago.)
I open my desk drawer and reach past the rolls of washi tape, behind the mason jar of paper clips I never use. A half-empty baggie is there. I hold it up in the lamplight, watching the powder settle along the bottom seam.
I’ve been trying not to use but it’s starting to get to me.
I’m having mood swings so hard I can’t predict who I’ll be from one hour to the next.
Clean is supposed to make me better, but it’s making me worse, making me shove my sister against the wall.
Or maybe this is just who I am underneath, and the coke was the only thing keeping the worst version of me quiet.
I shove the baggie back and close the drawer.
The silk piece is beyond saving, so I wipe the brush on a rag and try one more line anyway. It pools and spreads, formless. It’s the representation of my thoughts right now, every creative impulse muffled before it reaches my fingers.
I drop the brush in the water cup and give up. Then I move to the bed and sit. I hunch forward and press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I see color bursts. Red. Then white. Then nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice is in my head.
“I’m sorry I lectured you…”
She didn’t finish but her voice cracked and she sounded like she meant it.
I could tell her about the cocaine. That I’ve been snorting lines in this room for weeks and I can feel it changing me into someone I don’t recognize. She’d lose her mind and yell for hours.
Maybe. Or… what if she reacted different this time?
If the crack in her voice was real, she’d listen first. She’d let me talk before she panicked.
I smile to myself. No, this is my sister. All June has ever done when I try to share something is react so big there’s no room left for what I was trying to say. I open my mouth, and she fills the silence with lectures and fixes until I forget what I was going to tell her.
I couldn’t tell Dorien, either. His focus has been somewhere else for weeks, wrapped up in June. I’d have to wait in line for his attention (I’d be waiting a long time).
Cinna can barely acknowledge I exist at a food truck thing, so she could care less about me.
Mom? I imagine telling her, and her face goes blank, the way it does when she doesn’t know how to reach me. She’d give me that searching look, then I’d get some cookie-cutter therapist advice. Finally, she’d go quiet, and I’d sit in that quiet and wish I hadn’t said anything.
That leaves Carter. I could tell him. He’s never been in my face about anything, always been friendly. He’s who he’s always been. Even though he’s hooking up with one of June’s friends, he’s the same guy.
He’s at a Hargrove swim match tonight, but out of everyone, Carter is the one who listens without making it about himself.
I could say, “Hey, I started using this and now it’s getting hard to stop and I think it’s turning me into someone I don’t want to be.
” Carter would nod and say, “That sounds rough, man.” He’d ask what I wanted to do about it instead of telling me. Then he’d help, just like that.
So maybe. Maybe I’ll tell him. Because this thing is getting out of hand and I’m not sure what to do.
Tiredness suddenly creeps into my marrow. It’s barely seven but I’m ready to pass out. Mom knocked a half hour ago and asked if I wanted dinner. I passed. Now my stomach is growling but the thought of walking downstairs and getting food feels impossible.
I click off the bedside lamp. The room goes completely dark. I lie back without changing out of my jeans and hoodie, without pulling back the sheets. I just need to sleep and forget, so I close my eyes. I’ll decide in the morning if I’m going to talk to Carter.
My mind is close to slipping under when my phone buzzes on the nightstand. Then again. And again. It’s a rapid burst of so many that my phone almost vibrates off the edge of the wood.
I groan. If it’s Carter sending memes during the swim match, I’m throwing my phone across the room.
I roll over and grab it. The screen is blinding in the dark, so I squint and try to make sense of things. An unknown number has sent me a string of images.
I open the thread as I yawn and try to focus.
The first image is a small leather-bound book. June’s diary. I’ve seen it around the house a hundred times, and it’s emerald. You don’t usually see emerald leather diaries.
I sit up, suddenly less tired, and flip the lamp back on. My pulse is hammering.
The next image is a page from the diary, with June’s loopy, messy cursive. The sender circled part of the image in red, so I read that snippet: “Seriously, my brother is too passive for his own good. He’s always hanging out in the kitchen but doesn’t say anything. Speak up man!”
Another page: “At the exhibition show today. Dorien there. Irritating man!! Aeron was hovering. I wonder what he thought of my piece because he didn’t really say anything…”
I swipe through more. The images aren’t in order. Some entries are from months ago about things I barely remember, some more recent. All of them are about me in some way. These are June’s private thoughts about me, and the overall message is “disappointment.”
I’m too quiet. I’m all over the place with my art. I’m not trying hard enough. I hover. I don’t speak up. I’m making bad decisions.
The entry about the weed: “It’s illegal!
How can my brother be doing something illegal?
! What if he’s smoking it at school?? Is he trying to get caught and get suspended and throw away the money Mom spent on his education?
WTF! She’s worked so hard to get us both into school and Aeron doesn’t even care! ”
My vision blurs, and I blink rapidly to keep seeing the screen. My throat is closing, muscles tightening from the base of my jaw all the way down to my collarbones.
She never writes “failure,” “loser,” or “disappointment” directly. But she doesn’t have to. I can hear the truth under every sentence: I wish my brother were different.
I swipe to the next image. Then the next.
And then to the one that ends me.
“Wow. Wow I don’t even know where to begin.
I was looking at baby pictures with Mom and she had some wine, so pretty tipsy.
It was hilarious at first, but we opened up a dusty box of random photos.
And she pulls out one of her in the hospital holding Aeron.
I’ve never seen the picture, but she looked sad.
She was crying in it, but it wasn’t a face like, ‘Look at my beautiful baby!’ It was like real despair.
So I asked her. Just… wow. She said Aeron was unplanned, like a ‘whoops’ because she’d made a mistake with her birth control.
Her and Dad were starting to have problems around that time.
Mom literally said, ‘I never wanted to be a boy mom. I only wanted one child. Just a girl.’ I wasn’t sure what to say… ”
A few images later: “Thinking about when Mom said Aeron wasn’t planned. I love my brother but I was thinking, what if he was never born? My life would be so different.”
There are more images, but I’m done. I lock my phone and set it face-down on the nightstand.
My face is wet, but the crying is silent.
I stare at the wall opposite my bed, at a poster of starlight, and tears travel down my cheeks and drip off my jaw.
I think I’m feeling absolutely nothing. I really don’t know why there are tears because I’m completely empty inside.
She never wanted me.
Mom held me in that hospital and cried because I was a mistake she couldn’t undo.
Somehow, I’ve always known that, it just wasn’t on the surface.
I’ve felt it in every careful sentence she chose around me, every time she brushed June’s hair from her face mid-conversation and then looked at me like she was trying to remember where I fit in the picture.
In her heart, she’s only ever held the image of the two of them. Mother and daughter. Her heart holds no picture of the three of us.
Now I finally have proof.
And proof brings a strange kind of quiet. It’s a validation so complete it’s almost peaceful.
Mom never wanted me. And, clearly, my sister likes the idea of being an only child.
The tears dry on my face. My breathing is steady. My hands, which have been shaking for three days, are perfectly still.
I reach for my sketchbook, the good one, with the thick paper that drinks graphite. I find a pencil, cross my legs on the bed, then prop the book against my knee.
I open to a fresh page and start drawing. I know exactly what I want to make because my thoughts are finally clear. I’m clear because I’ve stopped fighting what I’ve always known.
Nobody wants me here.
So why stay?