The Re-do
Sitting at my dead brother’s desk, I seriously contemplated arson.
A thousand years had passed over the course of three days, and I’d found myself in a cataclysmic hell where every second was plagued by the two worst things that had ever happened to me: losing Benji a year and a half ago, and the moment that redhead stepped into Sequest. These moments were not mutually exclusive.
These moments were, in fact, wound so tightly around each other that it felt almost like time had become slippery, and I’d ended up moving backward.
Suddenly, the wound was fresh and I was bleeding out, and I couldn’t fucking breathe.
I blamed her. Waltzing in here like she was doing me a kindness, a favor.
That hesitant doe-eyed glitter emanating off her as she gazed at me like maybe she expected a thank you when it took everything in me not to fall to my knees in the lobby.
I’d been okay. Or at least I’d been scraping by.
I worked. I went home. I dodged calls from my mother and pacified my friends’ concerns with irregular responses to texts and emails, the occasional FaceTime.
I’d even humored Bree’s latest scheme to keep an eye on me by letting Gav crash at my apartment for the last six weeks.
Things in my life weren’t good, by any means, but I’d gotten to the point where I woke up in the morning and my brain didn’t reach into the dark.
I’d get up and get ready for the day. I was fine.
And now it was fucked. All that progress in the wind because of the incompetency of the United States Postal Service and a good samaritan in a red dress.
Fuck. I had to stop thinking about the dress.
Arson was clearly the answer. I would come back in the middle of the night and douse Sequest in gasoline.
A few years in prison would be preferable to my life in its current state.
I’d make sure the employees were taken care of, I’d fund the rebuild myself, and I’d never have to walk into this haunted house of an office ever again, let alone think about the letter screaming at me from the desk drawer.
But if it was possible to forget, arson would be overkill. Throwing it away would suffice.
I doubled over in the chair Benji spent a small fortune on, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes until pops of color impeded the dark.
I knew I had to tell someone about the letter.
Gav had been watching me like a hawk since I strayed from my routine that day she showed up; instead of arriving home at 5:45, I’d gone to a bar and drunk roughly a gallon of whiskey, stumbling into my apartment sometime after dark.
In the morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, a plastic mixing bowl on my nightstand, and Gav sitting by the door in a chair he’d dragged in from the living room, watching over me so I wouldn’t choke on my own vomit after I passed out.
I couldn’t remember crying, but from the way my eyes stung, I knew it’d happened. I’d hidden so well for over a year only to slip up on a bad day. From the way Gav looked at me, I’d confirmed every one of his worst fears.
I wanted to reassure him that I was fine, but there was no point. So I looked him in the eye and said, “Please don’t tell Bree about this.”
Gav was a fool in most respects, more intent on making people laugh than being taken seriously.
He was the living embodiment of comedic relief, but he was also the most loyal person I knew.
He cared with his whole chest; that he’d moved in with me in a pathetic attempt to watch over me was proof of it.
I knew, somehow, he’d spent the night grappling with indecision, whether he should alert Bree of my meltdown or wait and see what happened in the morning.
Gav had always been a wait-and-see guy.
“Okay,” he’d said quietly. Later, he pressed me to talk about it, and I did my best to reassure him that night had been a fluke on a bad day.
He didn’t buy it, but he’d stopped digging for answers, opting to just watch me more closely.
And considering Bree hadn’t showed up on my doorstep, he’d kept his word.
But it was exhausting, carrying this new aspect of the loss.
A responsibility tied to it. I’d always thought you were allowed to make your way through grief at your own pace and now, suddenly, I had an obligation to face it head on.
Because while this letter had found its way into my hands, it didn’t belong to me.
But I couldn’t think about Cat. Instead, I daydreamed about burning down the charity that gave my brother purpose along with the last words he’d ever written for the love of his life, and I wanted to take a pen and shove it into my ear until I hit brain.
It was a mistake, taking over Benji’s job. When I stepped down from my position at Stall, I’d intended to get myself together before figuring out what came next. And then a call from my accountant confirming a tax write-off had me driving fifteen hours to Boston.
A few months before Benji died, he showed up out of the blue at my apartment in Chicago.
I hated living so far away, and my debilitating fear of flying made visits few and far between.
He and Cat had made the trip for Bree’s annual Friendsgiving event, and then I’d driven to Massachusetts to spend Christmas at Mom’s.
As thrilled as I was to see Benji on a random Tuesday, I knew better than to believe he simply wanted to see his little brother.
We sat on my couch, facing a wall of windows looking out onto Lake Michigan. Benji folded his hands in his lap, eyes downcast, everything about him seeming heavy and tense.
“You know I wouldn’t do this if there was another way,” he’d said, his voice cracking.
“I’ve never asked you for anything, not like this.
I never wanted to be the one to need you, August. But…
” He’d broken off, rubbing his eyes. “Sequest means everything to me. I didn’t realize this was my dream until it was right in front of me and now…
I can’t lose it. These kids can’t lose it.
I know it’s too much to ask. I know that. But I have to.”
I’d put my hand on his shoulder and offered a smile I hoped reassured him that I wanted him to need me. I wanted to help.
I’d given him a blank check and he broke down in tears, hugging me tighter than he ever had. And when he only cashed in $10,000, I sent another donation anonymously, tacking on another couple zeros.
“You’re a goddamn menace,” he’d said on the phone later. He spent the rest of the call saying thank you.
I never meant to stay at Sequest. It was supposed to be a meeting to set up an annual donation in Benji’s name.
I knew I could have made a phone call, but I’d never seen it in person, this place Benji called his dream.
He talked about Sequest all the time. Told me about the kids, how funny they were, how much heart they had, how significant it felt to be a safe space for them.
He’d found his purpose. When I walked through the door, he was everywhere.
In the colorful decor, the tangerine-scented air freshener, a painting of his hung on the wall.
Behind the desk, Mary took one look at me and knew who I was.
In addition to breaking their hearts, Benji’s loss had proved detrimental to Sequest; he’d been the one to talk one-on-one with the kids; they trusted him, confided in him, adored him.
He made them feel safe and seen and understood.
Without him, the kids weren’t opening up, that is if they showed up at all, and the rest of the employees were floundering.
They were in trouble, and this time, it had nothing to do with money.
It was supposed to be temporary. I was going to help them find someone I thought Benji would approve of, and help with some of the digital media that he’d been in charge of.
A few days into it, I was sitting behind his desk, trying to make sense of his filing system, when Mary brought in a glum teenager.
She had a pageboy haircut and a split lip. Her name was Mae.
“Mary said you’re Benji’s brother,” she’d said, regarding me warily, arms crossed. I’d nodded. Immediately, Mae dropped her arms, everything about her softening, and she dropped into the cushy chair facing me, her eyes welling up. “I miss him so much. We all do.”
“Okay,” I’d replied, pushing down the instinct to retreat. She needed Benji and all she’d get was me. But here she was, trying. The least I could do was try. “Well, we have that in common. That’s a start.”
When she smiled, it resurrected something in my barren chest.
I was unsteady, uncertain, but the kids seemed to respect that I didn’t put on a front.
I was honest. I didn’t speak down to them.
It had been a long time since I felt warm, but it existed in me, if only in this room to help the kids who sat in front of me.
They were struggling, with their home lives, their sexualities, their identities, and that was something I understood, to an extent.
It took a while to come to terms with my bisexuality—fervent denials and reassurances that I hadn’t looked too long at my shirtless friend in the locker room, that I didn’t fantasize about kissing him, that when we ended up hooking up, it was a drunken experiment.
I spent years suppressing it, dimming myself down, and I hated myself a little bit.
Bree, the hurricane that she was, tore my life into disrepair as she flagrantly showcased how great it was to embrace your queerness.
She never pushed me to come out, but when I finally did, she wrapped an arm around me and said in the sweetest possible tone, Obviously.