In our world, there was every chance that he wasn’t necessarily wrong.
I also listened to him as he’d had to grow up very fast and deserved the respect and dignity that came from surviving a harsh road that I hadn’t been able to change nearly as much as I wished. There were times I could close my eyes and see the small bloody footprints on that blackly grim path. That my larger ones were beside his every step of the way didn’t help. Didn’t absolve.
I was fifteen and I was smart. More than smart. I could admit that because it wasn’t boasting. Being more than smart meant knowing too much. If I’d had a choice, I would’ve chosen to be less smart. I would’ve chosen not to know all about absolution and how hard it was to come by.
Impossible on some days.
As for right now . . . I’d grown up as quickly as Cal, but if I hadn’t—if I’d been a normal fifteen-year-old, I would still know this: you show respect to a warrior. For Cal to have survived our childhood, he was a warrior. I gave him his due. Anything else would’ve made me less of a brother.
He put down his pencil and raised his eyes from the carelessly rumpled paper. I swallowed the sigh and reminded myself that there were worse things than a messy nature. Cal was a good brother and a good kid when, if they’d lived his life, other children would be feral as wild dogs and amoral as sharks at dinnertime. Cal was amazingly, painfully human in comparison and not once did I overlook that.
I reached over and gave him an encouraging tap on the back of his hand as he hesitated, something he rarely did. Cal knew his own mind about generally everything under the sun and all the other suns in at least half our galaxy. “Go on, grasshopper. Tell me.”
Gray eyes, the same as mine and that of our mother, Sophia, blinked; then he shrugged. “I smelled it. On him.”
That’s where the discomfort entered the picture. Cal didn’t like admitting he could do something other people couldn’t. He didn’t want to be different. I told him that sometimes different is good, sometimes it’s better. It was one of the few times in his life he hadn’t believed me.
“Okay,” I said, calm as if that was something I heard every day. I pretended not to see the flush of shame behind his pale skin. He wouldn’t want to talk about it and if I tried, it would make it worse. On certain matters Cal was determined that no positive spin could be put on it and that was that. Stubborn, so stubborn. “What exactly did you smell?”
He shrugged again. “I got off the bus at the corner with the other kids.” To say that Cal could take care of himself better than your average eleven-year-old was something of an understatement, but I made certain he played it safe all the same. That he stayed with a crowd or a group of other people if he could. “I was walking home and he was at his mailbox by the sidewalk. When I passed him, I smelled it. He smelled like blood. A lot of blood. After he went inside, I snuck around to his backyard and got close to the house. There are tiny kinda half windows to the basement. I think they’re covered up with cardboard on the inside or painted because I couldn’t see anything.” He made a face. “But I could still smell. It’s like roadkill. His basement smells like a mountain of roadkill.”
He gave a third shrug, a habit I was going to have to break and soon while I was still sane. “He has a basement full of dead bodies,” he declared, “and that means he’s a serial killer.”
End of story. Which was my brother’s way. If he became a lawyer when he grew up, he’d have the most succinct closing arguments in any court system in America.
He had already picked up his pencil again and gone back to the math problems. It wasn’t that he liked math or homework of any kind, but he knew no homework meant no TV. That motivated him to no end . . . normally. What motivated him now was the amount of trouble he knew was coming his way.
“You went prowling around the man’s windows? Cal, how could you do something so stupid? He could’ve shot you. If he’d seen you, he would’ve shot you,” I snapped. This was the type of neighborhood where everyone, little old ladies included, had guns, and if they saw a shadowy shape that remotely looked as if it was trying to break in a window, they would shoot first and not bother to wait long enough to register the shape was the size of a child.