NaNoWriMo is upon us, ladies and gentlemen.
And I'm already behind. :O
But no worries. I'm spending today and tomorrow hurrying my butt up (and trying to axe-murder my inner editor: "Mom! I can't write without editing! 82% of my writing ability is editing!!")... PROMISE.
And just as a kind of preview...
I present the beginning. That I changed. Which got me behind. By, like, a day.
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I lay with my back on the bed, bawling my eyes out.
It wasn’t some kind of unnatural thing, though. I usually did this after a long week of being crammed into place after place – School, home, psychiatrist’s office; all of them were horrible places that constrained me, and by the time I got home on Friday, I was usually ready for the crying jag that kept me up half of the night.
It wasn’t just the places though that kept this ritual in practice. It was the fact that I was constantly being known for my other half; my twin brother, Les, who wasn’t ever completely there. He randomly say something about people that the rest of the family, if you would really call the disjointed group of people that lived in this house ‘family,’ didn’t know anything about.
He literally lived in his own little world that he visited constantly, sitting on the couch, watching cartoons with a muted volume.
It killed us all just to sit there and watch him.
All of us dealt with it differently, too, which had kind of killed any chance of being close to one another.
Mom had taken up both smoking and drinking on a daily basis, two fierce habits that she’d kicked long ago, after she’d had Les. Her hair remained in a forever-frizzy mess, usually combed back into some kind of bun, revealing her thin, bony cheeks and dulled green eyes. She was in a state of depression, and had even remarried just to get her spirits up, kicking Les aside and blaming his ‘disease’ on her first divorce – One that Les and I hadn’t even been alive for. She’d become a workaholic, along with our new stepfather, who we barely knew because he was constantly in San Francisco or New York on important business. Whenever he came home, Les and I would seek out refuge at a friend’s house, while August would just disappear for a while, leaving no notice of where she was going.
But then again, from her, we didn’t really expect anything.
August had taken the fact that her little brother was a shrink case pretty harshly, turning into a picture from the Goth’s Book of How to Dress in the Dark and putting down anything he said about ‘his people.’ The only difference (besides the dark, heavy makeup and the so-black-that-it’s-blue hair) was that she blamed the very people he talked about for the way he was. She was discreet about it, but she was always telling him to ditch his friends and come back to her, because even though they may want him there, she wanted him back more than anything like that. She wanted her brother.
It was so strange, though, that while they both blamed other people, that I blamed myself. As cliché as it may have sounded, that’s just the way it was.
I’d seen too many shows on Discovery Channel about the difference between twins, and more often than not, some aspect of the show would have to do with the twins that were mentally disabled because the other one had taken more of something, leaving the weaker one to struggle just to live.
To me, that was the story of Les and I; I’d taken what he needed in order to be normal for nine months, and now, for the last three years, he’d gotten his biological payback – Making my life a living nightmare.
“Kids!” Mom croaked from downstairs, where I could be almost sure she was getting ready to head out for a meeting again. “Get down here!”
I swiped at my eyes with the sleeves of my shirt, and hurried downstairs. Mom hadn’t ever seen me crying at anything like this, and there was no way I was going to start letting her now.
“Yeah?” I asked. Les sat on the couch, and looked up at me with a little smile. Even though we were so completely different, we still had that whole ‘twin’ thing that kept us from shooting each other. He could tell what was wrong with me before even I knew, and I could tell when he needed or wanted to talk – It was some kind of mutual psycho-thing that we’d had for as long as we’d been alive.
It was pretty amazing to look at Les and think that he was literally the other half of me. Beautiful green eyes and dark brown hair accented the unnaturally pale skin that both of us had been cursed with. It was just a shame that we weren’t identical; I had blonde hair that was always too thick to mess with, with blue eyes that were too blue – like a blueberry Popsicle stranded in the middle of a sea of white. I stuck out and blended in all at the same time, because of my looks, which were pretty, but not anything close to model-esce.
“You have to take Les to his appointment with Dr. Weber at six. I’m supposed to be down at the office in ten minutes, and God only knows how long that will last.”
I stared at her in disbelief. She had to be kidding. “Mom, we’ve never taken Les anywhere like that before. August and I don’t know what to do.”
She waved me off and picked up her keys. “Ask the receptionist or the doctor or anyone around. It’s not brain surgery, Enna.”
So there’s this teeny problem with my family. See, with Les being the way he is, and me being without a car, only August would be able to take us anywhere – and usually, she hates being in the same room as other people.
This would be interesting.
“We can ditch it.” Les coaxed. “We already know what he’s going to say.”
I shook my head. “Look, if this makes you get any better, we’re doing it.”
He frowned and turned back to the TV. He didn’t think he had a condition, and he got frustrated that it was brought up in a bad way. “The only thing that’s wrong with me,” he often said, “is that my family doesn’t trust my own judgment.”
Which, sadly, was true.
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Wordcount at the moment: Noneofyourbeeswax.
I'm in
that good of a writing mood. :P
