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The first week back you don't leave Gray’s side. You don't sleep at all. You study his bruises, watch how they fade from purple to yellow. You take blurry phone pictures of his scabs, the dark circles under his eyes. You lie next to him and keep checking for his exhalations with the back of your hand to make sure he's still breathing.
He's dead in all your dreams. Spaghetti sauce red, halved by teeth. Intestines showing like purls of sausage in marinara and you lurch awake gasping, trying not to aspirate bile. It's better to lie awake like a sentinel, listening to the suburbs. Birdsong, sprinklers, weed eaters, commuter traffic at dawn. If you want to sleep at all, you have to sleep with Gray. Your heart won’t do it without him.
The rest of the summer is a wash. Too many melatonin, not enough REM. Before Costa Rica you had high hopes for parties and weed and blowjobs, but they get ripped down in the aftermath of it all like piers in a tsunami, eaten like goats. You'd grieve that loss, maybe, were there not so many other things to grieve. Instead you live off the chlorine smell in your brother's hair, perpetual like light pollution. It's comforting, somehow, to know you can't go outside, look up, and stargaze.
With your ego sweat off in the jungle, Gray is fun, now. Or, Fun again. You remember the way it was before you turned thirteen and everything was ruined. Just the two of you, not quite two boys but more than one, Monopoly money and catch in the park and make believe games where you were a prince or a knight and he was a princess or a page, wrapped up in Mom's stolen shall there in the tree house before it was overrun with daddy long legs and mouse shit. Now it's cheesy 90s action movies in bed, microwave dinners, long afternoons at the neighbors lima bean shaped pool since he refuses to go to the community center and you understand why. Too many people who don't understand what it's like to be chased down, hunted.
Mom's given up on the old rules. Namely, the one where you're not allowed to be alone with your brother. Sick with guilt she makes a Costco pizza and lets you take it to bed. Gray gets sauce all over his hoodie, you yank it over his head, fuck up his hair, toss him one of your shirts like it's no big deal. He looks soft in it—like something beaten, battered. A chicken fillet hammered with Mom's wooden mallet before baking. You can't stop looking at him, you forget the Ninja Warrior marathon and lose time to the cup of his collarbone, milk white under the bleach-blotted neck of your shirt. The bone looks made for your teeth and maybe you should stop yourself from thinking that way, but you don't because so much of your mind is already made up of teeth in Grey's skin it hardly registers. That's all you are, most days. Teeth and Gray, like morse code.
He has nightmares, too. You alternate between who vaults up sweaty and shaking, finding the other in the covers. You like his room better since he stripped all his posters off the walls and left them a sterile, soothing white like an insane asylum. In your room you still have a picture of your ex-girlfriend up on your mirror and you haven’t cleaned since you got back. She stares at you with a fake smile and straw yellow hair. Before everything went to shit you used to jack off on your bed only half looking at her, and when you finished you’d tell yourself, I need to break up with Katie. You'd gotten bored of her like you got bored of every girl. Now, you wake up in your brother's room. If you don't, you wake up to the photo and think, I need to take that down. You’re always not doing the stuff you know you need to do.
Puberty gives up its slow, stalking approach and comes for your brother the first week of July. There's a block party with fireworks for the 4th, the air stinking like charcoal and hot dogs and gun-power so you have to shut the windows. You spoon Gray through the explosions, his body twitching against yours with each resounding boom. It's undeniable, this close: he doesn't smell like kid anymore. He all teenage sweat, hormonal and glandular and sharp and mouthwatering. He sticks in your throat, his voice cracks and you want to put your fingers in those cracks. It makes you ache and you have to cant your hips away from the shape of him, pretend it's just a thing your body does, like getting pimples or digesting food or startling awake with a racing heart just seconds after falling asleep.
The worst part is that new nightmares don't mean the old ones go away. Sometimes you still lurch awake from the memory of coach's leather couch. His house is special and scary, even in your dreams. The initial pride of being invited there giving way to stupid, bed-wetting terror. The smell of lotion and greasy fake-butter popcorn. The game, then porn playing on the giant flat screen TV. Two tan, muscled guys spitroasting a blonde. Coach’s hand on your thigh, his breath on your ear: you like blondes, right? You have that pretty blonde girlfriend. What’s her name? You don't remember which blonde you were dating back then, or what dating looked like when you were thirteen. You also don't remember what happened after coach leaned in—it's funny, actually, the way your brain protects you from some horrible shit, but not all of it.
The neighbors are old so they don't swim anymore. They play golf at the country club and putter in the front garden, wave from pristine yards. Look at you and Gray all tangled up with sad, pitying eyes. You don't mind the stares from the back window because the clear blue laps are good for you. Sputtering, blinding, one after the other after the other. Gray sits on the edge and refuses to come in, kicking bony ankles in the shallow end, skimming the eucalyptus leafs like crescents of cut nail. Last summer you would have dunked him, called him chicken. This summer, you don't say a word. You watch his mouth stain otter-pop red, you put your head under, you don't plug your ears.
Teeth, the stink of carrion. A bone snaps so loud you sit bolt upright in bed, panting. You're covered in sweat, the sheets a Chinese finger trap around your body as your room materializes. Cluttered desk, soccer posters, a humming computer monitor. The picture of Katie still taped to your mirror. You get up, you run from her, you return to the insane asylum where Gray is already awake, waiting for you.
Marco Polo once he finally climbs in the water. You lose on purpose, let him get his hands all over you. When you're supposed to be the one looking for him, the Marco, you keep forgetting the rules and opening your eyes to stare at him mired amid the shock of cyan a shade bluer than his eyes. He's changed, so you have to watch him. He's growing up faster than you knew anything could. A new lankiness to his body, his cheeks thinner, less puppy fat. You pin him to the scraping cement side, bite the side of his face while he kicks at you, shrieks. You lick over your teeth marks to tell him sorry, even though you're not sure what you're sorry for—losing, cheating, getting your teeth in his skin even though you're both so afraid of teeth, these days.
Just when you think you're almost normal again, something will remind you what a pipe dream normal is. If something has been dead in the road just long enough on a hot day, you’ll smell it and your heart will stop. You know that stink—all the little rotting bits of mutton and horse meat jammed between a dinosaur’s teeth. The dead-thing funk that gusted out of them in a tropical wind when they opened their jaws to make way for that deafening sound. You still can see Gray’s face, tear streaked and grimy as he clapped his hands over his ears.
Two weeks into not-normal, mom pulls you aside and asks when you're planning on sleeping in your own room again. Her eyes are pink from crying, and a part of you wants to put your fist in the drywall beside her head. I don't know you say, because it's easier than saying never.
A warm laptop propped on your knees and crumbs in the sheets and your brother's head pillowed on your shoulder. He burrows closer and closer and he's wearing your shirt again because he stole it that night and every time you see him in it, hanging down to his knees like a dress, your stomach drops like you skipped a step. Your gaze keeps drifting from the screen, your guts keep plummeting. Marco, Polo, a body you can find anywhere, even blindfolded in the pool, even in the jungle, even in the darkest of darks. You fall asleep, and when you wake up he's fitted into you and you're hard against the drowsing heat of him. Your eyes drift shut again—you tell yourself it's only a dream, and that's why it feels so good.
Your parents don't split. Not technically, anyway, but the schism remains. You think dad decided to stay for you and Gray, convinced himself he couldn't ditch two sons he almost lost. But it doesn't matter, because Gray finds other things to cry about. Roadkill, a spilled soda, a splinter, a broken computer charger, a knocked funny bone. He yelps and swears so you grab him, press his willowy body to the tiled kitchen island before propping his elbow up and kissing it. Your mom is out at her pilates class and Dad is locked in his home office so you think you can get away with it, but your wayward mouth only makes him cry harder.
You drop his arm. Step away, apologize with your guts knotted up like translucent fishing line. Gray pins you with steely eyes, twin tear tracks cutting down his cheeks in sticky stripes. His glare incinerates. You solemnly, silently vow to stop crossing lines, or, worse, pretending there aren't lines to cross.
He's still sulking at dinner, pushing cauliflower around his plate. You can't stand it. Before bed you knock on his door for the first time in a month instead of barging right in, knuckles stinging with impact. He says come in, and you do. Pick your way through the heaps of dirty laundry on his floor, curl up like a dog at the foot of his bed without touching him. You're mad about something, you mumble. What did I do?
He shuts his book, lies nothing through a pout. His face gets so serious sometimes you can forget he ever smiles, forget the rules of Marco Polo, forget he stole your shirt and forget the way he looks at you when the two of you are all alone. The way that makes you feel more like a man than anything in the world has ever made you feel like a man.
It's not nothing, you say. C'mon, buddy. You can tell me.
His nose crinkles to the side, his most common tic. No, I can't.
You reach out, find his foot in the sheets, risk squeezing it. He doesn't kick you off, but his eyes well up. You can tell me anything.
Most things, he concedes. But not everything.
You still wonder what Gray thinks happened during those hazy, nightmarish months after the thing with coach. He went to stay with Dad's brother and his wife for a few weeks to give the rest of the family “space” to deal with a “legal matter.” When he started asking questions, Mom said 'Zach was hurt at soccer practice.' Hurt. Like you twisted an ankle. Compound fracture. Had it hurt? You can’t remember. You'd been jacking off before it happened. The room was humid like the jungle, coach had offered you a beer, called you mature. Maybe you were too dizzy, too drunk, too special for it to hurt. It all looks so fucking stupid and obvious now, from where you're standing.
So yeah—you get it. You have your secrets from him, too.
For a long time it felt like Mom would never see you the same way. A pinched face, still pink from crying even years later, like grief is a bad sunburn. With that sunburn came a series of new rules: constant check in phone calls, curfews, embarrassing "screenings" of new friend's parents, since predators could be lurking anywhere. No sleep overs, no unsupervised trips to the mall. And worst of all—the open door policy within the house. Like you might turn the shit coach taught you on Gray, given the chance.
The easiest way to move on after it all was to obsess over girls. Show mom, show the world, show yourself that you were normal in spite of it all. So you dated indiscriminately, cheated a lot, texted and snapchatted. Always hunting for a new mark to charm and sweet talk and smile at. You were an expert at stealing away under bleachers or into coat closets to hook up. It didn't matter if you liked them, if they were pretty. It was about coach. You needed to prove that he hadn't broken you, sullied you, turned you. But the desperation to outrun filth is something only dirty people have, and there was no outrunning dirt. It stopped you from casually touching Gray for years. Even still, there are days you're surprised you don't leave sooty hand prints on his skin. Smears of Vaseline and popcorn grease in angry strips.
Dawn wakes you, cold blue fingers pressing into your eyes. Someone's dog barks and mockingbirds imitate car alarms from the telephone wires. You find your brother in the sheets, dig your feet against his burning hot legs before you remember he was weird about you touching him yesterday—he still wouldn't sleep alone, he still wanted you close, but not too close.
Sorry, you rasp, trying to disentangle yourself from where you're clawed around him, limbs twined.
No, he mumbles in a tiny voice, dragging you back, very awake. Don't go. Then: I'm being dumb.
You're not dumb, you tell him. Your eyes adjust to colorlessness, the world the shade of his name while your heart hammers against his spine like it wants your bones to fuse. You think of the way his elbow felt under your lips in the kitchen. How it pissed him off, how hard you're trying not to fuck him up. But you're dirty, you can't get it right, and before you can stop yourself you're kissing the back of his neck where the knob of his spine is flocked in fine, mousy hair. Then you wince, wait for him to say STOP in that insolent kid brother way he's mastered.
Instead he sighs a sigh like a sob and finds your hand in the sheets. Your fingers tangle, locked in a puzzle on his stomach. You kiss him again, this time without pulling sway. You’re always not doing the stuff you know you need to do. Like STOP.
When Gray was four or five he wanted to play wedding. It wasn't as weird as it sounds— he'd raid mom's closet and drape himself in smuggled garments and you'd walk him down the aisle and your action figures and his stuffed dinosaurs would weep from the tinker toy pews. Your uncle had gotten married that fall and Gray was fascinated by the ceremony, too little to feel self conscious about his fixation. You didn't want to play a dumb girly game like that, but he made you feel like a man, he has always made you feel like a man, somehow, and as a man you didn't want to say no to your baby brother or tease him for the things he liked to do. So you'd go through the motions, take his lead. Say I do and lift the gauuzy hem of mom's white negligee from his face to kiss him big and silly, mwah. Then, he'd race back to the beginning, and you'd do it all over again. When he wanted to play it in the yard you would gently usher him up the ladder into the tree-house, calling it the chapel. Even at nine, you knew this was a game meant for solitude. That f someone else saw—they just wouldn't get it.
Katie finally dumps you a moth after you come back wrong, saves you the trouble of having to dump her first. A month of you ignoring her calls, a month of her picture fading in the sun pouring through windows of a room you no longer sleep in. She shows up in the driveway in brand new coke-white keds, all made up and shiny like a newly minted dime. You're surprised— you thought she'd just fade out, disappear like the stars into the suburban smog but here she is, lips pursed while you lean on Mom's van and stare at your bare feet on the burning concrete, waiting for something to blister.
She lectures you and you wish she’d hurry up already. You need to get back inside to the A/C oasis, to Gray's room where you can lie next to him and stare at your phone and listen to his breath while he plays his nerdy civilization game on the computer. You had been toasting a bagel to split and now you’re worried it's burnt or he's eaten it all without you or else he's dead, because when you can’t see him you always worry he’s dead.
Where have you fucking been? she snarls.
Right here, you tell her. Meaning your parents house, the suburbs, but also, the A/C oasis with Gray. The glittering pool. His twin bed. The Chinese fingertrap. The treehouse where you got married, over and over and over again. This whole time I've been right here. I haven't left.
It goes about how you'd expect. Katie cries, and you say all the wrong things. When she leaves, you notice a black scuff on her brand new shoe, and you almost feel guilty.
Gray never bothered to learn any of your girlfriends names. When you introduced him to some other blonde before Katie, he slouched on the sofa with daggers in his eyes: Whats the poiny of learning her name? You called him a rude little shit and he shrugged without looking up from his gameboy. There will just be a new one in a week.
You complained to Dad: he ruins my dates on purpose. He's a jerk to every girl I bring home.
He's jealous, Dad wearily explained, stirring creamer into his coffee. You grew up, your interests changed. Now, his best bud is paying attention to other people. I remember when my brother started dating— I felt replaced. Left out. One day we were playing T ball and catching frogs and the next he was wearing cheap cologne. Give him a break, Zach—when he gets older and starts to notice girls, he'll understand.
Will he? you thought, unconvinced. Even then, you knew Gray was different, somehow. That he wouldn't get older, or he wouldn't notice girls, or he wouldn't understand. Sometimes it felt like you were the one who had to grow. Like he was just standing on the sidelines waiting for you, rolling his eyes, demanding you quit fucking around and catch up.
Katie leaves, you go back inside. The house didn't burn down and Gray is alive but he's crying like you put your mouth on his bones again. What?! you ask, swiping the untouched bagel from the paper plate on his bedside table, heart still thudding, mouth bitter from every unkind word you spat.
Snot bubbles from his nose and he wipes it with the back of his hand. It's one of the few things that gives you away as brothers—you've always had the same nose, slightly upturned at the tip. What did she want? he snaps, voice scathing.
She wanted to know why I'd been ghosting her. You sit on the bed, he draws his bony knees to his chest and shoots fire at you. Like a reflex you think of the way his cornsilk hair feels on your tongue when you suck it into your mouth while he sleeps, and you don't know why you're thinking of that, you don't know why it makes you feel so crazy that he's mad at you and you can't lick his tears up and in spite of everything you've been through together this summer, there are still things you don't understand about your little brother. She dumped me, you say then, glaring right back at him. Are you happy?
He looks down, picks at a string on the duvet. I don't know, he says eventually, but something about it sounds closer to yes.
Relief floods you, tingles in your limbs. You crawl to him, you put him in a headlock, you get his hair in your mouth and suck the chlorine out of it, tickling him until he goes limp and wheezes with teary-laughter. You think, maybe, he's relieved, too.
Things might have gone on forever like this: hazy, Popsicle sticky, swimming pool blue, but not lit on fire. You look back sometimes, try to find the fork in the road and trace it with shaky fingers. Try to sniff out the moment whatever path you and Gray were stumbling down together became too narrow and treacherous to turn back from. But then you remember the tree house weddings, his bitter jealousy, his fierce possession. The way he looked up at you with starry eyes and made you feel like a man. Not just any man—the biggest man, the most important man, the only man. It was always like that, even before the thing with coach, even before the dinosaurs. So maybe there was only ever one road, and all you could do was trip along it. Barefoot, bleeding, into the dark.
Gray loses his last baby tooth at the pool. Rips it out, a stinging premolar he's been fruitlessly tonguing for months. The others have been dropping out for the last few years, you remember trying to convince him to leave them under the pillow. He'd rolled his eyes and kicked your ankle. It was funny—he was such a baby in some ways but light years ahead of you in others. He figured out Santa and the Tooth Fairy were made up at the ripe age of six, too logical and cuttingly observant for your parents to keep tricking him. You couldn't sneak anything past Gray.
He holds the tooth in his palm, hair slicked in a dark swath across his brow. It's bloody, a fine crimson root still adhered to the base. You take it from him and pocket it in your swim trunks. Open up, you say taking his chin in your hand. Show me the hole.
He does. Lets his jaw hang open, lets you stare at the gummy vacancy, unable to stop dragging the tip of his little pink tongue over that new ragged mouth within a mouth. And if there was a moment from which you couldn't return from, it was this one: the pool water lapping at your waist while you twitched to shocking, conscious, daylight-hardness for your brother's mouth. His his breath in your lungs, his tooth in your pocket, the sun beating down on the two of you so hot you thought you might go up in flames.