Chapter 2

Adrian and Madeline settled into our lives like they had always been a fixture. I still have no idea how that happened because one day I was minding my own business, having my own life, with its usual ups and downs, and then I got myself a brother.

A stepbrother. The difference is important. It’s actually the one thing I kept telling myself as I fell to my doom. Since we’re not related by blood ... anything goes, right?

Save for the part where sodomy is a mortal sin, and as a good choir boy, I should stay away from anything remotely looking like I’d like that: to be sodomized – what a word – by my stepbrother.

But I’m running ahead, and I bet no one cares about my interior demons and what they do to me on a daily basis.

For a couple of days after moving in, I saw little of Adrian. He was always somewhere; it was like he couldn’t bear the simple thought of being inside. True enough, it was a glorious summer at the time. Only bookish nerds like me would choose to stay inside rather than do the things young people do when it’s hot outside and everything seems possible.

If things had stayed the same – me inside, him outside – it would’ve been freaking swell. But my dad had a different opinion about how his new family was supposed to function. That included me taking care of that good-for-nothing bad boy. You see, from the start, I got it into my head that it’d be damn good to label him because he pissed me off so much.

Or maybe other things were pissing me off. Such as how I recalled, so clearly, the way his skin smelled or the feel of his rough hand on my skin when he’d wrestled me on the bed in his room, treating everything – me included – as a joke.

“Jordan, go find your brother. His mom needs him here for dinner,” my dad said through my bedroom door, shouting loud enough to make me consider getting a new pair of headphones. Not that I afforded it; my dad didn’t care about things that weren’t a ‘need’. And I didn’t ‘need’ new headphones.

“I’m sure he’ll show up,” I shouted back.

But my dad was already gone, which meant that I had to suck it and find my stupid brother. Damn, it was one thing that Dad considered him my brother, but did he think that asshole was his son? After two days he and his mom spent under our roof?

There was no one I could yell at, not that my dad tolerated any yelling. I knew he had a heavy hand as a fact. So, groaning for show though there was no one to witness my reluctance, I began dressing to go outside.

Where could that idiot be? Seeing how he looked, he was probably hanging out by the old quarry where all the cool kids went to sneak beers and cigarettes. That was my first choice.

And I was right, of course. Adrian was there, one arm hung over the shoulders of a chick who had come back from college after only two unproductive years and now shared her time between hanging out here and working a dead-end job at the local mart.

She wore too much makeup and was a couple of years older than him. Not that I gave a damn about any of that. What I had to do was drag my brother away from her and take him back to his loving family.

“Hey,” I called out, making most guys and gals there look at me.

Not Adrian. He was busy whispering in that chick’s ear, and she was busy laughing at whatever stupid jokes he told her.

I wasn’t one of them. They knew me as the weirdo who went to church too much with other weirdos. So their looks would soon turn hostile; I knew it.

“Hey,” I said louder.

The fucker ignored me, but his new girlfriend didn’t. She locked eyes with me and chewed on her bubble gum more aggressively. I didn’t want to get any closer because I’d have some of that hostility present starting to surround me.

“Hey,” I yelled for real this time.

Adrian snapped his head in my direction. “The fuck you want, choir boy?”

His audience – of course, they were his audience because it was his type of crowd – started laughing and hooting. I dug my nails into my palms so hard I could scream in pain.

“Home, now. Dinner’s ready,” I said and turned on my heel.