*.*.*.*.*.*

August 26

I get home in the evening, skipping going shopping with my friends. They're excited for the football season, and since Riley is kinda-sorta dating the star quarterback, she wants to dress to impress. As for me, I'm not feeling so well. I'm tired all the time now.

Maybe Marla is right and I should see a doctor. She's noticed it, the changes in my behavior and metabolism. Having to eat something every few hours or drinking excessive amounts of water that make me rush to the bathroom every two hours is bad enough, suddenly feeling the urge to sleep is another thing entirely.

It's not normal as far as I can tell.

Walking straight to the kitchen, I pull open the refrigerator and peek into it. I see a loaf of bread and grab it, taking out a jar of peanut butter while I'm at it. I don't want to eat something sweet but the sinking of my heart and spinning of my head tells me I need to eat and fast. The thought of mom and dad coming home to find me passed out on the kitchen floor is frightening.

But maybe that'll make them care about me again.

Sighing and shaking my head, I take a knife off the stand. I jump up to sit on the kitchen counter before putting some peanut butter and jelly on cold bread. I take a bite and the dry sandwich clogs my throat, refusing to go down. I choke, getting off the counter and filling a glass of water from the sink. When I can finally breathe again, I open the fridge and pull out a carton of milk, drinking from it.

I hear the lock of the house click and door open, freezing for a moment before Mom comes into my view. She catches sight of me and stops in her tracks, a faint smile appearing on her face.

"Oh, Taylor, it's you," she says, her voice so distant I almost don't recognize it.

She looks the same as she always did, dressed in a long blue cardigan that stops below her white top. Her hair which she had set in the morning is coming undone and she isn't wearing any makeup. While both Carter and I inherited Dad's Asian features, Mom is surely the prettier one. I have Dad's dark-brown almost-black hair and the same brown eyes that disappear when I laugh. Even my button nose which Carter sometimes smacked as a child because he wondered if I'd squeak. He'd sometimes said he wished he looked more American. Maybe then he would fit into the crowd better. He didn't admit it to anyone but me, though, and said I shouldn't tell anyone unless he did first.

He never told anyone how he felt.

"You're home early," I speak, holding the cold and tasteless PB&J sandwich between my fingers.

Mom nods, leaving her bag on the kitchen counter and opening the fridge. She closes it without taking anything out. Reaching into one of the upper cabinets, she grabs a bottle of champagne. I frown when I see her removing a glass from the stand next to the sink, rinsing it, and pouring herself a drink.

It's barely evening, mom.

"I wasn't feeling so well," she says, lifting the glass to her glossless lips.

"Yeah, same," I say, knowing she hasn't asked me why I'm back early. It used to bother me, it still does a bit, how she never asks how I'm doing anymore. It's like I'm not even here.

It's like I died with Carter.

"Will Dad be coming back soon too?" I ask, almost hopeful.

A part of me misses the family time we had, having dinner together every evening and talking about our days. Mom would tell us about the kind of customers she saw at the retail store and Dad would complain about his overbearing boss and lazy colleagues. I liked talking about my classes and the badminton team. Carter usually listened before taking out his Gameboy. This would result in Dad telling him it's impolite to do that at the dinner table and that he was becoming aloof. He never argued, shaking his head and excusing himself from the table.

'What's his problem?' either Mom or Dad would ask.

I'd shrug and keep eating.

I wish I'd stopped eating, gotten up, followed Carter and asked him 'what's the problem?'

"I don't know," Mom mumbles, spinning her drink in her glass so that it sparkles under the kitchen light. It takes me a moment to remember that I'd asked her about Dad.

I hum. "Well, I can make something and we can have dinner together." I'm still hopeful.

Mom lifts her tired eyes to me. "I'm not hungry, Taylor," Mom says softly. "You can eat whatever you want." She downs her drink and places the glass upside down in the sink. "I'm going to sleep."

As she attempts to leave the kitchen, I try to stop her.

"Are you okay?" I ask. "We can go to a doctor if you're not well."

Mom shakes her head without looking back at me. "Just tired."

"Yeah, so am I," I reply, hoping she'll ask me what I mean.

As crazy as it seems, I've had this conversation so many times in my head. Sometimes I lie in bed for a long time and talk to myself, playing both sides: my own and my parents. I roleplay the discussion we can have, with my parents asking me a question and I leading it back to them, to their aloof attitudes, to their changed behaviors, to their complete disregard for my existence.

Mom doesn't say anything, walking into her room and closing the door behind her. I stand there, wishing yet again that she heard me. Oh, how I wish she heard me. I wish she heard me like I wish I'd heard Carter.

That's the tragedy of life, I guess. We don't hear people when they speak and want them to hear us when we're quiet. It's ironic how we wish we don't lose people yet we don't value them until we've lost them.

Sometimes I wonder what goes on in Mom's and Dad's heads. Do they go back in time like I do and wonder what they could have done differently? Do they sometimes imagine having a dialogue with Carter about his deteriorating mental health? Do they see in their dreams, his body lying cold and limp in his bed?

Maybe they don't.

After all, it had been I who found him like that, blue-lipped and lifeless, an empty bottle of pills rolling out of his open hand when I shook him, sobbing and crying like a maniac. Mom and Dad didn't see it, the foam dripping from his mouth. They didn't try to bring his still heart back to life with amateur first aid while the ambulance was on its way to our house.

It had been me.

I had found my twin brother dead in his bed. Dead in his sleep. Just as he had planned. A quick and painless death.

Mom and Dad had received the calls that told them 'Mr. and Mrs. Ming, it's about your son.' I'd expected them to fight about it, blame each other over whose fault it was that their son took his own life. I'd expected arguments that usually occurred when they forgot to pay the bills or restock the groceries or messed up the laundry so that Dad's white shirts turned pink because they were accidentally washed together.

But it didn't happen. Nothing happened.

Carter's suicide didn't break Mom and Dad apart. It broke them as individuals. They stopped fighting. They stopped talking. They stopped living. The Mr. and Mrs. Ming I see now aren't alive. They're merely existing.

But not me.

Placing my uneaten sandwich in a round, white plate and sliding it into the top shelf of the fridge, I make my way towards the stairs leading up to my room which faces Carter's empty one. It still haunts me, the emptiness. It tears at my heart, clawing at my insides when I push the door open and see the dust coating his furniture. I clean it every weekend, exactly at the same time as we always had together. I change his sheets, make his bed, open the windows and let the cool wind play with the lace curtains he'd hated so much but kept anyway because Dad liked them.

I enter his room, taking in the books he almost never read lying in a neat pile on the desk beside his bed. His shoes are lined under his bed, his single, hard pillow, because he didn't like fluffy cushions under his head like I do. I stand in his doorway for a long time, staring at the things I've seen so many times since he abandoned them.

I'm not sure why I do it. Maybe because I don't want him to think he's been forgotten. I don't want Carter to feel like nobody cares about his collection of video games or the stamp collection he had as a child or the pokemon cards he had stashed under his mattress where no one would find them. I don't want him to think I've forgotten him like Mom and Dad have.

"It's not you, Cart," I say under my breath, talking as if to Carter who might or might not be able to hear me. "Don't take it personally. It's their way of coping with it. They think it's easier to pretend they never had children than admit they lost half of them. So, don't worry ..."

I inhale a deep breath, blinking back my tears.

"... they don't remember me either."

*.*.*.*.*.*

A/N: I'm sorry if this chapter got sad but it's important. What are your thoughts about Carter or Taylor? How do you like her as a person? She's not perfect, because no one is, but I hope she's relatable.

Oh, if you haven't seen already: I've added a date above every chapter to organize the timeline. Please take a moment to check them so you know. I hope it will help clear any confusion about the pace of the story as well.