Chapter Seven: Best Sibling Relationship
River Jenkins

I was wiping my busted lip with my thumb when my aunt opened the front door before I even had the chance to lift my free hand to twist the doorknob. She must have sensed me coming seeing that the curtains of the front of the house were drawn, so she could have easily seen me walking over the driveway to the front door.

She gasps when she sees my busted lip and the trail of blood that ran from it. “River,” she starts, looking at me worriedly, “don’t tell me you’ve been back to that awful place.” She then grabs my chin with her hand and tilts my head so she could get a better look at my busted lip and bruised face.

I pull my chin from out of her grasp. “I’m fine.” I insist. “Fighting is the only way I could forget. You know that.” I then smile at her, just to assure her some more that I was doing okay. “It helps a lot. More than you know. I don’t mind having a busted lip and bruised face.”

“But I do!” She says when I threw my school bag to the floor. “I know you like coming home with a bruised face and bleeding knuckles, but I don’t like it, River.” She shakes her head at me and I could have sworn she was on the verge of crying. “It’s dangerous. And you’re so young… You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

I turn my hand over, looking at my bruised and bloodied knuckles.

The blood against my knuckles was dry and the cuts on them were much deeper than it was before today. The cuts I got from punching the mirror last week has opened up yet again in today’s fight, and it stung whenever I clenched and unclenched my fist. The cuts were definitely going to scar, no doubt, but I loved that I had a reminder of winning that fight on my body.

I look at my aunt. “I told you I’m fine.”

“You skipped support group, didn’t you?” She asks. “You skipped it to fight?”

I nod. It was no use trying to lie to her when she already knew the truth. “I told you before that the support group with Oliver doesn’t help me.”

“It’s because you don’t give it a real try!” She says, her voice thick with emotion. “You don’t talk to Oliver. You don’t talk about what happened. The support group was made for talking, River.”

“I am fine.” I breathe out. “I feel much better since the fight I had today.”

I hope she absorbs the words.

I know she is concerned for me, but if she knew how much fighting has helped me since all hell broke loose. She should be more concerned for my safety, and my health, if I didn’t have fighting. Fighting and pain helps me deal with the taunting voice inside my mind, and if I didn’t fight or feel pain, I would come home looking much worse. I would have turned to something else other than fighting, something much worse than fighting.

Her next words were choked. “You look worse every time you come home.”

“But it makes me feel better and that is what you fail to understand.”

She closes her eyes, seeming to think about her next words, and opens them again. “I’m worried, River.” She says. “I am worried about you. I keep wondering if you’re going to make it home or if you’re lying in a ditch somewhere after a fight you might lose.” Her voice was tremulous. “What if this costs your life? I don’t want to lose you too, River. Please… River…”

“Are you expecting me to stop? Because I can’t do that, Aunt P.”

She swallows hard as the first of the tears ran down her cheeks. “I am not trying to tell you to stop fighting although it would be the best decision you have ever made, but I just want you to be careful. Fighting is dangerous. You might not realise that now, and you might think that this is the only way you can cope, but one day you’re going to realise that this is slowly ruining your life, River. Those cuts and bruises could turn into something worse, like concussions and broken bones. It could lead to permanent damage. I’m just asking you to think about—”

“I already have permanent damage.” I pull my fingers through my hair. “Fighting makes me forget that I am permanently damaged, aunt P.” I sigh, looking at her as more tears ran down her cheeks.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and she was trying so hard to contain her sobs.

“I told you that I am fine. I have my own ways of coping, and if you take that away from me, I might become worse and worse. I would become unbearable to live with. I will always be angry at every small thing that happens, and I would search for something else to help me cope, and I don’t think that would be healthier than fighting.”

Before she could say another word, I grab my bag from the floor and disappear up the staircase.

When I get to my room, I close the door behind me and throw my bag to the floor. I greet Duke, my aunt’s dog, by petting the top of his head. Duke reminded me so much of the dog Beck used to have before he disappeared. Duke is a Golden Retriever with soft fur and even though my brother brought home a brown Labrador, Duke still reminded me of Beck’s dog.

I smile at him and walk over to my window before opening the latch.

I pull out a full packet of cigarettes from my pocket.

I didn’t hesitate when I lit one, but when I inhaled the smoke through my lips and exhaled it slowly out of the window, memories came crashing down on me, very painful memories, the kind of memories that made my heart clench inside my chest and my breaths start to pick up the pace.

“Mom is going to whoop your ass.” My brother says when he came into my room, seeing me smoke a cigarette by my open window.

“Only if you tell her.” I smirk at him, knowing that he won’t snitch on me.

Beck shrugs and walks over to my bed before plopping himself down ever so casually like it was his, with shoes on his feet too, on my clean bed sheets.

Beck has the same blue eyes as me, just a little darker than mine, and where my hair was blonde, his was black. He inherited his hair from our mother, and I unfortunately inherited my blond hair and blue eyes from our father.

Beck was one year younger than me, but sometimes he acted older than me.

“Give me a drag.” He says, extending his hand even though he was sprawled across my bed, a few feet away from where I was standing by the window.

“Fuck no. You’re way too young to even think about smoking.” I tell him. “And you don’t even like the smell of smoke.”

He chuckles at me, running his fingers through his black hair. “I am one year younger than you, asshole.” He says. “And as for the smell… you’re right… I don’t like the smell of smoke. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to smoke one, though.”

I laugh at him, taking one last drag from my cigarette before throwing it out of the window.

Sometimes, when I turn around, I hope to see Beck sitting on my bed with his hands behind his head and his feet on my bed. I want to hear him complain how much he hated the smell of smoke, but wants to take a drag from one nonetheless. I want to hear him laugh again.

If I could have seen Beck and my mother one last time, I would have warned them about the future. I would have warned them about the dangers, but unfortunately we don’t get to catch a glimpse into our futures, so we won’t be able to tell if something bad is going to happen to us or not.

It would have been so much easier if we could, though.

As I held the cigarette between my fingers, they started to shake. Ever since I started to fight in the abandoned barn, I could never keep my hands as steady as I used to, but after last week’s episode in the bathroom, my hands started to shake even more. I found it difficult to write sentences or drawing simple doodles because of it, and my handwriting was even sloppier than before, making it difficult to read.

I place the cigarette between my lips and trace my fingers over my knuckles and the cuts and purple bruises there. It was sensitive to the touch and the skin around the cuts was slightly numb, too.

My aunt was right: fighting could cause me permanent damage.

Was it going to stop me from fighting again? No. I will never stop fighting.

The smoke of the cigarette drifts in the air in front of me, and when I was done smoking it, I threw the butt out of the window with force so that the breeze would kill the cigarette on the way down.

I close my window tightly right when Duke sat on the floor beside my feet.

• • •

My aunt was sleeping on the couch when I went downstairs to grab a bottle of water from the fridge. The TV was on and there was no sound coming from the speakers, but I went over to the TV and switched it off anyways.

My uncle’s rarely home, and when he is home, he’s never really around the two of us. He would either sleeping or he’d be fixing whatever there was to be fixed around the house. And on good days… rare days… he would join me and my aunt for dinner, but like I said before, that was a rare occasion.

I don’t blame my uncle for never being around because I know he’s very busy at work, and I know he truly loves my aunt very much, but he could at least call to tell her that he won’t be home. It would save her from having to sleep on the couch, waiting for him to come home every single night.

I grab the hand-knitted blanket from the couch’s armrest and drape it over my aunt’s body before kissing her cheek.

I then make my way to the kitchen quietly, so I won’t wake my aunt up.

I grab a bottle of water from the fridge; take a swig from it, and then another.

When I was done, I throw the empty bottle into the trashcan.

I know my aunt means well, trying to protect me from ruining my life, but if only she could understand how fighting helps me cope with the memories. She doesn’t wake up each day covered in a thin layer of sweat with the nightmares haunting her. She doesn’t try to fight off painful memories. My aunt doesn’t know how it feels to be inside of my body and inside my mind when the taunting voice keeps haunting me. She doesn’t understand how much his voice affects me—in every possible way—even after all this time.

Fighting was more than just fighting to me.

It was my drug. It was my way of coping with the painful memories.

I was an addict when it came to fighting. I couldn’t wait for my next fight, and I wanted to fight again even when I was recovering from the last one.

She doesn’t understand that fighting helps me forget everything.

• • •

I walk over to my bed and plop down onto the foot of it.

I notice purple bruising around Beck’s wrist and I frown at it. “Where did you get that bruise from?”

He shrugs and rubs the bruising. “Football. You know how rough it can get.”

I raise my eyebrow at him questioningly. “You play football? Since when do you play football?”

He rolls his eyes at me before he kicks my leg. “I thought you knew me so well. How didn’t you know I play football?”

“I do know you; I just didn’t take you for a football type of guy, more like chess.” I tease him and I hear him sigh.

“Whatever. I’m still better at football than you are.” He says, smiling at me.

“That might be true…” I trail off before I get up from the bed to walk over to my desk. “But can you catch this?”

I turn around and throw the pen my brother’s way. He misses it and it hits him square in the face, bouncing off of his forehead before it landed in his lap again.

“Boys! No playing in the house.” My mother scolds from the doorway, but despite her scolding us, she still had a bright smile on her face.

I walk over to where she was standing and pull her into a hug.

Beck joins us not long after, throwing his arms around the two of us.

When I awoke, my aunt was looking down at me with concern etched onto her features. Her eyebrows were pulled together and a v was formed between them.

She had her hand on my shoulder. She tried to shake me awake.

To anyone, it could have been a beautiful dream—having a good laugh with your younger brother and hugging your loving mother—but to me, it was a nightmare. It was to show me what I lost. It was to show me that I didn’t have that anymore: a younger brother or a loving mother. I was completely alone. I still had my aunt and uncle who I loved, but without my family, my life felt incomplete. I needed a mother figure… a brother to mentor.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, shaking my head, “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“It doesn’t bother me.” She says.  I know she was referring to the nightmares and that I might have been whimpering from them. “But it sure as hell worries me, a lot, River.” She then shakes her head. “You weren’t lying, did you? The support group really hasn’t been helping you?”

“It’s fine.”

“River,” she squeezes my shoulder, “we need to think about real help.”

“It was just one bad dream.”

“River, it wasn’t just one bad dream.” A pained look marred her face. “I’ve heard you whimpering. I’ve heard you calling out to them for a while now.”

I wipe the sweat away with the back of my hand.

She caresses my cheek but I wince when she accidentally touched the cut just above my eyebrow. She immediately drops her hand to her lap, shaking her head at me. “I don’t like when you fight, River. In fact, I despise it, actually. But if it’s the only thing that helps you cope, then so be it.”

A moment of silence passes us.

“I don’t like when you fight, but I just need you to be okay, and if fighting is the only thing making you feel like you cope better, then I’ll leave you to it. I will not preach about you fighting again, but if I notice that it starts to become worse and worse each time you come home, I will stop it. Okay?”

I nod.

“Just,” she sighs, “be careful. That’s all I’m asking you. Just be careful.”

She gets up from the bed and walks out of the room, clicking the door shut behind her. I listen to her footsteps as she made her way back to her room down the hallway and when she closed the door behind her, I inhale deeply.

It was still early in the morning.

I just close my eyes to sleep again.

• • •

I slept the entire night through without another nightmare, and when I got out of my bed, my hands weren’t shaking and my heartbeat was normal.

I was physically fine, but mentally… I wasn’t fine at all.

The nightmare was playing inside my mind every time I closed my eyes.

I was so damn happy. I thought. But little did I know what awaited me after.

I missed Beck and my mom so much, so much that it physically hurt me just thinking about the two of them, but it hurt even more when I just thought about someone wanting to hurt them. But that’s also the thing… No one can ever hurt them again where they are because they’re tucked away safely where no one can ever lay their hands on them ever again.

That’s what brings me through the day on good days, knowing that they were safe somewhere where no one could ever touch them again. They don’t have to live through the horrors we all call reality anymore.

They were already safe and sound.

But on most days, like today, I just wanted them to be here with me. I was cruel for wishing that they were here instead of where they were right now, but I couldn’t help it. It was very difficult going through life without them.

I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and walk to the bathroom to shower.

When I was done, I entered the kitchen where my aunt was making herself a cup of tea. She knows I preferred energy drinks over tea, but seeing that it was too early in the morning today for an energy drink, and I didn’t really drink tea like she did, I settled for a bottle of water instead. I swallow it all down in three gulps, and then I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

When I walked over to the trashcan to throw the empty bottle of water away, my aunt was giving me a look. A dirty look.

I look down at my clothes, thinking that the dirty look was because I was wearing ripped jeans in this strange weather, and dirty boots I found at the back of my closet, but I looked presentable enough.

“Why are you looking at me like that, Aunt P?” I ask her.

“We need to talk about what happened at school yesterday.” She says. “About what you said in Mr Yuri’s classroom yesterday.”

Ah. Mr Yuri ran to the principle about my behaviour in class yesterday.

“I was going to let it go, but your behaviour yesterday was not acceptable.” She says, hugging the cup of tea in between her hands. “Mr Yuri is a very kind man and he has always shown nothing but kindness toward you.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache piercing my brain.

“You need to apologize to him, River.” My aunt says. “You have to.”

“I’m not going to apologize.” I tell her. “He wanted to take my belongings.”

“With good reason.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “You don’t focus on your school work anymore. He told Mrs Killian that you keep doodling in his classroom when you are supposed to be focusing in class.”

“Well,” I shrug, “he should mind his own business then.” Before she could utter another word, I continued. “Don’t bother waiting up for me; I will be staying out late tonight. Don’t expect me to be home for dinner, either.”

“River, don’t you walk away from me!”

She follows me out of the house until she grabbed my arm to stop me from moving another inch. “Don’t fight with me.” She says, looking at me. “You know all I ever wanted is for you to be okay. I just want you to do well in your last year of school, and when that is done, you can do whatever you want to do after, but don’t jeopardize your last year of school, River.”

“I’m not jeopardising anything.” I tell her.

“I just want to help you. Please, River.” She squeezes my hand in hers, tightly, and I know that whatever she’s about to say will not make me very happy. “Beck wouldn’t want you to ruin your life like this.” She says. “He would want you to finish your last year of school and—”

“Don’t.”

She lets go of my arm as I started to back away from her.

“Don’t make me feel guilty about him not being able to finish his last school years.” I couldn’t help but clench my hands into tight fists. “I already have enough guilt eating me alive every single day of my damned life.”

“I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.” She says, reaching for my arm, but I backed away from her. “I just… I know it’s difficult for you, but if he was in your shoes, would you want him to jeopardize his life like this, too?”

“He’s dead,” I clench my teeth, “he cannot jeopardize anything anymore.”

She opens her mouth to say something but just closes it again.

When I turn around to walk away, I look over my shoulder at her. She was looking at me with tears in her eyes, and then stormed back into the house.

It’s then when I realised that I should have kept quiet instead. It was never my intention to hurt her with my words about Beck being dead, but unfortunately I cannot take the words back—they were already said.

That was another reason for Beck to be disappointed in me. Hurting my aunt.

• • •

When I arrived at school, I stopped before the bricked walls of the building. The entire walk home, my nails have dug into the skin of my palms; it actually began to draw blood.

When I turned my hands over, I noticed the shape of my nails imprinted into my palms.

Right when I thought my day couldn’t have been worse, I noticed Mackenzie walking over to me in a set of the reddest high heels, a pair of black skinny jeans, a white tank top and a cardigan over her shirt.

Her blonde hair was loose and it flailed against her back and shoulders as she walked toward me. “Are you okay River baby?” She asks. She must have noticed that my mood was a little off because the next thing I know, she had her arm hooked in mine and her lips were being pressed against my cheek in a long kiss that was supposed to be seducing, but it annoyed me even more than I already was.

I clench my hands into fists, hiding the crescent shaped marks from her. “I’m fine.” I tell her, wanting to take my arm out of her grasp when we started to walk, but she held tightly onto me.

“If you don’t mind, I need to go to the bathroom.” I tell her when we entered the double doors of the school building. “I need a little privacy.”

There was no doubt in my mind that she would have followed me into the boys’ bathroom if I didn’t ask her for some privacy of my own. She always wanted me alone, and every time I told her that I wasn’t interested in what she wanted to offer me, she ignored it, so here she was, glued to my side like a fly lingering over food. She did, however, respect my wishes when I wanted to be alone when I entered the bathroom, but I don’t think she caught the hint that I didn’t want to interact with her again when I left it.

I walk over to the sink and was surprised that they replaced the broken mirror with a new one. I don’t know what I expected—to see the blood from last week still lying in the sink and the shards of the mirror too—but then I remembered that the scene in the bathroom last week was enough to haunt anyone, so they cleaned everything and had the mirror replaced.

I scrub my palms with my fingers, the left one and then the right, and focus on the blood and water as it ran down the sink and into the metal drain.

Once both my hands were cleaned of the blood, I inhaled deeply, and left.

I wasn’t even surprised to see Mackenzie outside waiting for me, but it annoyed me that she didn’t get the hint that I didn’t want her in that way.

When she tried to hook her arm into mine, I pulled it away quickly and propped my hands into the pockets of my jeans, but she just places her hand on my shoulder and walks by my side like we were the couple of the year.

“What do you want from me, Mackenzie?”

“I was just asking if you were okay.” She says, flicking her blonde hair over her shoulder with her free hand. “That’s all.” She then trails her manicured talons over the fabric of my jacket, trying to seduce me and get me to fall at her feet, but again, to no avail.

“And I told you that I was fine.”

“I can see that you’re not fine at all,” she says, standing on her tip toes to kiss my cheek and then she started to whisper in my ear, her warm breath fanning the skin there, “do you need me to make you feel better, River?”

“Stop it Mackenzie.” I shake my head at her. “I’m not interested.” I try to walk away, but the heels clanking directly behind me told me that she was on my heels yet again and she caught up to me, fast, even in heels.

“I know you don’t mean that.”

I could have misheard, but I could have sworn that she sounded hurt at the rejection. A girl like Mackenzie doesn’t care if she’s rejected by a guy because she would just play it off and move on to the next guy in her line of sight, but now it sounded like she was quite disappointed.

“I do mean it.” I tell her. “It’s you not getting the damn hint.”

I notice Sophia, Ana and Cole—my former teammate before I left football—entering the school building side by side.  Ana had her arm hooked into Sophia’s and Cole was holding Ana’s free hand and Sophia was laughing at something Ana had said.

Seeing Sophia laughing after the shitty week she had with people laughing behind their hands at her and gossiping about her scar surprised me.

She plainly showed them that their stares and gossip wasn’t getting to her.

Mackenzie’s eyebrows pull together in a frown and her lips were pressed in a firm line when she noticed me looking at Sophia for a second too long. “Please don’t tell me that you have your sights on that loser with the scar.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle.

Mackenzie’s jealousy was quite amusing, to be honest.

“Are you jealous, Mackenzie?”

She looks at me as if she was offended. “No.” She says. “I’m way prettier than her anyways.”

“If you keep telling yourself that, you might believe your own words someday.”

“Are you saying she’s prettier than me?”

I didn’t answer her question.

I just walked away from her.

I chuckle again when I heard Mackenzie scoffing behind me as if she was offended by my lack of response, but at least she left me alone and she didn’t bother me again.

But I wasn’t alone.

Sophia was running toward me with a stack of papers in her hands. She stops in front of me, clearly out of breath from the run, and hands me the papers. “It’s your Biology homework.” She says when I frowned at the contents in her hands. “I thought I might give it to you early, and then you can do it in Math seeing that you don’t do the work on the whiteboard anyways.”

“Since when do I do homework?”

“If you don’t, we might get behind in Biology and I don’t want that, River.”

“That’s not my problem.” I tell her when I walked away.

I walk over to the nearest trashcan and throw the papers inside.