Things Not Said

Chapter 10: Kyle

Kyle

A week after Allie’s breakdown I’m finally allowed to go see her again. Although I thought I’d be excited about going to see her again after so long, I felt nothing but fear at the thought of it. With the words I’d read burned in my mind, I don’t know what to do.

But then again, I do. I know exactly what I need to do. I can’t deny it any longer.

The familiar sound of sliding doors meet me for the first time in days and I see the receptionist’s recognizing look.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she says, obviously happy to see me.

“Allie wasn’t feeling well,” I answer. The receptionist nods understandingly and I write my name on the sheet before heading up the stairs. At Allie’s door I wait before opening, taking a deep breath and repeating what I want to say over and over again in my head.

Finally, I go in. The flowers still sit on the windowsill where they’d last been and my ears catch the sound of a guitar playing a tune. I hear Allie’s humming and realize she’s probably doing much better than the doctors have let on.

The corners of my mouth lift at the thought and I step in closer to see Allie’s guitar in her hands and her humming sweetly filling the air.

Her face has paled again and black hollows surround her eyes. She hadn’t heard me come in and so I travel to the seat next to her bed and sit. She looks up at me, smiles, whispers a greeting, and keeps playing and humming the tune along, occasionally singing a verse.

When her fingers leave the strings, the last chord ringing through the air, she looks up and weakly smiles at me. I prepare myself for what I’m about to hear before getting right to the point and asking her. There really is no point in waiting.

“Tell me about your brother.”

The words have come out more quickly than I’d intended and sound more like a jumble of sounds to me than an actual sentence. But Allie seems to have caught on.

Her eyes widen in alarm and she looks at me. The green pierces my shield and I look down at my feet, my head on my hands like a prayer. The silence that has overtaken the room lasts for what seems like an eternity until Allie breaks the silence.

“My brother’s gone.”

I look up quickly and see tears gleaming in her eyes.

“I hear he’s here now, but he’d left. Believe me, he wasn’t a bad guy, probably still isn’t,” she says rapidly, noticing the confusion in my eyes, “He just… couldn’t stand it anymore.” In response to my puzzling look, she takes a deep breath and began.

 “When we were young we’d do everything together. We went to the park, walked to school, took swimming lessons even. Anything there was to do, we’d do it together because we’re, well, we were, really close.

"My brother was never a genius at school, his grades actually always pretty low, just above average, but somehow I always got good grades and my parents would never stop telling him to take example of me,” she laughs at the memory.

“One day though, we had a parent-teacher conference and my parents met with my teacher first. She would say what you would normally say of your kid: She’s smart, kind, has lots of friends, that kind of stuff. They heard what they’d expected to hear and I got praised when they came home that night.

“After visiting my teacher, they then went to my brother’s class and the teacher asked them if they could wait till the end of the meetings. So they did. When every other parent had gone home, even most of the teachers, Mr. Wilkinson, my brother’s teacher got to my parents and sat them down at his desk and put down all of Andrew’s notebooks, from Math to English. My parents were expecting the teacher to tell them how Andrew wasn’t doing well, needed help out of school, even be pushed down a grade maybe.