how to make a mixtape :: mgc (fin.)

5. flowers & prizes

dedicated to @stefanielovesmuffins bc she's a cutiepie and so is everyone else and i wish u could dedicate chapters to multiple ppl but itll take too long sigh
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"What's with the flowers?"

"What's with the sheet music?"

"They're yours." Alejandro glances down at the bundles of paper pressed to his chest. The drawer in his room which we keep most of our unused notes is open halfway, and by the looks of it, empty. He stacks the pages beside him on the bed, and I set the flowers along with them. "I thought with our songs..." He trails off.

"I could make a mixtape for the contest. Yeah." I leap onto the mattress, pulling my knees under my chin and resting my cheek on his firm shoulder. "No originals allowed, remember?"

"Yeah." He moves closer, kissing my head. Although the time's not asking for it, I would naturally remark about his horrid overuse of cologne, but I'm much too exhausted. "You holding up okay with this whole... money situation?"

"No." I don't bother to ask if he is. I know he isn't. "Have you heard back from whoever's holding the competition? Did they tell us what the prizes are?"

"That's why I asked you if you were entering it." He stands up, drawing the curtains closed.

He fronts me, and it's takes a while to register how girls see him -- actually see him. Scrutinize and drool and note on every detail. He's one of the boys everyone in my old secondary school would whisper about. With experience of hormonal, boy-crazy students, I've learned an unspoken routine that must be followed when seeing a boy in public: Take a moment to stare, rate out of ten, then proceed to ogle at him through the whole time they are present. It seems easy, but minds race in those seconds to minutes girls watch a member of the opposite sex. For a squeaky thirteen year old raised as a strong Catholic from an all girls school, (perhaps someone like a 2010 version of me), first ideas could range from 'There is an aesthetically pleasing male human within my area and I do not know how to contain my female urges' to 'Wait till I tell the girls about him.' However, for someone who's lost their virginity in a tree house with a boy she met a few months before, (perhaps someone like a current me), her eyes may as well skip over a simple boy with nice lips and blue eyes, because she knows what her standards her, and she knows she prefers cute, minor-polymath boys who have acne and know how to sing. Alejandro is one of them, minus the polymath and acne. More or less, Ale has dark hair and white skin, almost like flour, and has a talent for piano. Girls happen to swoon over him when we enter the bus -- even in Australia -- and unlike most siblings, it's plain to sight we're related. Same facial structure, same hair, same build -- the only physical difference is he's a boy and tall and I'm a girl and short.

"Sorry, what?" I pass a hand over my forehead, picking up sweat from my hairline.

Ale hasn't moved from where he was. His arms are set akimbo and his eyebrows are pinched together. He isn't about to tell me off for being air-headed, I don't think. He seems too distant, and when people like Alejandro look distant, you should know how many ideas and words and sentences must be racing through their head, how hard it must be to even categorise every flash of colour or image.

He purses his lips, cramming his hands into his pyjama pockets. The bed dips as he sits down, and his breathing finally evens. I pat his shoulder awkwardly. You would think siblings are the ideal person to lean on for comfort. Not me. I'm terrible. I stare at the small tattooed piano at the back of his neck and rub my finger over it. He doesn't shift or react.

"The prize," he says quietly, "is sixty thousand dollars."

I pull my fingers together, and this time, he elbows me in the ribcage. His skin is red where I've pinched it, and he rubs it angrily. I curl my toes over the red carpet, heat expanding from my chest to my head. I press the heels of my hands to my closed eyes and inhale, exhaling soon after, like I could blow out anxiety. Sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money; sixty thousand dollars is ten thousand more than we're in debt for. I lean my head back, resting it on Alejandro's. His warmth on my back soothes me, and I pretend we're in Colombia again, cuddled in his big bed on a cold morning in which I want to skive school. I was fifteen the last time he helped me ditch, but then he stopped. We matured. We grew apart. And being thrown into a country where pigeons eat discarded chicken bones and there are more street musicians than people live in houses, we were stitched together again. If I don't win this money... we'll have nothing to keep us glued together anymore. We'll fall apart, like worn out PVA trying to keep heavy bricks on each other.