The Seven Pieces of a Feuilleton

Chapter 3

Thrice, he sat in the waiting room of a pungent hospital waiting on a girl and thrice, it was the one girl he knew better than he knew himself.

She'd been anxious to test out her new skates the month they both turned seven - so anxious, in fact, that she overlooked the quite noticeable patch of thin ice skipped over by their cousin Lottie in favor of the figure eight she gloated she would ace before him.

She did ace it, alright, and then sliced her heel straight into the gelid water below.

He'd been the one to pull her out and rush her over to their parents, as he'd pulled her out of many messes since.

The second time, he walked out on his SAT to sit with his family as they awaited the news of whether his twin sister would suffer the same fate as his beloved aunt Sheila. She'd been fine then and after two days under a thick thermal blanket, she'd been fine in St. Paul, too.

But the third time - the third time is when everything fell apart.

And, as he sat on the plane, glaring down into the drink he inhaled only occasionally - like in the air to a destination he would rather avoid - it was that third time that kept spinning figure eights into his grating memories.

It wasn't enough that he lost the only woman he had ever planned to marry - and to his best friend, no less. It wasn't enough that Kelly ripped open his heart that night, Dylan demolished his vows or Brenda shattered the windshield of her car.

No, it wasn't enough, because he had to sit in that waiting room with as much strength as he could muster for his crumbling family, whilst keeping the man who had been his brother as far away from his sister's door as possible.

That was damn difficult, especially when the fetal monitor had indicated severe distress. But the doctors warned stress could cause his sister permanent damage to her heart - much more than had already been inflicted - and a visit from her adulterous, drugged-up spouse would have certainly caused her stress.

Oh, Dylan had tried to yell out that he wasn't high, that he hadn't taken anything, that he didn't know what the fuck had gone wrong. He'd begged to see her, pleaded for the Walshes to let him talk to her. Claimed she needed him. Lied and said he needed her and he needed the little girl inside her - or little boy, as Brenda still insisted.

Oh yeah, Dylan had sure needed her when he'd stripped naked with Kelly Taylor.

Brandon had watched from the sidelines as his former best friend listened to the OB deliver the grave news. If it had been any other night, he would have caught the despondent man as he buckled, but he'd let young David Silver do the honors.

That had been the last time he spoke to Dylan McKay, whom he heard had tried to close himself off from everyone.

The twins moved into Andrea's after the burial, Brandon avoiding the woman who would have been his fiancée and Brenda refusing to speak to her husband. She instead shut herself off from everyone except Brandon, mainly because he never let her shut herself off from him.

Not since they were high school seniors, anyway. He swore to never make that mistake again.

He'd glimpsed a distressed, teary-eyed Dylan sprinting out of Andrea's two months into the McKay's separation, headed for the pool hall or the bar or wherever the hell he hung out in those days. He'd walked in to embrace an equally upset Brenda, who informed her brother that she had told Dylan they were over - "really, truly, Brandon," she'd said, "I mean it this time. I'm done. I'm done losing him to Kelly. I'm done being an afterthought. I thought he'd made up his mind. I thought he finally chose me. I'm done being the butt of this ongoing joke. It's time to leave high school behind."