You And Me - A Collection of Les Twins One Shots

Misfits

For as long as Larry lived, he never felt like he fit in with anyone. 

No matter how hard he tried to blend in, Larry had always been the odd one out. The poor kid with the hand-me-down clothes. The bastard whose father was a dead-beat. The 'Oreo cookie' with the too-light skin. The kid with the hole in its sneakers. The younger, less interesting twin and the last of the Bourgeois kids - both figuratively and literally. 

Larry had always been... weird. Yes, that was the word. 

Weird.

He had always felt like his entire human mechanism just operated on a different angle when compared to the rest of the population. From his short attention span to the bad memory, and the physical restlessness that had teachers losing their freaking patience with him. And Larry would almost find this funny now, because back in the 80s and early 90s nobody had known what ADHD or PTSD was and they also hadn't taken into consideration his Apnea, the fact that his brain hadn't gotten sufficient oxygen during the night because his breathing had stopped too many times. Or the fact that their dad used to spend half the night causing a drunk ruckus, beating up family members and wrecking furniture and that Larry still sometimes woke up at night, drenched in cold sweat, feeling the ghost of his father's fingers around his neck or his fists raining down on his skin like it was fucking yesterday.

Throughout his entire childhood, nobody could be bothered to understand the 'why'. The only thing that had mattered back then was that Larry fidgeted a lot in class and that he forgot a lot of stuff, and instead of asking where the bruises came from or why he couldn't seem to concentrate, it was just easy to say he'd never 'make it'. 

Outside of teachers, the real shit happened outside of the classroom. The other students had a million reasons to hate them both – starting with the color of their skin tone (too damn light to fit with the blacks, too damn dark to fit with the others – and how the fuck was that even criteria when the whole school was from mixed racial backgrounds). Larry would never forget the day he had gotten beaten up in the schoolyard for wanting to sit with some of the other classmates and smeared from head to toe with mud to cover up his skin. "You wanna be one of us? There you fucking go. Getting closer to real black every day." Larry had picked himself up from the ground, bleeding and crying, thinking 'Why can't I just be more like the others', wishing so fucking hard that he'd be a little less different. And then Laurent had found him in the boys' bathroom, trying to clean the dirt from his skin, his hands shaking so hard as he tried to wipe the mud and blood from his clothes. And Laurent had stepped in to grab his wrists mid-movement and it had taken one look to transfer everything that had just happened, for Laurent to storm off and find every goddamn soul that had had anything to do with the hurt shining in Larry's eyes.

But no matter how hard his brother tried to protect him, Laurent couldn't always save Larry from getting shoved into lockers, or from getting his school bag torn off his shoulders and stomped on, or getting tripped or beaten up. And as much as it sucked to be everyone's favorite punching bag, things didn't even get that bad until  their mom decided to send Laurent away.

Larry's apnea got worse the second Laurent no longer slept under the same roof with him and his attention span shrunk even further. His grades got so bad, that the teachers advised for their mom to take him out of school. And the bullying... the bullying got bad enough that their mom was starting to consider taking them up on the advice, even though he wouldn't have had much perspective without some form of base-level education.

But somehow Larry made it, and things eventually came to a head on Laurent's first day back at school after their year-long separation. Larry had once again been bothered by some of his classmates. One of the school bullies – Hakeem – had called Larry out for how weird and dirty his hair was, pulling on his afro in the school hallway and backing him into a corner. "Look at that dirty fucking frizz right here. Can your mom even afford soap, you pathetic chimp? Maybe we should do you a favor and give you a little haircut, huh?"