"I'm Not Crazy"

XIX.

I was only eleven years old.

It was Christmas Eve. Our parents were at a holiday party with a few people from church, but we'd stayed home because Matthew was supposedly sick with some type of cold. He'd been sniffling all day and if that wasn't enough, he had been seemingly falling apart for several weeks. He seemed paler somehow. He seemed skinnier, and had seemed skinnier for weeks really. Nobody but me had seemingly noticed, but he'd stopped working out with his friends. He hadn't signed up for wrestling that winter. He was spending more time in his room.

Matthew hadn't been being very kind to me. It seemed like days had passed since I'd managed to get past him without receiving an elbow to the ribs or a sneer. He'd been coming into my room at night as always to call a truce, but it was half hearted and robotic, and it was paired with more jeering than I was used to. I was having to remind him to get the porch light in the backyard for me. He wasn't like himself. He seemed out of it. He seemed like he knew what was coming.

I didn't know about the drugs at the time, or at least I didn't understand them. I knew that Matthew occasionally took things from his friends. Like most things, he'd told me about it in a joking way, almost as if he were just telling a story, but I knew that it happened and that it made him stronger. That's what he always emphasized. These things that he did made him better, and the church did not understand them, or else they would also approve too.

But things had changed, and I can't explain exactly what changed because I was just a small child. Children do not know everything. They can't read into the details, and they can't put stories together on their own, so they can't possibly know. They have no way of understanding the entire story. I had no idea what was falling apart for Matthew that day, or in the days leading up to it. I didn't know what was missing. I didn't know the why. All I knew was that the church had been telling me about all of the principals we were to follow, and that we were tasked with keeping our bodies clean, and that Matthew had not done that. He'd taken something, and now God was punishing him because he was ill and weak. That's what I thought I knew.

We were home alone together, and Matthew was supposed to make sure I got dinner. That's another thing I knew. I had already resigned myself to not eating because Matthew had not been kind any time in the recent days. He'd actually been notably unkind, and I did not want to have my expectations disappointed. Sometimes Matthew just wouldn't let me eat. He often told me it would make me stronger in the same way that the steroids he was taking would strengthen him.

I was shocked when he called me to come out of my room. I hadn't seen it coming at all, and that's obviously a theme because I rarely saw things coming, but I was exceptionally surprised.

I didn't catch on to the fact that his tone sounded false and distant. I was a child who did not notice such things. I just believed that I was going to be fed, and as an eleven year old I was not really capable of knowing to believe more.

I made my way down the hall towards the kitchen where I'd expected to find him, but he wasn't there. No food sat at the table or the counter where I'd expected it. Stupidly, I got excited about that. We weren't allowed to eat in the living room, but Matthew let me do it when he was stuck watching me sometimes. He'd make me sit on the floor, but he'd sit on the couch and play video games, and I was allowed to watch as long as I didn't make a mess or an exorbitant amount of noise. I liked those moments. They were when I felt the most connected to Matthew as my sibling. We found connection in mutual crime.

Then I walked into the living room and froze because Matthew was there, but he didn't have food waiting for me at all.

There are two versions of this story that I'm going to tell right now because I think it's important for all of the versions to be told. Both of these versions are distressing. Both of them fill me with an equal and scary hesitation. I'm told that one of them is a lie. There's a version of this story that has forever labeled me the liar.