Almost.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

 

When I was younger, everything was revolved around my siblings. I never minded, I liked being in the background, it was quiet and cold and I loved the feeling of endless goosebumps trailing along my skin. I loved the darkness because I never really knew what was to come of it all. I could get sucked into a whole new world and not even recognize where I was from the daring dark. I could hear noises and ponder over who it could be or what it may be.

Everything was a mystery in the dark, an endless, ongoing unsolved mystery that nearly everyone wanted to know what had happened that made everything inside your mind over power every other part of your entire body. A captured moment that makes everything all the more merrier. When I was young, everything seemed so easy, the quietness of the night made my mind go awake. The sky was alive at night so my mind was alive too. Even at such a young age, I had more knowledge than all my older siblings, even my parents had less common sense than me.

Ansel and Jolene were the closest. She was younger than him by six years and they were closer than ever. Everyone would watch as a fourteen year old played around with an eight year old. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Ansel had Jolene’s back more than he had his brothers. Mom would smile at them from the kitchen, she’d laugh when Ansel would pick Jolene up and spin her around until they were both heaving on the grass from laughing so hard, they couldn’t catch their breath. It was easier back then.

Breton was tall and broad shouldered. Everyone looked up to him because he was the tallest, not the oldest, but the most intimidated one. It was simple for him to receive what he wanted with just one look or a stomp of a foot, or a snap of fingers. Breton had a scary image, one that made me back away from him whenever he came towards him.

When Breton hit his teenage years, he grew abusive. Instead of asking for something, he’d practically beat people out of them. He had a temper, one that no one wanted to mess with. People believed something dangerous was swirling around Bretons head but we all knew he only merely had a bit of a temper. When he reached his breaking point in life, his girlfriend of three years had ended with him and he was failing all his classes and he got cut from the baseball team for slacking, he wandered into my room while I was asleep.

He shouted, hollered until I awoke and when I did, he laughed, tears streaming down his flushed cheeks and eyes blazing with a sort of fire I had never seen him wear. His hands were in tight fists, nearly cutting himself from how clenched they were. I had sat up in my bed, straightened with wide, frightened eyes. I was only seven and I was innocent and naive. Breton was seventeen and had a determined thought leaking through his mind, swerving from his head to the outside world.

It was only a little before one in the morning when I realized the shiny thick blade sticking from his hand. He was holding it tightly, it was glistening in the moonlight. Tears streamed down my face, my mouth muffled from the cries I was trying to hold back. In the last seconds before the clock struck one, Breton hollered how sorry he was then nearly dragged the knife through his heart.

If Ansel wasn’t there, Breton would’ve been lying dead on the floor of my room.

I was seven years old.

Tristan was younger than Jolene, only three years older than I am. He had escaped the world easily, you would think anyway. Sneaking out in the middle of the night on your eighteenth birthday was a risk Tristan was worth taking. Tristan had a mind of pure gold, my mother would say to him whenever he had come home with anger lighting his eyes and muscles tense. School was rough for him. He was tall but built, he got called names from ‘Steroid Head’, to ‘Muscle Mania.’ He hated it, all of it. So much that he needed to find a route out, an escape that would save him.