Brother/Sister by Sean Olin

Author:Sean Olin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

WILL

We were in a school bus. Mom, Dad, me, and Asheley. Dad was driving, he was singing and driving—you are my sunshine, my only sunshine—driving real slow up the Pacific Coast Highway, and the rest of us were sitting way in the back row. There were duffel bags and boxes of food and stuff stacked up in the rows in front of us. We were headed to Big Sur, I knew this, I don’t know why, and everyone was chatty and excited about it. I’d done the packing and I was feeling real proud of what a good job I’d done, holding the checklist Dad had made for me and reading it over and over again: sleeping bags, check; flashlights, check; Coleman lamp, check; all these necessities, check, check, check, check, and I remember thinking, this is why Dad’s happy, because I checked off everything on the list. And then somehow we discovered that a bunch of the rows near the front of the bus had been taken out so there was a big open space there, and Ash said, “Let’s put up the tent! We can be camping now!” So I opened the sleeve and dumped everything out and it turned out there weren’t any tent poles. “Don’t tell your dad,” Mom whispered and Dad stopped singing. “What’s that?” he said. And ’cause Ash was so little and easily excited, she toddled up to the driver’s seat and said, “We forgot the tent poles!” She sort of sang it.

Screech. Dad pulled off the side of the road and came racing back toward us, shouting at Mom, “Deb, what did I tell you? What about the list? You just check things off on the list. It’s not rocket science.” And then he’s dragging her by the collar of her T-shirt, ripping it, she’s bucking and pulling behind him, down the steps and out the door. Asheley’s screaming and I’m watching them argue, my face and hands pressed to the window. They’re on this lip of black rock, like a thousand feet up, but I know there’s ocean down there, I can hear it roaring. And then, somehow, the tent’s out there too, flapping around in Dad’s other hand, and he kicks Mom’s legs out from under her and straddles her and pulls the tent tight between his fists and he’s got it stretched across her face. He’s suffocating her. “Will!” she says. “Will!” And I can’t tell if she’s begging me to help her or if she’s telling Dad that this is all my fault. Either way, he’s up and off her now and coming toward me, snapping the tent like a whip as he comes, stomping up the steps and down the aisle until he’s right there on top of me, his face huge and full of rage and the tent comes up between us and I can’t see, all of a sudden I can’t see, it’s just gray and pink plastic everywhere, but weirdly not violent at all, sort of soft and tender and I hear myself shout and then I hear Asheley.

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