My Brother's Shadow

ARRIVAL
It was winter when he arrived. The chill wind blew through his ragged clothes, turning his skin a raw pink. Chapped lips and bloodied gums, his face pressed against the window.
When I saw him that first time I screamed--a small and silent scream, all inside, in my gut. It was the most terrifying, the most thrilling, the strangest thing to happen in a maths lesson in a long time.
The boy dipped below the frame like a duck. He soon resurfaced.
His eyes--a sharp, cold gray--searched the classroom, passing from face to face. I stared right back.
When his eyes met mine through the frosted glass and my heart was stilled in my chest, I thought perhaps, for just a moment, a flickering smile parted those cracked lips.
Smiles can be small, tiny even, minute. Smiles can be just in your eyes. Magic, secret smiles that you don’t want anyone to see but you can’t help. Or magic, secret smiles that you want just one person to see--the one person you love the most, who knows your face the best.
Later, even when I knew that face, after hours and hours of staring at that furrowed brow and those thick charcoal eyebrows, hours of afternoons shared, I still wasn’t sure if in that first glance there’d been a smile.
That face was the biggest mystery of all.

FROZEN GIRL
Last term Mr. Wills gave us each a yellow notebook filled with empty gray pages.
“This is your holiday homework,” he said. “You’re to write a diary of everything you do over the break.”
I didn’t write anything. Well, what was I going to write?
Monday
Mum went to work. I was meant to be going to the holiday club at school. Instead I made a sandwich, went to the big park and sat under an oak tree (Quercus robur).
Tuesday
Mum was “sick” and didn’t go to work. Heard her boss shouting at her down the phone. Think Mum’s lost her job.
My mum from before would never have acted this way. My mum from before loved her job. My mum from before loved me.
I made a sandwich, went to the park and sat under a different tree, silver birch today (Betula pendula--the best name of any tree).
Wednesday
Mum “sicker.” I stayed at home so she didn’t hurt herself. Hoped she didn’t hurt me.
No, I didn’t write anything. But then the boy appeared. So I decided to fill these empty pages. I had something in my life to write about and someone in my life to write about.

I think they tried to take the boy away. The police probably, social workers, the teachers. They all tried to get him to leave. He screamed and barked, yelled and growled. I heard him from the classroom, where I shivered and glanced at the window. Mr. Wills set us reading to do.
I used to love books--each one a mystery waiting to be uncovered.
Long, long ago, back when no one called me idiot or freak, I used to read books just like the other girls. Now they read big fat books with thousands and thousands of words, big fat books with big fat mysteries and pretty pink covers. I still read the same books, the same books as a year ago, when I was ten, when everything stopped, not just my reading.
I’m frozen in the past. I’m frozen in a day which I’ll never forget. Frozen. Frozen. Frozen. How do you defrost yourself from something you cannot see? How can you change what’s happened?
I Kaia am forever frozen.
Forever frozen Kaia I am.
I forever Kaia am frozen.
So I’m not reading. I don’t want to remember. Instead I’m writing this.

In the end, I don’t think they could make the boy go. His wails and wild shouts must have stopped the whole school from working, so they let him stay.
At the end of the day, when Mr. Wills had given us our homework--yes, more homework--and we’d finished our daily scramble for bags and coats and empty lunch boxes, we lined up as usual outside the library. And there he was, perched like a blackbird, his knees pulled up to his chest and his toes curled around the lip of a chair amongst the bookshelves.
He stared at us again. Dev and his stupid friends made stupid jokes about his dirty, raggedy clothes.
“They’re definitely from Oxfam, mate,” Dev said.
Poppy, Hanaiya and all the other girls giggled. I stared right back at the boy.
It’s rude to stare. That’s what I’ve been told. But I don’t know why; sometimes it’s not. We’re told to keep our eyes on our writing and focus on those maths problems. When I gaze at the sky or lose myself looking up through the branches of trees trying to see some pattern or order, no one tells me off. But if I stare at a person, an amazing, unique, miraculous person, I’m being rude.
We should be allowed to stare at everybody. We should be made to stare at everybody. All these incredible people and we’re not allowed to stare. It’s madness.
Have you seen them all? Well, I know you’ve seen them, but have you seen them? Scurrying here, busying there, all thinking different things, dreaming different dreams, with a different past and a different future, every single stupendous one of them.
It’s good to stare. That should be the rule. That’s the kind of rule Moses made for me when I was sad or worried or sick.
“Tears let the sadness out,” he said.
Or, “The future is full of possibilities.”
Or, “Everyone’s gotta be sick someday.”
That’s what he said--before. Rules for life, he called them.
It’s good to stare.
So I stared right back. The boy stared. I stared. He stared. I stared. He stared. I stared.
“Come on!” Mr. Wills called. Everyone else had gone. It was just me, staring.
Someone in the library--who hadn’t been as interesting as the boy--closed the door, and I scuttled after Mr. Wills with my own thoughts and dreams and past and future.

Rule for Life
It’s good to stare.
ANGEL BROTHER

After the boy arrived I dreamed. Mum says that my brother is in heaven. If that’s true, then he came down for the night.
With his hat pulled low he looked just the same as I remembered him. He looked just the same as when I found him, just the same as I see him every day. Well, apart from the wings.
“Hey, Tiny,” he said.
I reached out my hand. Moses the angel stepped back. He stretched out his wings and rose into the air.
“Sorry, Tiny. Looky, no touchy,” he said.
I asked him how he was, which I can see now was a stupid question.
That’s often a stupid question: How are you? People don’t want to tell you how they really are unless you’re their brother or their sister. Even then we don’t share everything, do we? Mr. Wills was always asking “Are you OK?” And I always lied.
“You’re not to worry about me, Tiny Girl,” my brother continued. “You need to worry about yourself.”
But that is all I’ve done for twelve months and twenty-three days. I worry about school, about the stupid kids calling me names and cackling like hyenas. I worry about Mum, about the drink and about money. I worry.
When I awoke, and the world of dreams tinged the waking one, worry still ate away at me, but perhaps Moses the angel had lessened it just a little.

WILD BOY
The boy prowls the playground, a lion amongst the hyenas--all the chattering, cackling children. His rags have been replaced with a hodgepodge of lost property and an adult is with him, tailing him--Harry, who works with one child at a time in school. His job is to find out what is going on inside a child’s brain. An impossible job.
Even with his escort, the boy looks dangerous.
I hear Dev calling him “Wild Child”--not to his face, of course, but in a whispered hush as he and his idiot friends scuttle past me.
Dev means it as an insult, I know that. But I don’t think it is an insult. He is a child. And he is wild. What’s wrong with that?
Wild animals are fierce and dangerous and free. Wild flowers are the most precious and beautiful. And wild thoughts are what make us feel alive. Like when I think about jumping on the table in the middle of Mr. Wills’s maths lesson and shouting at the top of my voice, “I’m not stupid! I’m just stuck!”
I like the boy. He is wild. He scares all the idiots in my class; I can see them cower as he walks by. He has hair like a deep, starless night. And he likes staring, like me.
I stare at everyone. Everyone ignores me. Nearly everyone. Luzie catches my eye. She is sitting in a circle of my ex-friends. Her eyes are sad. Her lips begin to rise in a smile. I look away.
We’re not allowed to take pens out to the playground, but I’ve been sitting writing all lunch. No one usually sees me, not even the teachers.

On bad days Poppy sees me. Today’s a bad day.
She crept up behind me. “All right, freak,” she whispered in my ear.
Giggles then from Poppy’s idiot friends.
I didn’t turn. I didn’t answer.
“What you writing, freak?”
I’d closed the book. I held it tightly. I held my thoughts tightly.
“Whatever, freak,” Poppy hissed. More giggles. Then I felt a tug on my hair as she pulled at my frizzy mop. Still I didn’t move.

The boy sees me too.
I was sitting where I am now, where I’d stolen a sad glance from Luzie, where Poppy had tugged at my curly black hair--on my second-favorite bench. My coat was buttoned up and a long, thick scarf that Mum knitted an age ago was tied round my neck, face and head when I first spoke to him.
His prowl led him right past me.
He stared. I stared. His dark gray eyes tried to swallow me, but before they could I whispered, “I like your hair.”
Another stupid thing to say.
His eyes flashed. I breathed in. He continued his prowl. I breathed out.
That was our first conversation.
Can you call that a conversation?
Of course. Both people don’t have to talk, just respond. He flashed his eyes.
Mum says that I mustn’t talk to myself, that I’ll make myself go mad.
I think it might be too late for that.

THE DAY I WENT MAD
He said, “Bye-di-bye, Tiny,” in the morning, pinching my sides, making me giggle. Then my brother left for school. His cap was tilted back, and just before he closed the door his big, bright eyes smiled at me. You know, one of those secret smiles. I smiled back.
I used to have a lovely smile; Mum always tells me that. Used to. That makes me sad. What’s wrong with my smile now?
I went to school, same as normal. I did my lessons, same as normal. I laughed and played with all my friends, Luzie, Angelica, Gemma, Hanaiya, same as normal. Mr. Wills said that I was “so bright,” same as normal, and that I’d be able to read any book I liked soon. I walked home with Luzie and Shadid, same as normal.
Then normal ran away.
In my memory everything is wrong. Our front door looks warped, the paint cracked and peeling. The lock sucks my key in, the mouth of some hungry monster. The key burns my skin like ice.
I open the door and call, “Mo!”
This is greeted by a silence so complete, so unearthly, that my breath freezes in my lungs. The chill spreads out around me and frost cracks under my feet as I step towards my brother’s room.
“Mo!” I whisper into air so still I can see my words hang in the mist ahead of me.
I place my hand on Moses’s door and push.
Then I see him, as I see him now--whether waking or sleeping--cut into my mind.
He is still and cold, lying on his back. His head is propped against the bed but that priceless smile is covered by his cap, fallen forwards. Apart from that all I can see is red--soaking into the carpet, smeared across the pages of discarded books, staining my last sight of my brother.

FITTING IN
Nobody talked about the boy, not like when an ordinary person joined our school.
Someone normal and straightforward and boring was the greatest fascination to my classmates. Someone normal would be mobbed in the playground, forced to tell every detail of their dull lives. Someone normal just fitted.
But this boy, this wild boy, he was too much, too wild, too extraordinary. He crashed into our lives. He haunted our days. And he fitted none but me.
Nobody talked about the boy, but there were whispers.

I’d spend a long time in the book corner, soaking in the covers of the books on the top shelf, the ones I still could not read. When Mr. Wills was busy reading with others, I’d pull them one by one from the shelves, gazing at the glossy pictures.
I was standing, staring at a picture of a boy with red hair sitting on a swing--it was a book I’d seen Luzie reading--when I heard the whisper and I knew straightaway who they were talking about: the boy.
“. . . just a weirdo. Wandering around, staring.”
It was Poppy, but her table wasn’t by the book corner. I pushed myself up on tiptoes and peered over the bookshelf.
Poppy was standing behind Dev and Deon. Luzie and Angelica took up the other chairs.
“We-ir‑do.” Dev rolled the word out like a catkin. Deon laughed.
“Shut up, Poppy,” Luzie said. “Don’t be so horrible. You heard what Mr. Wills said. We’ve got to include everyone, no matter how different they are.”
“You shut up,” Poppy spat back.
I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to listen.
I tried to silently sneak back to my seat. I glanced at the table as I emerged, knocking the wobbly shelf; it shook and rocked on its uneven legs. Books crashed to the ground.
“What on earth is going on?” Mr. Wills yelled from his desk, where Shadid sat beside him reading a book about football.
All eyes were on me.
Poppy answered before I could. “Kaia was pushing in the book corner, sir.”
“Sit down, Kaia. You too, Poppy. I don’t know what either of you think you are doing,” the teacher said. He returned to Shadid and the football book.
Poppy glared at me, anger in her cool blue eyes.
I looked away.
Luzie caught me, held my stare.
I walked away, back to my chair, an empty one beside it.