The Fine Line

Disclaimer: The following is a work of fiction, nothing contained herein is real or true and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental (and the cause of all my paranoia.) All rights belong to me, the author, and any unauthorized reproduction is prohibited by law (and violators will be punished with a really big stick.)

A/N: second installation, ta da! Thank you to JJ for the vote of confidence! Oh, and side note, my net will be dissapearing on friday for a week or two, so readers are warned. I am not abandoning this, I have the entire story finished, but my net will not be accesible. Thanks for the support! Murray loves you all, and I am Murray so I should know! Enjoy!



(Aaron)
My name is Aaron. I don’t have a last name. My parents never bothered to give me theirs because they were too drugged out of their minds, so my birth certificate and my social security card just say Aaron. My misunderstood little brother Matthew and I were taken away by child services when our parents died of an overdose. I was 10 and Matthew was almost four. We were bounced around from foster home to foster home for a few months, but because of Matthew’s strange eyes and unusual gifts we were never able to stay in one for very long. So they gave us to my crazy irresponsible sister Clara as soon as she came back to the USA after the college in England kicked her out. My sister Clara is just like my parents, except her drug of choice is alcohol, not heroine. All the same, she could barely afford to take care of us so I did whatever I could to help.

I knew the moment I saw him through the little glass window they hold babies up to when they’re born so the family could see them that he was not a normal baby. He was much too aware of his surroundings for a new born, and his eyes were completely black, not the usual blue of babies. The first time he ever spoke he was three and a half and it was a full sentence. He said, “Susan and Harold are going to die next week.” Susan and Harold were our mother and father and exactly seven days later they popped too many pills and took too much heroine. They were dead before the police arrived according to the report. I was scared when I remembered what Matthew had said, but slowly I began to accept it. Even if he was odd and a little frightening, he was still my brother. He never spoke unless it was to tell me someone was going to die. I think he wanted me to help them somehow, to stop them, or to save them maybe, or just to comfort them. His silence worried people, his true predictions scared them. Clara never noticed.

The only person to ever be nice to my brother besides me was Mrs. Mitchell; she lived with her son Vincent in the apartment right above ours. She told me once that she wasn’t scared of Matthew because her husband had been exactly like him and she always thought Vincent would grow into the same person because they were so similar. I thought he looked just like his mother, but she insisted he resembled his father far more then her. Still though, they both had thick black curls and deep amber eyes. I once told Mrs. Mitchell that if Vincent ever grew his hair out some more, instead of just keeping it in the stubby little pigtail he preferred they could be mistaken for twins. It wasn’t just their looks though, they both always seemed so happy, and their joy was infectious. Everyone around them seemed to live for smiles from the two of them and Mrs. Mitchell always had her smile ready for everyone, no matter what. According to his mother, Vincent was like that too…before I came. I only saw him smile once, not at me of course, but at the old lady next door when he was helping her up the stairs.

It was the day my brother and I were dropped off at my sister’s and I was still in the social worker’s car, so I don’t think he even saw me, but his whole face lit up and his eyes glowed while he asked her about her cat or her grandkids or maybe if she’d seen last night’s game show. I couldn’t hear him, so I guess I’ll never know what he really said, but from the way she reacted he must have been telling her that Jesus Christ himself was going to come down from heaven to give her a million dollars. I knew right then that I wanted to be his friend just because I wanted to be around that smile. I wanted him to smile like that at me because a few minutes later I knew he was going to need a friend he could trust. Matthew told me about Vincent’s mom the day we moved in, four whole years before she died.

As much as I wanted Vincent to like me, everything I did just seemed to make him angry. Someone told me he ran errands for people in the complex, so I decided that I would too. But I guess people felt sorry for me because they never asked Vincent for help anymore. He’d never spoken to me, or even looked at me really, but from then on whenever he saw me his face went dark and he would leave as fast as he could with his fists clenched as if he were trying not to hit me. I wanted to hang out with him and I could see what a great softball player he was so I played too, and because he was a good student and went to special honors classes, I studied harder. He stopped showing up for team practice as soon as I joined. He said that he wanted to spend more time working on other extra-curricular activities that would look better on scholarship applications. He requested to be moved to another teacher’s class once my grades landed me in honors. He claimed to be allergic to his current teacher’s perfume and said he didn’t want to stop her from using something she enjoyed just for his sake. The looks he gave me whenever I showed up anywhere he was made my veins fill with ice water and I started to forget that he could look so kind and happy. Then I heard him sing.

His voice was amazing! Hearing him sing, I felt like I could almost see the music drifting through the open window to spread peace through the neighborhood. I could play piano a little, and I wanted to be good enough to accompany him so I asked Mrs. Mitchell for lessons on the days he took them in order to learn his favorite songs, but as soon as my lessons started he disappeared. He always disappeared whenever I showed up, either locking himself in his room or going out for a walk, so I never got to talk to him. I felt like I needed to apologize. I’m not sure what for exactly, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong really, but I didn’t want him to hate me like he so obviously did. He was going to need a friend but he refused to let that person be me.

Instead, Mrs. Mitchell became my friend….no….more like my sanctuary. She treated Matthew like a normal little kid; she treated me like I mattered. She tried to help my sister through rehab, it didn’t work, but it was a nice gesture all the same. She wasn’t exactly like a mother, more like a….well….more like an angel really. It was so hard for me to believe she was sick and that she was going to die but Matthew was never wrong. Then the coughing started one afternoon and I saw her handkerchief before she could hide it from me. It was covered with tiny flecks of blood that she never could wash out all the way. When she told me she had lung cancer I begged her to use the shoebox full of money that she had stashed in her closet. I’d found it one day a year earlier when she sent me to look for some sheet music, but when I asked then she just said that it was for an emergency. I told her that lung cancer was an emergency, but then she told me that the money was Vincent’s. She said his father had been sending them money every week since Vincent was born, but Mrs. Mitchell said she didn’t need it to raise him so she kept it safe in case anything should ever happen to her. She said he didn’t even know it was there.
I told her to tell him, I told her he would agree with me, that he would want his mother alive more then he would want a safety net. She told me that even if she used the money to go to the doctor, she would still die from the cancer and then Vincent would need the money even more. She said that according to her will, Vincent’s aunt Jemania, his father’s sister, was supposed to take care of him, but she also said that Jemania was a bit of a loose cannon and hardly reliable. She begged me not to say anything to Vincent and it was easy for me to agree because Vincent never talked to me, even after 4 years of me coming to his house every few days.

Mrs. Mitchell still insisted that he was just going through a rebellious phase, that if I waited for him to outgrow it she was sure we would be best friends. She had been saying that for four years. She was too nice to see that he hated me because he thought I was stealing her from him. He would never let her see his jealousy, but I knew that was it. I tried to give up the lessons when she became sick; I couldn’t pay for them anyway and it just made Vincent hate me more, but Mrs. Mitchell insisted that my talent was too pure to throw away. She kept saying that Vincent would come around eventually, that he was just being a silly boy, and that I shouldn’t worry myself over him or her illness. She said that she was happy her son would have me to turn to when she was gone. Of course, I think Mrs. Mitchell knew before I did that what had started as my wanting to be friends with her son had turned into something…else. Of course, being screamed at to drop dead isn’t a very good way to start any relationship.