Skin, murky purple like the plums Charlie had bent his sneakers standing on tiptoes to get for her. A nose bent like the tracks of a car that had suddenly skidded off an icy road. Red lips like her own but rouged instead by blood, grotesquely bulging.
“School.” Her mother threw the word alongside her as she strode on by, equipped with a frozen bag of peas in one hand and a glass of water in the other toward the pillow on which the mottled face Chloe was staring at lay. Chloe, without taking her eyes off of her disfigured brother, scooped her backpack off the floor and flung it over her shoulders. She backed through the doorway and did not turn until her mother, hovering over the figure in the bed, eclipsed him. As Chloe’s body pivoted to instead face the stairs leading down to her front door, her top lip curled upwards in disgust. The deep thuds her feet made as she pounded downstairs created a rhythm for her thoughts.
He had always been slow. Chloe was not blinded like her mother by some maternal biological drive, nor was she insistently ignorant like her father; she knew and didn’t mind saying aloud that some wire in his brain must be hooked up to the wrong end. His body parts just didn’t seem to coincide with each, he was like a car that has one wheel spinning the opposite direction of the other three. He had a lazy eye and as he spoke, his pupils would always be drifting off in different directions, infuriatingly refusing to focus on any one thing, last of all the person with whom he was having a conversation. He didn’t talk all that much, but when he did he always ended up spilling out a medley of inappropriate details and phrases asking to be misconstrued. He always had some sort of injury: a gash on his hand from cutting something, a giant bruise from tripping over a rock, a broken toe from dropping a book on his foot. People could smell Leon’s void of survival instinct, and the scent of vulnerability drew them toward him; half of them wanted to make sure he wasn’t harmed and the other half wanted to see the harm that would inevitably befall him, but either way all of them wanted to be near him. It drove Chloe batshit crazy.
But everything was different now. While before everyone had wanted to be around Leon, now nobody wanted to even make eye contact with him for fear that Jack would hear and do the same thing to their faces that he had done to Leon’s. Instead they only wanted to talk about him, and they all looked to Chloe to be their official database on all things Leon. They would sidle up next to her, pass her a note in class, inbox her on Facebook, all with the intent of extracting some new material to weave into their tapestries of her brother, that pudgy freshman who got pummeled by Jack Trevor outside the high school. Leon, that poisonous fungus whose spores were wrecking havoc on her lungs, limiting her air supply – he deserved it having been such a fucking moron. Only someone who had been thrown shot-put style into a concrete wall would be dumb enough to tell Mr. Frinder, “Yeah, I guess Jack looked over at my paper a couple of times, but I dunno – I don’t really think that’s cheating. I mean, he does it a lot, and I don’t mind.” He got Jack kicked out of school – what other outcome that doesn’t involve a vicious beat down could he have expected?

Charlie understood. He shook his head as Chloe described to him what had happened, or at least what had happened between Jack and Leon. After she had told her story, she tried to redirect the conversation, regretting having brought up the topic at all, but he seemed to want to talk about only Leon. She answered more and more questions about him, trying to mirror the sympathy in Charlie’s voice yet also feeling her hands beginning to shift, straining to fulfill a feline desire to claw Charlie’s face off. How could someone possibly love a person the way she loved Charlie and then, barely a millisecond later, distort that same exact love into murderous hate? What kind of human being did that make her? But she answered that question herself: “A human being with real vitality. One who knows the primitiveness of love, one privy to its covert blackness. Only real artists have access to that. That’s real love.” And this voice reaffirmed Chloe, immersing her so deeply in her own unique spirit that she didn’t even register Emma’s arrival, at first.
There wasn’t anything particularly special about her from Chloe’s point of view. Yes, Emma was rather pretty but in a wilted way; everything in her face seemed to droop, like gravity paid more attention to her. Except when she smiled. Chloe had to admit that Emma’s smile had a quiet, perturbing radiance – it unsettled Chloe with its gross openness, she felt that it mocked her. Whenever that smile was directed towards her she always felt like something, somehow inaccessible to her only, curved those pale lips. But aside from that smile, it still seemed to Chloe that there was really nothing else that should make Charlie look at Emma the way he did.
It had begun just a couple of months ago. Emma Gurner, a threatening foreign entity, had invaded the summer, a time period specifically allocated by the universe itself for Charlie and Chloe. It was during summer Charlie and Chloe had first met, in Chloe’s backyard; Charlie, newly arrived to the neighborhood, three houses down, had punted a soccer ball directly into a pot of Chloe’s mother’s freshly plucked hydrangeas. Amid shattered earthenware and tragically trampled flowers, Charlie and Chloe had introduced themselves. But at the end of last school year Charlie’s dad had died, and Emma, who had lost her own father two years previous, sprung upon him fangs bared. Now here the three of them were, discussing Leon, Jack, black eyes, and bloody parking lots. It was Emma who said,
“I wonder who told Jack? He or she is really the one to blame for all of this.”
Chloe knew she hadn’t imagined the metallic glint in Emma’s eyes as she said this, staring directly at Chloe. But of course Charlie hadn’t noticed anything and instead he just said, “Yeah. Poor Leon.”
--------------
A few days after Leon had gotten Jack expelled, a large, clammy hand clutched Chloe’s arm as she was walking home from school. She swiveled around, and saw that it belonged to Jack. “Hey beautiful.” She felt herself smile at him and heard herself make a flirty comment back. And then suddenly they were on his couch, in his basement, the odor of beer dense, almost toxic clinging onto every molecule of air in the room. “You really are so goddamn hot.” His voice struck her thoughts and sent them crawling away. She tilted her eyes downward at the four empty cans lying next to Jack’s boot as a response, her eyelashes creating stripes across their labels. “Only thing good about that school” his voice was starting to sound thicker and groggier, “all those girls. Just right there.” She felt an anger rip through her, bitter and putrid. Anger made sharper by the nature of its evoker, Jack Trevor: a f***-up retard who thought it was clutch to have a sticker of an upside-down cross plastered onto the bumper of his car. And yet it oozed out of her like liquid nitrogen, “I bet you’d kill the kid that got you kicked out.” He popped open a new can as he said, “Only to teach him a lesson.” She didn’t even look at him as she said, “It was my brother.” As soon as the words were unleashed Jack looked up, and she saw dark satisfaction violently color his pupils. She knew that something, which had been gradually cracking, had finally shattered.
She remembered the day Leon had been beat up. She had felt rumbling course through the hallways of the school that whole day. And then, as the last bell rang, she saw kids running outside, their yells echoing back to her. She paused momentarily, running her hand through her hair, feeling the dirt and grease trapped within it before she began to trail behind them. Her pace slowed as she neared the shouting, her toes curling in macabre anticipation. She lingered back, a couple feet from the large mass of students, able to see a fist fly up through the cracks in the crowd every so often. She waited and the sounds of shrieks, gasps, moaning and laughter drifted back to her. Finally, the sound of bone slamming into flesh ceased, and Jack suddenly stood up, put on his jacket, and walked off. After a few minutes the crowd dispersed too, everyone walking away huddled together in various groups. Chloe approached the spot where all the people had just been standing, and saw, on the ground, a crumpled body like road kill. Blood surrounding it gathered in small puddles while a couple of stray teeth lay scattered around it, white orchid petals. The creature, groaning quietly, shifted it’s body slightly from side to side, attempting to wriggling out of its suffering. Chloe could make out the outline of her brother’s face and the color of his eyes but nothing else. She didn’t help him, in fact she did not move at all, but continued to stare at him wishing that the purple lump, which had been his eye, would squeeze out just one tear. At least then she would be able to feel a little less parched.