August

 Chapter One

            One woman having two fertilized eggs in her uterus sounds like a miracle, doesn’t it? Well at least it does to me. This woman ultimately gives birth to a twin: one boy and one girl. Even though they were born on two different days, they are only five minutes apart. My brother, Grayson, is just five minutes older than me, but he acts more like he’s five years older than me. I laughed at the time when he would yell at me for ripping the head off his Catwoman.

            I remembered the first time he shaved, I purposely out soap in his shaving cream and I after that I was grounded for two months. He wouldn’t talk for me for two weeks straight. It felt lonely when he didn’t talk to me. The time he climbed onto the tree and fell off of it breaking his right arm, I felt the pain in my right arm too. I could feel the blood pouring out his skin; I could feel how he felt. I even had the urge to cry with him. Every time I look at my forearm, I could feel that invisible scar.

            Grayson has always been the other me; the other part of me. When we are combined together, we make perfection. A year ago he was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer that usually occurs on teenagers. At dinnertime, it was so quiet like none of us exist. Mom will cook and then we’ll eat. That was all. And when Grayson started chemotherapy everything got worse. Mom and Dad will always fight and I will always be in my room blasting the music trying to ignore their arguments. My life sucked.

            Now here I am at Grayson’s funeral. He didn’t die from cancer. He died being heroic. I watched as Grayson’s coffin filled with white roses. I wished the one that had die was me. His life was rough already, he didn’t need this. A few people from school came to his funeral, but mostly it was our relatives.

            I looked at Grayson’s gravestone and imagined my name next to his. The beloved son and daughter that will always remain in our hearts. Instead it read: What lies behind him and what lies before him are tiny matters compared to what laid within him. That touching line that Dad chose for him, but nothing was more touching than Grayson himself.

            “Jackie,” Noah Beckham, Grayson’s best friend, called. He stood behind me giving me a melancholy that made my stomach churned. “I’m sorry.”

            I would have said, “Thank you,” but I instead I didn’t say anything. I walked away leaving him in the rain, that has just started.

v   

            I sat on the window seat in my room and looked out the window searching for something I know I will never find. The doorbell ring and Dad opened the door. “Patrick,” Uncle Dexter, a detective, said. “Where’s Jackie?”

            I heard his footsteps as he climbed up the stairs. He appeared by the doorway. “Did you catch him,” I asked never taking my eyes off the window.

            “Yeah,” he said softly. “We found the driver and he admitted the hit and run.”

            I nodded as tears swelled up in my eyes. “Thank you.”

            “It’s my job,” he said. I watched as one by one the car drove by without an accident. Of all the people on the street why did it had to be Grayson.

            Life is unfair.

            It will never be.