CHAPTER ONE – AIDEN
It was the perfect place to grow up as a kid. Just a townhouse development out on the far edge of the farthest sprawling suburbs to most people, but to an eight-year-old this place was magical.
My mom and I always lived in apartments before that. Not nice ones, either. Dingy ones. Run-down ones with ant problems, mice problems, drunk neighbor problems. But this year I turned eight we moved out of the city because she started working for this lawyer guy.
(Yes, he did end up being my step-dad. It was one of those sappy, romantic, ‘down-on-her-luck single mother finds a fucking prince who whisks her off to the magical kingdom of small-town townhouses while giving her a well-above-minimum-wage job so she can make her own choices for once’ stories.)
His name is Bob. My dad, that is. And he looks like a Bob. He sounds like a Bob, he acts like a Bob and you know what? What a fucking relief, right? Because in the city the guys who were interested in my mom were all called Chad, or Todd, or Snakes. She literally dated a guy named Snakes.
So Bob Edwards was a huge step up for her.
Anyway… I’m rambling.
I’m trying to think back to the day I met them. The twins who lived across the green space from us. Like I said, this townhouse place was magical. There was grass. Like… lots of it. And all the front doors of the townhouses faced each other across this expanse of greenery. About thirty of them all lined up in a row on one side and the same number on the other side.
Off to my left were the woods and off to my right was a rock feature. Like a big pile of boulders surrounded by water—not a lot of water, enough so you could jump from the shore to the nearest boulder and clamber your way up to the peak. And there was a pump or something that made water trickle down the rocks. In the pond there were tadpoles, and frogs, and one summer there was even a turtle.
Maybe this isn’t magical to some people but it was for me. I’m telling you, to a kid who had so far grown up with nothing but trashcans outside his front stoop, this was heaven. In my eight-year-old mind it felt like I’d been picked up and set down inside a whole new world. I don’t know what my life would look like right now if I had stayed in the city. Maybe I’d still be this guy, but probably not.
So the nature was cool and all, but the best thing about living in those townhouses was the twins, Kali and Kyle. Same age as me. They’d lived there all their lives so I was some exotic city boy who knew nothing about how to survive in the woods for an afternoon, or build a fort, or how to catch and raise tadpoles on your back patio, or where the wild berries grew in the summer—and they took it upon themselves to teach me their sleepy, small-town ways.
The three of us were inseparable. Ten minutes after the movers arrived I was enrolled in Kali and Kyle’s school of middle-class survival.
So that’s where it started.
I sigh and suddenly realize I’ve said all this out loud.
I’m standing at a podium on the church altar giving Kyle’s eulogy. Everyone is crying. Everyone but me. I can’t even look at Kali because if I do I’ll lose it and I don’t want to lose it. Not yet. I have to keep my shit in check until I’m done because this is my only chance to pay Kyle the respect he deserves. My last chance to honor him and let him know how much I loved him, how much I’ll miss him, and how life will never be the same now that he’s gone.
I was gonna say, “And now this is where it ends.” That sentence is written down on the piece of paper in front of me, but I can’t bring myself to say it. Because that cheats Kali out of what must come next.
A life without her twin.
It’s a life unimaginable. One that should not even have to be imagined, but must. Because this is real and I want her to know that I get it, even if I can never fully get it.
So I wing it. I talk about how we grew up, and Kyle went to business school, and I went to mechanic school, and Kali moved away to chef school. And how Kyle and I opened up Rock Crawler Custom Jeeps and lived a life of testosterone-filled bliss for more than a decade.
I don’t know why I think everyone is interested in this shit, but I don’t care if they’re not. I am. I need to retell it. Need to remind myself that life was good once.