Falling into Exposure (Falling 2)

“Parker was the oldest out of all of us, the firstborn. He was smart and outgoing, and ridiculously funny. He could always make you smile, even when you didn’t feel like it. But I guess deep down, he was also the most sensitive. He took things to heart and bottled them up inside. He was the one who struggled the most with our parents. They couldn’t understand that he was acting out in order to get their attention. My mom especially isn’t very maternal. I don’t know why she even had four kids… I guess it looked good to everyone on the outside.”

I curl in closer to him, losing myself in his deep voice as he unburdens himself.

“Parker started acting out a lot when he was in high school. Getting into trouble… drinking, partying, embarrassing them. My mother hated it. She always wanted everything in a neat little box, and when it didn’t fit, she couldn’t stand it. She sent Parker away to boarding schools, wilderness camps, that sort of thing. He always managed to get kicked out or run away. He just wanted to be home with us. But she was insistent that she was going to punish him. My Dad went along with it like he always does. And when Parker turned eighteen, they kicked him out. They told us they were going to give him some tough love. By cutting him off from all of us.”

“That’s horrible,” I choke out. “Your poor brother must have been so scared.”

“I guess they thought he would come around to their way of thinking eventually,” he continues. “I hated them for it because I knew how Parker was. He needed us, he needed his family. But he never came back and I couldn’t figure out why. I went looking for him every day after school. For months, I looked everywhere. And then one night, I finally found him, sleeping on a cardboard box in front of the homeless Shelter. He was dirty and gaunt, track marks up and down his arms. I didn’t recognize him at all until he spoke.”

Gabriel’s chest trembles as he holds in his feelings, his eyes squeezing shut. I wrap my arms around him, melding us together as I try to hold back my own emotions.

“I tried to talk to him, but he was angry that I found him. That I saw him that way. He was my big brother, and I always looked up to him. We were the closest out of all of us. He told me to stay away from him, that he was a piece of garbage, just like mom and dad said. They’d actually made him believe that.”

Gabriel opens his eyes and looks down at me. “God, Victoria if you had known him before, you would know he was anything but. He was smart and talented. He just needed the one thing my parents refused to give him.”

I nod painfully, understanding that feeling all too well. Vying for someone’s attention, the person who is supposed to love you, and just never being enough. It’s a feeling you can never quite get past. Not being enough. Not deserving love. I cringe inwardly as I imagine Gabriel’s parents denying their own children a basic human need.

“I can see how that would have affected him,” I reply softly. “Affected all of you, Gabriel.”

He looks annoyed by my remark, obviously not wanting to admit that it has affected him. But I’m glad when he continues to talk, to tell me his story.

“Parker ran away from me that night, and it was the last time I ever saw him. I begged my parents repeatedly to get him help. I even saved up my pocket money to get him into a clinic, but I couldn’t find him again. I looked everywhere, asked so many people. He’d completely disappeared. I held out hope until three months later when my parents got the phone call. The cops found his body in an alley next to the trash of some nightclub. He had jumped from the roof. At first, I didn’t think it could be true. Parker would never kill himself. But then they brought us the note in his pocket, and it couldn’t be denied.”

“That is so sad, Gabriel. I can’t even imagine how that must have been for you and your family.”

“Good old mom, she made sure the story never went to press,” he says dryly. “God forbid a scandal like that could tarnish her image of the perfect wife and mother.”

I shake my head in revulsion. I don’t even know this woman and I loathe her.

“I hated them from that day on, especially her. I started acting out. Not to get their attention, but to embarrass her on purpose. She despised me for it. So when I turned sixteen, she sent me to a military boarding school. I probably should have hated it, but I didn’t. I spent the next two years of my life there and never went back home after that.”