Forever Changed

“It's funny, she spent months not saying a word, and now she won't shut up," I laughed.

"She cracks me up," he said as he used his finger to trace my scar.

“I still can’t believe you didn’t turn off the disposal before you stuck your hand in there,” he said, shaking his head.

“Are we going to talk about this every time we hold hands? Besides, I was preoccupied defending your honor,” I said.

“Thirty-three stitches,” he said.

“I know, I felt every one of them,” I said as my hand began to burn in response.

“I’m sorry you hurt yourself, babe,” he said, nuzzling my neck which proved to be an excellent pain reliever.

“Me too,” I quipped. “No, actually, I’m not. At least it got Megan talking, and helped Mom and me work through a lot of stuff, so maybe it happened for a reason. Everything that happened was tough and I will never stop missing my father, but I am glad you're finally free from yours,” I said, sinking back against his chest.

His mouth traveled my jaw line as he tilted my head back so his lips could meet mine. I deepened the kiss by opening my mouth to his as his hands gently caressed my ribcage, slowly moving upward.

I pulled back to look in his eyes. “I’m not going to keep the one promise to my dad,” I said, laughing as his eyes widened. “But I am going to wait until it no longer feels like I would be letting him down,” I said, bursting his bubble.

“Damn, so close, yet so far away,” he said as I giggled. “You’ll be the death of me, woman,” he said in a mock growl.

“I hope not or you’ll miss out when I am ready,” I teased.

He laughed with me. “Okay, so I see a lot of cold showers in my future then.”

I laughed too, enjoying life fully for the first time in as long as I could remember. One tragic event had changed everything. Shifting our lives to bring us together and we would be forever changed because of it.

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When I was younger, I always thought of life like chapters in a book. I never knew what each turn of the page would bring, but always hoped for something better and happier. I regarded my younger brother and myself as characters that were meant to persevere, no matter what obstacles were thrown our way. Of course, our life was far from the paranormal worlds that I loved reading about. Not that you could call our life normal—not in the least, but we definitely didn’t have any cool supernatural powers or anything like that. Still, fantasizing about it helped pass the endless miles down highways that look the same no matter where you are at. If I were a paranormal character, I would be an illusionist. I had made it an art form to never let anyone know how I was really feeling. We never knew what kind of mood my mom would be in from one day to the next, so most days I was the emotional catalyst of the family, always trying to appear happy and cheerful, when inside I was screaming. My brother, on the other hand, would be a special character. Kevin is a unique soul, caring and selfless. He definitely doesn’t deserve this life—neither of us do, but at least we have each other, and I would die to protect him.

We arrived in Four Corners, Montana, in late September, over a full month after the school year had already started, but my little brother and I were used to that by now. The town definitely lived up to its name. Four adjacent corners with lonely looking establishments perched on each one. We observed the Higgins Grocers, which sounded vaguely familiar on the south corner and a small mom and pop restaurant called Sunny-Side Up on the corner directly across from it. Withers, a gas station that had seen better days, sat on the third corner opposite from the restaurant, which left the last corner to the run-down trailer park called Shady Lane that would be our new home.

As Jim, my “step-dork” as we liked to call him, pulled our beat-up car into the dirt-packed path, my brother Kevin and me exchanged horrified looks. We weren’t freaked out we would be living in a trailer, since it was a humongo step-up from some of the dumps we had lived in over the years. Just the idea of having a roof over our heads was an absolute godsend. It was more the size of the town that made Kevin and I exchange uneasy glances. Even at nine, Kevin understood how our mom thought, and we both knew there was absolutely no way Lucinda would make it in a town this size.

Like always though, I kept my face impassive, not letting my disappointment show. It had taken most of the morning for Lucinda to sign all the housing papers the woman at the welfare office in Bozeman handed over. During that time, I’d allowed myself to daydream about the stability our lives would have, for at least a few months anyway, and after two weeks in a shelter, I was ready for a little space.

Living in a shelter was always tough on Kevin and me. The accommodations were always tight with no privacy to speak of with food that you ate just for the sake of eating. If I never drank another glass of powdered milk again, I would die a happy person.

This last shelter had been more bearable than most of the others we had lived in over the years. Instead of separating men and women into different spaces crammed with cots, they had family rooms that were roughly sixteen feet by sixteen feet where entire families could stay. The rooms had two double beds, which meant Kevin and I were forced to share. At seventeen, I should have bucked at the idea of sharing a room, let alone a bed with my brother, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way, he was all I had, and I’ve spent my entire life trying to protect him.

Already knowing that we would most likely only be living in our new home for a short while was always a hard pill to swallow, no matter how many times we’d been through this. It had taken us two weeks in the car to get to Montana from California since we had to make several pit stops to earn money for gas. Kevin and I were both equally sick of the car and didn’t relish another move when Lucinda decided yet again that the grass was greener somewhere else.

Step-dork, Jim slowly drove past a string of mobile homes that varied in size and appearance. We’d stayed in our share of projects, dumpy motels and run-down apartments, but never a trailer park. I was surprised that some of them were actually relatively nice with extra built-on storm rooms and utility rooms. Small bushes and fake flowers bordered the majority of the homes, making it clear that the current owners took pride in the little plot of land they inhabited. I couldn’t help but smile a little at the dozens of god-awful looking garden gnomes peeking out behind several of the bushes surrounding one of the trailers.

It all seemed so very normal, which only further proved our new home was doomed from the get-go. We definitely didn’t exist in the realm of normal.

Jim pulled into a narrow drive and stopped in front of what was to be our new home. The overgrowth of weeds and unkempt bushes surrounding the trailer gave the indication that it had been sitting empty for quite a while. The exterior of the trailer was covered in faded metal paneling, but looked to be in decent enough shape. There were no broken windows as far as I could tell and as long as there were no holes in the floor or roof, it might actually be tolerable. Lucinda and Jim piled out of the vehicle, leaving Kevin and me behind in their typical parental-lacking fashion.

Kevin used his insignificant body weight to try to push the heavy car door open. The door cracked open slowly, sticking at half-mast on its rusty hinges. I twisted around on my seat and used my feet to push it open the rest of the way before sliding out after him. It would have made more sense for me to sit by the only door that opened in the back seat, but the rusted-out hole that took up the majority of the floorboard on my side of the car freaked Kevin out. He was scared he was going to fall through the floor, so I had taken the less desirable position for the remainder of the trip. Being older, I didn’t want to admit to him that the hole sort of freaked me out too, especially at night when we were sleeping in the car. My mind would run wild, conjuring up images of every insect imaginable creeping up through the hole in the pitch-black night and crawling all over us. During the day, I would drape my bare feet out the open window, daydreaming about being somewhere else, anywhere else. This method worked through California and most of Nevada, but once we got into the mountain ranges, the temperature dropped drastically, making it impossible to keep the window open. Kevin and I stayed huddled together under the thin blanket we shared at night, shivering in our thin California apparel that didn’t serve us well in the chillier temperatures we were driving through. Where the hole in the floor really sucked though was when the sleet and snow on the road splashed up from underneath the car. Kevin had a meltdown watching the snow spewing up through the hole, scared it wouldn’t stop and would bury us alive in the backseat. My hands froze as I scooped it back up and made a game of throwing it back down in the hole. Kevin perked up at the makeshift game and admitted he

even kind of missed it once we made our way down the mountain.

“So, should we go check out our new home?” I asked, using all my weight to close the stubborn car door behind me.

“I guess,” he said grumpily.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, using my hip to nudge him teasingly.