"Don't go down to the river," they told me. "Ain't nothing good happen down by the river."
My brother was killed when I was fourteen. When he died, I didn't cry. Not when they left the casket open to show his pale face, with all that makeup plastered on to make him look still living; not when they lowered him into the frozen ground. I wanted to, but I could never find myself able to let tears fall, especially where anybody could see.
After he died, my parents stopped being parents. It's not like I stopped calling them mom and dad but after we buried Colin, they stopped doing all the things they used to. They didn't notice my grades slip, or the way my pupils constantly consumed the grey of my eyes. When I came home with rope burn around my wrists and mouth-shaped bruises on my neck, neither of them raised an eyebrow. I wasn't big enough a personality to fill the hole Colin left in all of us. I never wanted to be, either.
Colin and I used to go down to the river when we were kids. It used to be safe back then, there weren't the same gangs or drugs when we were kids. We'd strip down to our underwear and jump into the water from the old unused train-bridge overhead. I always came home with cuts and bruises but Colin never did. He always knew the deepest part of the river to jump in, and he'd dive down down down to the bottom and come up with a rock from the bed for me. I'd keep them in the loose floorboards under my bed. I told Colin we'd collect enough to one day build a castle.
But when I got to middle school, and Colin started his second year of high school, the river changed. Kids stopped going down there to play after that little boy got buried in the beach-sand and came back out with a needle in his elbow. At eleven, I knew enough about the darker side of maturity to know it wasn't safe to play down there anymore. Colin's best friend, John, had shot up in front of me before, and I was used to watching the two of them stumble around our house, drugged out on downers or uppers or a combination of the two. He'd never get caught. He was still our family's "Golden Child," even with the track-marks, and mom and dad turned a blind eye. The first time I smoked pot they caught me in a cloud of smoke in the backyard and that's when I started smoking with Colin and John instead. My brother used to sneak a joint into my bag lunch every day and I'd sneak out to meet them down the street during the break. Their high school started searching lockers when the gangs formed, and I was still too young to be suspected.
The night Colin died I was at a party with the few friends I had who were my own age. We were drinking bottles of expensive wine in Jane Allen's basement, one after the other, while her parents were out of town. I was used to the warm buzz of alcohol already, more so than the rest of my friend, and while they were stumbling around drunk I made it my business to sit and watch them all interact. I was sitting in the corner with my knees to my chest when the phone rang, and Jane said it was for me.
"Hello?" I said into the receiver. There was loud music in the background and heavy breathing on the line.
"Marie?" my brother's voice came in scratchy. I could tell he was drunk.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"At Sofie's. John and I came by but I think we're gonna go down to the river. Do you want us to pick you up?"
I looked around the dimly lit room. An entire night of sipping from bottles in a stupid game and pretending to grimace didn't sound like much fun. "Sure," I said, "I'll wait outside."
"Okay, see you soon." The line clicked dead. I handed the phone back to Jane, who was hovering around, straining to hear what had been said. I shot her a smile.
"Where are you going?" she asked, slightly tipsy from the wine.
"Down to the river with my brother." I could tell she didn't want me to leave and go off with him. She didn't want me to be cooler than her, hanging out with high schoolers while she tried to throw a party.
