Youth ✿ Paul Lahote [1]

xvi. out in the open

Alex could only watch as Jordan paced in front of her. The girl let her fingers clench into fists at her sides, more of a nervous tick than anything else as she prepared herself for what her brother was going to tell her.

It was scary for Alex to imagine what was going on inside Jordan's head. He seemed so broken, so unlike himself that Alex knew it had to have been serious to have him this worked up.

He had spent a solid half an hour in Alex's arms and had cried his eyes out. That wasn't usual for Jordan, it was always the other way round. Jordan held Alex when she cried, he put her back together.

Maybe that was what scared Alex the most—he was so out of character, so not himself that Alex struggled to recognise parts of him.

"I don't even know where to begin," Jordan continued to pace in the small space that his current room, the study his parents had converted, allowed. "My life is just such a shit show right now."

Alex didn't doubt that the boy had been homesick like he stated earlier, and that was part of the reason for him being upset. But there was more, Alex knew that and cursed herself for not trying to find out earlier. It had taken such a toll on her twin and Alex didn't notice nearly as much as she should have.

"Take your time," Alex let her small voice speak from her seat on Jordan's bed. "I'm not going anywhere."

Jordan looked grateful for that, a small smile graced his face as he watched his sister.

"I guess it started when I move to Ohio. It was fine in the beginning—I knew going into it that it would be hard, I was a new addition to the team and they had been bonded for over a year. But I would be fine, I have been any other time I've needed to make friends."

Alex knew that was the case—he had always been the outgoing one of the two. He did the talking, the socialising and any other extroverted thing whereas Alex was the opposite. She could never even imagine moving across the country, but she could easily imagine Jordan doing so.

Jordan let out a small sigh and he stopped walking. He stayed put in one spot and focused his attention on the ground in front of him. His fingers started to fiddle with the woven bracelet on his wrist—the one that both Jordan and Alex had gotten for their tenth birthday. Alex lost hers a long time ago but Jordan never took his off, it was a gift from his parents that he adored. "I don't know what part about me they hated, Lexi. They just did. From the minute I got there they made me feel like shit—and at first I thought that maybe it was because I was new, that they would warm up to me eventually. But I was so wrong.

"Everything I did, they hated. I got spat at, got called names that I could never even think about repeating—one guy even punched me once. For no other reason that I simply looked at him too long."

Alex felt her heart break—it was the only thing that she could pin on the feeling in her chest. It so heavy, such a massive pressured nailed down on her, so much that Alex nearly felt breathless. Her eyes got blurry before the drop of tears as she imagined what her brother had to go through, the ill treatment he got from his peers.

"I think when I really realised how fucking shitty those boys were was when they used my ethnicity against me—telling me to go back across the border, calling me names that are too derogatory to even tell you. That's what hurt the most for me—when they started to use a part of me that I have always been proud of and used it against me."

"And that's why you couldn't tell Mom and Dad," Alex concluded quickly from where she sat. The small girl used her hand to collect some of the tears that had ran down her face. "Because they used you being Hispanic as a reason to bully you—the one thing Mom and Dad are the most proud about giving us."