Mine

Janie and Henry

He was my brother. His name was Henry, and he was older by months, though I was not sure how many, nine at least... He was a tall boy with bright blue eyes and brown freckles. His hair was a lovely russet red, and he wore it long to spite our very unstable Mama. Henry was not a part of my life when I was small, he had lived with his father, and when his father died, Henry came to live with Mama, my step-father Peter, and myself.

Henry was very bright, a little shy, at least, I believed at first. He didn't talk to me for the first year he lived in Mama's house. He had taken up a room over the garage and from there I knew he came and went as he pleased. If I wanted, I could tip toe along the eave of the roof from my dormer over to the bonus room dormer and spy... I was never sure if he ever realized this, not until much later.

While Henry was Mama's first child, there was no familial love there. Mama and Peter were more concerned about keeping me a little girl than worrying about raising a young man. Henry was a minor inconvenience when he was born, and a slightly larger one now that he was to live this us. My step-father Peter was a nice man, but distant with me. He gave me all I wanted, and Mama saw it as a gesture to please her...not me. As for Mama, I was her doll. However, as I got older, I was becoming less like a doll and more like a woman, and thus my appeal faded. All the same, I was smothered with false affection when Mama's friends came around, and smothered with virginial white clothes and dolls and saddle shoes. I smelled like baby powder and purity.

At school, I had a nickname: the Virgin Princess.

I was the top of my class, alone, in my metaphorical ivory tower. I had decided long ago not to let anyone really know the blackness that swirled around under my skin.

I had 'friends' who would come to my house and laugh at me, at the dolls and the dresses and the tea cakes, but I hated them all. I was my own best friend.

Until Henry.

He went to the same school, in the same year, our last year, the rugged and interesting new guy in our small school. The girls swooned over him, the boys hated him, and soon Henry was palling around with the school miscreant, James. James was trouble with a capital 'T', and with his older girlfriend Beth, they terrorized the town after hours in their beat up brown El Camino. There were drugs and sex and loud music and vandalism and God knows what else. Henry fell in with James as if they were meant to be...a magnetic thing.

Mama had known Henry had been trouble. While Henry was devoted to his father, who was a bit of a criminal in his own right as Mama told it, Henry had been in trouble for fighting and violence in the past. It was only a matter of time, according to Mama, before Henry found someone like James and that they both found themselves in jail.

James would appear in Henry's room some nights, and I would listen to them talk and sniff the air as the smell of marijuana drifted out of the window. I would lay on the eave, back against the dormer and listen to them talk and listen to music. They talked about girls sometimes, and brag about how 'she would be begging for it' and other silly things boys feel they have to brag about. Then they would talk about more serious things. They talked about what they wanted to do with their lives, how they wanted to leave this place. They had a lot in common--unwanted children, lots of internal anger, wondering if they could know what love was and be loved... It was upsetting to hear from my place on the roof.

I knew they were experimenting with each other, and somehow it was beautiful to me, at least the idea of it. Henry was not gay, James neither, but that was a relationship that I would never fully understand being female. I was not a complete innocent, I knew what sex was, how it worked, and that I wanted to experience it. I had read Mama's smutty romance books on the sly since I was small, but all my experience went to watching my friends with their boyfriends at the 'sleep overs' I was allow to attend from time to time. I had only ever kissed a boy, but it never went further than that. The one kiss had been as much awkward as it has been exhilarating, but that had only been because Henry had caught me.