"Envy"--DEADLINE SUCCESS (Part One)
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Envy
Mirror, mirror, on the wall…
In the mirror there is a little boy in a long white nightshirt down to his knees and slipping off his shoulders. He cuddles a stuffed bunny to his chest, worn with age and love, and peers through shadowy bangs at the other standing shivering on the cold splintered floor. There are three little boys now, one inside the mirror, one outside and the other who sleeps in their bed while his living reflection frosts the glass with his breath. He reaches out a small hand and touches the other, but they are separated by a thin layer of lacquer that keeps them in their separate worlds, keeps them from becoming one because in this world there can be only two look-alikes and so someone here is not real.
---~---
From the first day they were living reflections, two little boys with midnight for hair and voices like choir boys, whose heartbeats echoed together in perfect time. Who can say, then, which was born first? (Though there must always be something to reflect for there to be a reflection). They said-this one, older-that one, younger-thus two little boys in the garden, separate but still equal, not knowing or caring which is which.
But life is more than an untouchable image in glass. Older-brother walks in the sunlit halls and plays in the gardens lifted from a picture book and learns under the harsh drone of teachers-like-crows. At his heels runs a shadow in color, a visible echo, younger-brother keeping easy pace, never surpassing but never falling behind either. They grow taller and fairer and brighter; they lift their faces to the sun and laugh in pure delight at living itself; they are characters from a legend or a fairytale told to children at bedtime.
When the shadows grow long on the grass they run back into the house to hide on the stairs and listen to the chatter of the guests at dinner party after dinner party, the sparkle of lights on the harsh fragile glass and the way it reflected off the women’s jewels like stairs and lurked in the depths of the men’s drinks. Holding their breath and each other’s hands, they watch with sparkling eyes and dream of the day they, too, can step out of the shadows into the strange bursts of light they can see.
---~---
…who is the fairest of them all?
They go to school. They have names-Will, younger-brother-Nate, older-brother. They are more separate than they were, but they are still equal. They are still together.
Delighted, they switch identities with frightening regularity and ease. Who is Nate? Who is Will? Call one and both answer. The question-do they know who is who? Quite possibly they’ve traded names so often that they can’t remember. Quite possibly they’ve decided that it doesn’t matter.
Their teachers are frustrated, trying to establish some base of identity between two dark-haired boys with angel faces and easy lies. Because Nate is taking Will’s tests and Will is writing Nate’s compositions and there is no difference in their scores and they find that eerie.
So one day the kindergarten teacher decides to make a point. And the test she hands back to Nate (who may not really be Nate at all, but he’ll be Nate forever now no matter if he was Nate before when it didn’t matter) is one point lower than Will’s test. One point, but it’s a widening abyss.
“Hey,” calls Will, rushing through the snow crunching underfoot after the identical figure in a blue snowcoat and white scarf. “What’s the matter? Nate? Nate?”
And Nate turns at the tugging on his coat and pushes his brother, hard, into the snowbank with a face like drowning beneath the ice.
That’s all it takes to shatter their world. They are separate; and now they are unequal.
---~---
There is a third little boy in the corner.
Nate has never seen him move, though he knows he must, because everywhere they go he is there. Always in the shadows he is waiting, under the desk or at the darkest crevices of the roots of trees, and he is watching with poisonous green eyes of snake’s skin. Nate does not speak to him, he is afraid of him in a way he does not understand, but he feels somehow that the boy belongs there with him (with him, not them, there is starting to be less of a them now). He doesn’t mention him to Will, and Will never mentions the boy to Nate-probably, he reasons, because Will is afraid, too. It makes him feel better to think that they will share something after all.
---~---
One day their mother reads to them, as she always does, from the Bible. Words are words and these are old and boring, but there’s one she speaks with spiteful passion that they want to know: what is it, this thing called sin?
“It’s something somebody does that God considers wrong,” she explains to them.
Wrong? God? They feel it’s wrong to ask who, so the question is what.
“What is wrong?”
“Seven sins. Gluttony, pride, lust, sloth, greed, wrath, and envy.” She counts them off one by one on her fingers as they watch in fascination.
And at the last word the boy in the corner raises his head from behind his updrawn knees.
“Envy,” Nate repeats. The word is new, and it tastes sharp as knives on his tongue. He turns to the boy in the corner. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
The boy nods once. He does not blink. He does not breathe.
In her chair their mother is frozen. She looks at Nate as though she had never really seen him before, as though he were not her son but some monstrous vermin-covered thing.
“Who are you talking to?” she asks sharply.
Nate doesn’t understand. “The…the little boy,” he says, gesturing to the corner.
“He means me,” Will says quickly. He grabs Nate’s hand and squeezes it in warning. It hurts; Nate wiggles his fingers in silent protest.
“I don’t mean you,” Nate cries angrily. “I mean the little boy in the corner.”
“There is no little boy in the corner,” his mother snaps, clutching her Bible with tight, white fingers.
“Yes there is!” Nate argues back. Will clutches at his shirt, his shoulders, trying to hold him back, trying to shut him up. “He’s right there!”
“Stop lying to me! There is no boy in that corner!”
When the books connects with his face, he doesn’t know how to respond. A throbbing, blinding ache blooms on impact and something begins to run down his face, hot, wet, sticky; he’s bleeding. His mother’s eyes are wide and panicked, and her chest heaves with the effort of breathing.
“Nate,” Will moans in a sharking voice. “Oh, Nate…”
“I’m not lying,” Nate whispers, tears beginning to stream down his skin.
But his mother is done with talking. She seizes his collar and drags him down the hall, despite screaming and pleading and clutching at the door frames, despite Will pulling at her clothes, her legs, pulling at Nate in some desperate attempt to save him from whatever was waiting for him. She slaps Will away and hurls Nate into their room, slamming the door in his shocked and stinging face. Over Will’s pleas and his own sobs, over the harsh smack of their mother slapping his brother’s face and the sound of her scolding, he can hear the soft click of being locked in.
“I’m not lying!”
Nate throws himself against the door and claws at in wild fury. “I’m not lying! I’m not lying! I’m not lying!” He kicks the wall, he hurls the lamp to the floor and tears the sheets from the bed, rips open the drawers to dump their contents on the floor and stomp on them, shrieking “I’m not lying! I’m not lying!” over and over through sobs so strong it feels like they should break his little body in half like so much glass. Until he runs out of energy at last and collapses to the floor to curl up in a little ball of pain, blood still trickling down his face.
There is a touch on his face, very gently. Envy has crawled out of the corner on his hands and knees like a wild beast, looking at Nate’s blood on his fingertips with a curious expression.
“I’m not lying…” Nate’s voice is a plea.
Slowly, Envy nods. He is here. He is real.
Later, when his mother unlocks the door and discovers the mess, there is shouting, slaps, and more flying objects and tears, but he doesn’t protest his innocence. He knows he’s right. It doesn’t matter what she says. Only Will.
“You can see him, right?” says Nate fiercely to Will in the aftermath, as Will is cleaning the blood from Nate’s face.
Will looks at him with the wide, frightened eyes of a deer.
“I don’t think you should talk about it anymore,” he replies quietly.
Nate doesn’t know if that means yes or not. But lying in bed that night, with Will’s soft breathing on his face, he can see Envy across the room, green eyes reflecting the moonlight like a cat’s. Nate shudders, and pulls the blankets up over the heads for protection.
Envy, he decides with his child’s logic, is most definitely real.
---~---
Years pass like leaves thrown into the river to be carried downstream. They grow older; they grow farther apart. They still share a room, but not a bed. They still share the same face, but not the same thoughts and experiences. They are not the same person.
“Hey!” Will laughs. “Wake up, Nate!”
They are sixteen, in the classroom of their last subject of the day, math. It is the private school of their hometown populated by wealthy businessmen who can afford the pseudo-estates in a semi-country town, and the others who are there to run the services necessary to sustain said estates. Their classmates, like they themselves, are the sons and daughters of the aristocracy of industry. Will is right at home among them in his spotless navy blazer, dancing through life, while Nate sits at his desk with a book and rumpled shirt, alone.
“Hey,” Will calls again. “Are you listening to me?”
Nate glances up, startled. “What is it?”
“School’s over,” Will jerks his thumb toward the door and a small group of fellow uniformed students. “What to walk home with us?”
Nate glances over the group. His brother’s friends are shallow and stupid, he thinks, like everyone in their school. He doesn’t like them and they don’t like him, and only Will seems not to have noticed that. It’s not worth the trouble, even if-his heart skips a beat-even if Emily is with them. He blushes, and looks quickly back down at his desk.
“No thanks,” he mutters.
Will shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He sounds relieved; Nate feels a quick stab of hatred for him.
“Bye, Nate,” Emily calls, waving. “See you Monday!”
He is alone in the classroom with the autumn sun streaming brightly in, casting a pattern of a cage across him and the desks. He stares out the window for awhile, admiring the leaves red as blood before he turns to smile into the corner.
“Ready to go, you?”
In the corner is Envy, no longer a child but his own age, on the edge of manhood. His face is thin and angular, black hair that seems to contain a faint fog of murky green falling around his pale moon face. He raises dark eyebrows and shrugs; Nate knows this is his way of indicating indifference. He still does not speak.
“He didn’t seem like he wanted me to go,” Nate continues, putting his things in his bag. “Probably he doesn’t. Well, who needs them anyway, right?”
He glances back at Envy, who shrugs again. He knows as well as Nate does that they’ll be following Will and his friends home.
It’s not even as if he likes them, Nate thinks as he walks beneath the dying trees. In face, he really hates them and the way they talk about nothing for hours on end, their stupid inside jokes and the way they laugh too loud. But as he stalks them through the streets, keeping to the side roads and shadows as he’s done for years-he’s never been caught yet-there’s a feeling that’s familiar in his chest of a fist clenching around his heart, and the sound of his blood rushing in his head fills his ears.
The routine is familiar; first Patrick, then Sheldon, Leah, Kevin, Katherine make their separate ways home, while Nate watches in silence, until only Will and Emily are left. They walk beneath the rain of leaves quietly as Nate slips from tree to tree behind them, waiting for them to reach the last corner and say good-bye, so he can go home.
“Well,” he hears Will say. “I guess…I’ll see you Monday.”
“I guess,” she replies.
They do not move. Nate can hear nothing but the leaves in the wind, instead of the usual underfoot crackle. He glances behind him, to Envy, who is sitting at the foot of a tree watching him. Envy does nothing. Confused, Nate turns back and peers quickly around the tree to see the corner-just what is going on here?
There is a crack above as a branch is broken in the wind, but Nate is sure it is the sound of his heart breaking. Standing on the corner in the shower of leaves that falls in the gentle breeze is Emily, in Will’s arms as he kisses her.
“Well,” says a soft warm voice in his ear. “That is interesting, isn’t it?”
Barely does he resist the impulse to scream. The hair is standing on the back of his neck as he turns to see who’s finally caught him.
Envy’s face is so close to his own that for a moment all he can see is green. He falls back against the tree, pressing to it for comfort, for stability. Envy cocks his head to one side as he watches, like a dog.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “You’re going to get your clothes dirty.”
“You-” Nate cries, forgetting he’s not supposed to be here, spying on his brother like this. Before he can say anymore Envy’s darted forward, covering Nate’s mouth with a hard white hand, pinning him to the tree with his body.
“Be quiet,” Envy instructs. Nate shudders; Envy’s breath is obscenely warm in his ear, but there is no tide of air in his chest, no heartbeat against his own. “You don’t want to get caught, do you?”
Nate shakes his head.
“Well, let’s wait until they leave and we can talk then, alright?”
Nate nods, and Envy very carefully takes his hand away. But he doesn’t move to unpin Nate from the tree. Briefly, Nate wonders what someone would think if they could see him like this, and he blushes in embarrassment before he can remember-nobody else can see Envy.
Envy doesn’t notice any of this; he’s gazing intently around the tree at the street corner with an expression like hunger and delight.
“I can see why you like her,” Envy tells him. “She’s pretty, that girl.”
“Yeah,” Nate says softly, looking down at the blood-red leaves like Valentine’s Day hearts on the concrete. He swallows hard. “Yeah, she is.”
“They’re gone,” Envy says a few moments later. He steps back to let Nate collect himself.
“It’s too bad,” says Envy, with a smile of sympathy that looks more like mockery. “Because now you won’t ever have her.”
“It’s not fair!” The cry bursts out of Nate in a rush of hot volcanic fury before he can stop it, and then it’s too late not to continue. “Why does he always get everything? He doesn’t work as hard as me-he doesn’t work nearly as hard as me! Why should everything go to him?”
“Easy, easy,” Envy pats his shoulder gently. “I know…it’s hard being second-best.”
Nate wants to cry, wants to scream and throw things and break furniture, pick a fight with the toughest hood-something, anything-to relieve the aching, stabbing pain in his heart of unreasonable betrayal and the surging hatred for his brother. He sinks to his knees on the concrete, weighed down by a foggy helplessness, and puts his face in his hands.
“Oh, hey now,” Envy drops down to crouch beside him, stroking his hair gently. “What’s all this? It’s not as bad as all that.”
“Oh yeah?” Nate snarls at him. “Tell me how it’s not that bad. You tell me, since you seem to know so much.”
“Well,” Envy shrugs carelessly. “I don’t know, I mean…it’s just a question of your brother being in the way, you see.”
Nate stares. “What?”
“If Will isn’t around,” Envy explains, very slowly. “Then there’s nobody to get in your way. There’s nobody to get higher grades, or the girl.” Envy gives him a slanting sideways look. “And your parents…”
Nate covers his ears quickly with his hands. “Shut up!”
Envy’s mouth twists in a grin.
“As you like,” says Envy lightly, getting to his feet with inhuman fluidity. “It’s only a thought.” He pats Nate’s head lightly with a hot-furnace hand.
“You can, of course, do whatever you want,” Envy continues. “But as long as Will is around, he’s always going to have everything that should be yours.”
Nate gapes at him, the slender figure in black jeans and bare feet and a long-sleeved black shirt, glancing back over its shoulder at him.
“Just saying.” Envy grins, and in a flurry of dead leaves he is gone, vanished into whatever crack of the universe he hides in when he’s not lurking in Nate’s shadow.
Dazed, Nate climbs to his feet. The sun is setting; the whole sky looks like fire and blood. He realizes that his legs are shaking and he can’t make them stop, and he’s shivering wildly. Each snap of the leaves beneath his feet is like a gunshot, each shadow holds a dark, sneering figure with a warm, lascivious voice. The sight of a mangy black dog digging for a meal in the trash nearby sends him into a blind panic at the reflective green of its eyes. Agitated, he hurries home.
When he reaches his house, shining white in the fading twilight, he breathes a sigh of relief. At least here, he thinks, he is safe, if only he can make it to his room. He even laughs at himself a little, wiping the sweat from his face as he opens the door. Envy seems much less scary in the light and the warmth and the presence of other people.
“Where have you been?!”
Standing at the foot of the stairs is his mother, clearly waiting for him to come home.
“Mom,” he beings desperately, but she’ll hear no excuses or explanations.
“School ended an hour and a half ago!” she shrieks. “So what were you doing all that time? Smoking pot? Vandalizing somebody’s house? Running with some street gang?”
“Mom,” he says again, quietly, wearily. He doesn’t know why she thinks he does those things, he never would, but she always believes he’s part of the teenaged underworld of drugs, sex, violence, and depravity.
“I wasn’t doing anything, Mom,” he tells her, brushing past to climb the stairs. “I just took a different route home for once.”
“Don’t you lie to me!” she shouts, another part of the worn-out scene of his life. He braces himself for the inevitable follow up and feels no shock at the sharp impact against his shoulder. He doesn’t even look to see what she’s thrown.
Will is not in their room. Nate is relieved; he doesn’t like undressing in front of his brother, because it still makes Will upset to see the bruises their mother’s abuse has left on him. He still has a scar, hidden by his hair, where she threw the Bible all those years ago.
“Hey!” Will throws open the door from the bathroom. Nate quickly jerks his shirt on. “Guess what?”
“What?” says Nate sourly, pulling on his jeans.
“Mom’s got our ACT scores. Want to see?”
“No,” says Nate.
“She says she’s going to announce them at dinner,” Will chatters on, oblivious. “Isn’t today a great day?”
“No,” says Nate again.
“Sorry you feel that way.” Will pats his newly injured shoulder; Nate flinches. Will’s face blooms with concern. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”
A lie. It’s not nothing, and it hasn’t been nothing for years. They let it be-it’s easier to pretend otherwise.
Their father is, for once, at home and not in the city.
“Hello, Will,” he says, as the come in the dining room and sit down at the table. Then, as an afterthought: “Hello Nate.”
“Oh, hush and eat,” commands their mother, putting plates of food in front of everyone’s place. Nate looks at his steak carefully, than at the others’-his is definitely burnt.
He can’t remember when his mother’s attitude towards him changed for their worst. He can’t remember it ever occurring before Envy came (he can’t remember anything before Envy came; something of shared consciousness marks the pre-Kindergarten era). His father seems not to notice it happens, or if he does he won’t speak of it, and Will stopped asking questions a long time ago out of self-preservation. What could Will ever have done about it?
(Something, anything, before the little boy in the mirror came alive in the worst way)
“We’ve received your ACT scores,” their mother announces after they’ve said grace. She beams at Will. “And we’re so proud of you.”
“Martha, don’t tease them,” their father interjects mildly. “Nate, you scored a 33, which I’m sure you know is well above average.”
There is a small burst of pride in Nate’s chest, and he grins for a moment.
“But Will got a 35!” their mother bursts triumphantly. Nate can feel the smile freeze on his face like an animal baring its teeth.
“Wipe that stupid look off your face!” she snaps at Nate, glaring imperiously. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, why you can’t just work harder. Do you want to be a slacker all your life?”
Nate can’t take it-he stands up suddenly, shoulders tense, glass spilling across the white tablecloth, a wet stain of shame, chair knocked to the floor.
“Look what you’ve done!” she shrieks. Quickly she rushes from the dining room and returns with a spotless white dishcloth, hurling it at his face.
“Clean it up!”
Wordlessly, he mops up the water. Neither his father nor Will looks at him. They are unnaturally focused on their plates and the action of eating. When everything is wiped away, he sets the towel down carefully beside his plate and bends to pick up the chair. In the background his mother is still scolding:
“-and if you’ve ruined our table, I don’t know why you’re so careless and where are you going now?”
In the doorway he pauses.
“I’m going to bed.”
“After all the trouble I went through to prepare dinner? You ungrateful-”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says quietly. “I’m not hungry tonight.”
The stairs are dark, his room is dark and the moonlight streams through the window to break on the floor. Impatiently, he tears through the drawers in his desk until he finds it-the little while bottle-Tylenol. Without pausing he wrenches it open and takes three, dry, three’s safe, three’s enough. He crawls into bed and puts the pillow over his head while he waits for the pills to put him under until morning.
Each night he hopes that he’ll shift in his sleep and smother himself and not wake up again. Each sunrise marks one more day of frozen half-existence.
Maybe tonight will be the night.
(But it isn’t tonight or any night, because every night somebody takes the pillow away)
Part Two is here
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Envy
Mirror, mirror, on the wall…
In the mirror there is a little boy in a long white nightshirt down to his knees and slipping off his shoulders. He cuddles a stuffed bunny to his chest, worn with age and love, and peers through shadowy bangs at the other standing shivering on the cold splintered floor. There are three little boys now, one inside the mirror, one outside and the other who sleeps in their bed while his living reflection frosts the glass with his breath. He reaches out a small hand and touches the other, but they are separated by a thin layer of lacquer that keeps them in their separate worlds, keeps them from becoming one because in this world there can be only two look-alikes and so someone here is not real.
---~---
From the first day they were living reflections, two little boys with midnight for hair and voices like choir boys, whose heartbeats echoed together in perfect time. Who can say, then, which was born first? (Though there must always be something to reflect for there to be a reflection). They said-this one, older-that one, younger-thus two little boys in the garden, separate but still equal, not knowing or caring which is which.
But life is more than an untouchable image in glass. Older-brother walks in the sunlit halls and plays in the gardens lifted from a picture book and learns under the harsh drone of teachers-like-crows. At his heels runs a shadow in color, a visible echo, younger-brother keeping easy pace, never surpassing but never falling behind either. They grow taller and fairer and brighter; they lift their faces to the sun and laugh in pure delight at living itself; they are characters from a legend or a fairytale told to children at bedtime.
When the shadows grow long on the grass they run back into the house to hide on the stairs and listen to the chatter of the guests at dinner party after dinner party, the sparkle of lights on the harsh fragile glass and the way it reflected off the women’s jewels like stairs and lurked in the depths of the men’s drinks. Holding their breath and each other’s hands, they watch with sparkling eyes and dream of the day they, too, can step out of the shadows into the strange bursts of light they can see.
---~---
…who is the fairest of them all?
They go to school. They have names-Will, younger-brother-Nate, older-brother. They are more separate than they were, but they are still equal. They are still together.
Delighted, they switch identities with frightening regularity and ease. Who is Nate? Who is Will? Call one and both answer. The question-do they know who is who? Quite possibly they’ve traded names so often that they can’t remember. Quite possibly they’ve decided that it doesn’t matter.
Their teachers are frustrated, trying to establish some base of identity between two dark-haired boys with angel faces and easy lies. Because Nate is taking Will’s tests and Will is writing Nate’s compositions and there is no difference in their scores and they find that eerie.
So one day the kindergarten teacher decides to make a point. And the test she hands back to Nate (who may not really be Nate at all, but he’ll be Nate forever now no matter if he was Nate before when it didn’t matter) is one point lower than Will’s test. One point, but it’s a widening abyss.
“Hey,” calls Will, rushing through the snow crunching underfoot after the identical figure in a blue snowcoat and white scarf. “What’s the matter? Nate? Nate?”
And Nate turns at the tugging on his coat and pushes his brother, hard, into the snowbank with a face like drowning beneath the ice.
That’s all it takes to shatter their world. They are separate; and now they are unequal.
---~---
There is a third little boy in the corner.
Nate has never seen him move, though he knows he must, because everywhere they go he is there. Always in the shadows he is waiting, under the desk or at the darkest crevices of the roots of trees, and he is watching with poisonous green eyes of snake’s skin. Nate does not speak to him, he is afraid of him in a way he does not understand, but he feels somehow that the boy belongs there with him (with him, not them, there is starting to be less of a them now). He doesn’t mention him to Will, and Will never mentions the boy to Nate-probably, he reasons, because Will is afraid, too. It makes him feel better to think that they will share something after all.
---~---
One day their mother reads to them, as she always does, from the Bible. Words are words and these are old and boring, but there’s one she speaks with spiteful passion that they want to know: what is it, this thing called sin?
“It’s something somebody does that God considers wrong,” she explains to them.
Wrong? God? They feel it’s wrong to ask who, so the question is what.
“What is wrong?”
“Seven sins. Gluttony, pride, lust, sloth, greed, wrath, and envy.” She counts them off one by one on her fingers as they watch in fascination.
And at the last word the boy in the corner raises his head from behind his updrawn knees.
“Envy,” Nate repeats. The word is new, and it tastes sharp as knives on his tongue. He turns to the boy in the corner. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
The boy nods once. He does not blink. He does not breathe.
In her chair their mother is frozen. She looks at Nate as though she had never really seen him before, as though he were not her son but some monstrous vermin-covered thing.
“Who are you talking to?” she asks sharply.
Nate doesn’t understand. “The…the little boy,” he says, gesturing to the corner.
“He means me,” Will says quickly. He grabs Nate’s hand and squeezes it in warning. It hurts; Nate wiggles his fingers in silent protest.
“I don’t mean you,” Nate cries angrily. “I mean the little boy in the corner.”
“There is no little boy in the corner,” his mother snaps, clutching her Bible with tight, white fingers.
“Yes there is!” Nate argues back. Will clutches at his shirt, his shoulders, trying to hold him back, trying to shut him up. “He’s right there!”
“Stop lying to me! There is no boy in that corner!”
When the books connects with his face, he doesn’t know how to respond. A throbbing, blinding ache blooms on impact and something begins to run down his face, hot, wet, sticky; he’s bleeding. His mother’s eyes are wide and panicked, and her chest heaves with the effort of breathing.
“Nate,” Will moans in a sharking voice. “Oh, Nate…”
“I’m not lying,” Nate whispers, tears beginning to stream down his skin.
But his mother is done with talking. She seizes his collar and drags him down the hall, despite screaming and pleading and clutching at the door frames, despite Will pulling at her clothes, her legs, pulling at Nate in some desperate attempt to save him from whatever was waiting for him. She slaps Will away and hurls Nate into their room, slamming the door in his shocked and stinging face. Over Will’s pleas and his own sobs, over the harsh smack of their mother slapping his brother’s face and the sound of her scolding, he can hear the soft click of being locked in.
“I’m not lying!”
Nate throws himself against the door and claws at in wild fury. “I’m not lying! I’m not lying! I’m not lying!” He kicks the wall, he hurls the lamp to the floor and tears the sheets from the bed, rips open the drawers to dump their contents on the floor and stomp on them, shrieking “I’m not lying! I’m not lying!” over and over through sobs so strong it feels like they should break his little body in half like so much glass. Until he runs out of energy at last and collapses to the floor to curl up in a little ball of pain, blood still trickling down his face.
There is a touch on his face, very gently. Envy has crawled out of the corner on his hands and knees like a wild beast, looking at Nate’s blood on his fingertips with a curious expression.
“I’m not lying…” Nate’s voice is a plea.
Slowly, Envy nods. He is here. He is real.
Later, when his mother unlocks the door and discovers the mess, there is shouting, slaps, and more flying objects and tears, but he doesn’t protest his innocence. He knows he’s right. It doesn’t matter what she says. Only Will.
“You can see him, right?” says Nate fiercely to Will in the aftermath, as Will is cleaning the blood from Nate’s face.
Will looks at him with the wide, frightened eyes of a deer.
“I don’t think you should talk about it anymore,” he replies quietly.
Nate doesn’t know if that means yes or not. But lying in bed that night, with Will’s soft breathing on his face, he can see Envy across the room, green eyes reflecting the moonlight like a cat’s. Nate shudders, and pulls the blankets up over the heads for protection.
Envy, he decides with his child’s logic, is most definitely real.
---~---
Years pass like leaves thrown into the river to be carried downstream. They grow older; they grow farther apart. They still share a room, but not a bed. They still share the same face, but not the same thoughts and experiences. They are not the same person.
“Hey!” Will laughs. “Wake up, Nate!”
They are sixteen, in the classroom of their last subject of the day, math. It is the private school of their hometown populated by wealthy businessmen who can afford the pseudo-estates in a semi-country town, and the others who are there to run the services necessary to sustain said estates. Their classmates, like they themselves, are the sons and daughters of the aristocracy of industry. Will is right at home among them in his spotless navy blazer, dancing through life, while Nate sits at his desk with a book and rumpled shirt, alone.
“Hey,” Will calls again. “Are you listening to me?”
Nate glances up, startled. “What is it?”
“School’s over,” Will jerks his thumb toward the door and a small group of fellow uniformed students. “What to walk home with us?”
Nate glances over the group. His brother’s friends are shallow and stupid, he thinks, like everyone in their school. He doesn’t like them and they don’t like him, and only Will seems not to have noticed that. It’s not worth the trouble, even if-his heart skips a beat-even if Emily is with them. He blushes, and looks quickly back down at his desk.
“No thanks,” he mutters.
Will shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He sounds relieved; Nate feels a quick stab of hatred for him.
“Bye, Nate,” Emily calls, waving. “See you Monday!”
He is alone in the classroom with the autumn sun streaming brightly in, casting a pattern of a cage across him and the desks. He stares out the window for awhile, admiring the leaves red as blood before he turns to smile into the corner.
“Ready to go, you?”
In the corner is Envy, no longer a child but his own age, on the edge of manhood. His face is thin and angular, black hair that seems to contain a faint fog of murky green falling around his pale moon face. He raises dark eyebrows and shrugs; Nate knows this is his way of indicating indifference. He still does not speak.
“He didn’t seem like he wanted me to go,” Nate continues, putting his things in his bag. “Probably he doesn’t. Well, who needs them anyway, right?”
He glances back at Envy, who shrugs again. He knows as well as Nate does that they’ll be following Will and his friends home.
It’s not even as if he likes them, Nate thinks as he walks beneath the dying trees. In face, he really hates them and the way they talk about nothing for hours on end, their stupid inside jokes and the way they laugh too loud. But as he stalks them through the streets, keeping to the side roads and shadows as he’s done for years-he’s never been caught yet-there’s a feeling that’s familiar in his chest of a fist clenching around his heart, and the sound of his blood rushing in his head fills his ears.
The routine is familiar; first Patrick, then Sheldon, Leah, Kevin, Katherine make their separate ways home, while Nate watches in silence, until only Will and Emily are left. They walk beneath the rain of leaves quietly as Nate slips from tree to tree behind them, waiting for them to reach the last corner and say good-bye, so he can go home.
“Well,” he hears Will say. “I guess…I’ll see you Monday.”
“I guess,” she replies.
They do not move. Nate can hear nothing but the leaves in the wind, instead of the usual underfoot crackle. He glances behind him, to Envy, who is sitting at the foot of a tree watching him. Envy does nothing. Confused, Nate turns back and peers quickly around the tree to see the corner-just what is going on here?
There is a crack above as a branch is broken in the wind, but Nate is sure it is the sound of his heart breaking. Standing on the corner in the shower of leaves that falls in the gentle breeze is Emily, in Will’s arms as he kisses her.
“Well,” says a soft warm voice in his ear. “That is interesting, isn’t it?”
Barely does he resist the impulse to scream. The hair is standing on the back of his neck as he turns to see who’s finally caught him.
Envy’s face is so close to his own that for a moment all he can see is green. He falls back against the tree, pressing to it for comfort, for stability. Envy cocks his head to one side as he watches, like a dog.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “You’re going to get your clothes dirty.”
“You-” Nate cries, forgetting he’s not supposed to be here, spying on his brother like this. Before he can say anymore Envy’s darted forward, covering Nate’s mouth with a hard white hand, pinning him to the tree with his body.
“Be quiet,” Envy instructs. Nate shudders; Envy’s breath is obscenely warm in his ear, but there is no tide of air in his chest, no heartbeat against his own. “You don’t want to get caught, do you?”
Nate shakes his head.
“Well, let’s wait until they leave and we can talk then, alright?”
Nate nods, and Envy very carefully takes his hand away. But he doesn’t move to unpin Nate from the tree. Briefly, Nate wonders what someone would think if they could see him like this, and he blushes in embarrassment before he can remember-nobody else can see Envy.
Envy doesn’t notice any of this; he’s gazing intently around the tree at the street corner with an expression like hunger and delight.
“I can see why you like her,” Envy tells him. “She’s pretty, that girl.”
“Yeah,” Nate says softly, looking down at the blood-red leaves like Valentine’s Day hearts on the concrete. He swallows hard. “Yeah, she is.”
“They’re gone,” Envy says a few moments later. He steps back to let Nate collect himself.
“It’s too bad,” says Envy, with a smile of sympathy that looks more like mockery. “Because now you won’t ever have her.”
“It’s not fair!” The cry bursts out of Nate in a rush of hot volcanic fury before he can stop it, and then it’s too late not to continue. “Why does he always get everything? He doesn’t work as hard as me-he doesn’t work nearly as hard as me! Why should everything go to him?”
“Easy, easy,” Envy pats his shoulder gently. “I know…it’s hard being second-best.”
Nate wants to cry, wants to scream and throw things and break furniture, pick a fight with the toughest hood-something, anything-to relieve the aching, stabbing pain in his heart of unreasonable betrayal and the surging hatred for his brother. He sinks to his knees on the concrete, weighed down by a foggy helplessness, and puts his face in his hands.
“Oh, hey now,” Envy drops down to crouch beside him, stroking his hair gently. “What’s all this? It’s not as bad as all that.”
“Oh yeah?” Nate snarls at him. “Tell me how it’s not that bad. You tell me, since you seem to know so much.”
“Well,” Envy shrugs carelessly. “I don’t know, I mean…it’s just a question of your brother being in the way, you see.”
Nate stares. “What?”
“If Will isn’t around,” Envy explains, very slowly. “Then there’s nobody to get in your way. There’s nobody to get higher grades, or the girl.” Envy gives him a slanting sideways look. “And your parents…”
Nate covers his ears quickly with his hands. “Shut up!”
Envy’s mouth twists in a grin.
“As you like,” says Envy lightly, getting to his feet with inhuman fluidity. “It’s only a thought.” He pats Nate’s head lightly with a hot-furnace hand.
“You can, of course, do whatever you want,” Envy continues. “But as long as Will is around, he’s always going to have everything that should be yours.”
Nate gapes at him, the slender figure in black jeans and bare feet and a long-sleeved black shirt, glancing back over its shoulder at him.
“Just saying.” Envy grins, and in a flurry of dead leaves he is gone, vanished into whatever crack of the universe he hides in when he’s not lurking in Nate’s shadow.
Dazed, Nate climbs to his feet. The sun is setting; the whole sky looks like fire and blood. He realizes that his legs are shaking and he can’t make them stop, and he’s shivering wildly. Each snap of the leaves beneath his feet is like a gunshot, each shadow holds a dark, sneering figure with a warm, lascivious voice. The sight of a mangy black dog digging for a meal in the trash nearby sends him into a blind panic at the reflective green of its eyes. Agitated, he hurries home.
When he reaches his house, shining white in the fading twilight, he breathes a sigh of relief. At least here, he thinks, he is safe, if only he can make it to his room. He even laughs at himself a little, wiping the sweat from his face as he opens the door. Envy seems much less scary in the light and the warmth and the presence of other people.
“Where have you been?!”
Standing at the foot of the stairs is his mother, clearly waiting for him to come home.
“Mom,” he beings desperately, but she’ll hear no excuses or explanations.
“School ended an hour and a half ago!” she shrieks. “So what were you doing all that time? Smoking pot? Vandalizing somebody’s house? Running with some street gang?”
“Mom,” he says again, quietly, wearily. He doesn’t know why she thinks he does those things, he never would, but she always believes he’s part of the teenaged underworld of drugs, sex, violence, and depravity.
“I wasn’t doing anything, Mom,” he tells her, brushing past to climb the stairs. “I just took a different route home for once.”
“Don’t you lie to me!” she shouts, another part of the worn-out scene of his life. He braces himself for the inevitable follow up and feels no shock at the sharp impact against his shoulder. He doesn’t even look to see what she’s thrown.
Will is not in their room. Nate is relieved; he doesn’t like undressing in front of his brother, because it still makes Will upset to see the bruises their mother’s abuse has left on him. He still has a scar, hidden by his hair, where she threw the Bible all those years ago.
“Hey!” Will throws open the door from the bathroom. Nate quickly jerks his shirt on. “Guess what?”
“What?” says Nate sourly, pulling on his jeans.
“Mom’s got our ACT scores. Want to see?”
“No,” says Nate.
“She says she’s going to announce them at dinner,” Will chatters on, oblivious. “Isn’t today a great day?”
“No,” says Nate again.
“Sorry you feel that way.” Will pats his newly injured shoulder; Nate flinches. Will’s face blooms with concern. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”
A lie. It’s not nothing, and it hasn’t been nothing for years. They let it be-it’s easier to pretend otherwise.
Their father is, for once, at home and not in the city.
“Hello, Will,” he says, as the come in the dining room and sit down at the table. Then, as an afterthought: “Hello Nate.”
“Oh, hush and eat,” commands their mother, putting plates of food in front of everyone’s place. Nate looks at his steak carefully, than at the others’-his is definitely burnt.
He can’t remember when his mother’s attitude towards him changed for their worst. He can’t remember it ever occurring before Envy came (he can’t remember anything before Envy came; something of shared consciousness marks the pre-Kindergarten era). His father seems not to notice it happens, or if he does he won’t speak of it, and Will stopped asking questions a long time ago out of self-preservation. What could Will ever have done about it?
(Something, anything, before the little boy in the mirror came alive in the worst way)
“We’ve received your ACT scores,” their mother announces after they’ve said grace. She beams at Will. “And we’re so proud of you.”
“Martha, don’t tease them,” their father interjects mildly. “Nate, you scored a 33, which I’m sure you know is well above average.”
There is a small burst of pride in Nate’s chest, and he grins for a moment.
“But Will got a 35!” their mother bursts triumphantly. Nate can feel the smile freeze on his face like an animal baring its teeth.
“Wipe that stupid look off your face!” she snaps at Nate, glaring imperiously. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, why you can’t just work harder. Do you want to be a slacker all your life?”
Nate can’t take it-he stands up suddenly, shoulders tense, glass spilling across the white tablecloth, a wet stain of shame, chair knocked to the floor.
“Look what you’ve done!” she shrieks. Quickly she rushes from the dining room and returns with a spotless white dishcloth, hurling it at his face.
“Clean it up!”
Wordlessly, he mops up the water. Neither his father nor Will looks at him. They are unnaturally focused on their plates and the action of eating. When everything is wiped away, he sets the towel down carefully beside his plate and bends to pick up the chair. In the background his mother is still scolding:
“-and if you’ve ruined our table, I don’t know why you’re so careless and where are you going now?”
In the doorway he pauses.
“I’m going to bed.”
“After all the trouble I went through to prepare dinner? You ungrateful-”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says quietly. “I’m not hungry tonight.”
The stairs are dark, his room is dark and the moonlight streams through the window to break on the floor. Impatiently, he tears through the drawers in his desk until he finds it-the little while bottle-Tylenol. Without pausing he wrenches it open and takes three, dry, three’s safe, three’s enough. He crawls into bed and puts the pillow over his head while he waits for the pills to put him under until morning.
Each night he hopes that he’ll shift in his sleep and smother himself and not wake up again. Each sunrise marks one more day of frozen half-existence.
Maybe tonight will be the night.
(But it isn’t tonight or any night, because every night somebody takes the pillow away)
Part Two is here