[H] Brother’s Skirt - Chapter 8

Back when my brother’s hands were tender, they felt soft on my skin. Now, roughened by carpentry, his touch added an extra thrill, tingling more intensely.

After the beach incident, the girl had asked my classmate for my brother’s phone number, and that fool gave it to her. A few more things happened afterward, but I’d lost track of any interactions they might have had.

Stepping out of the subway, I asked my brother, “Did that girl from my class say anything after she got your number?”

Caught off guard by my sudden probing into past affairs, my brother held my wrist as we moved with the crowd, admitting, “She confessed her feelings to me.”

“And how did you respond?”

“I told her I was already interested in someone else.”

The girl really had it rough, rejected first by me and then by my brother.

Exiting the subway station and walking about five minutes towards our neighborhood, we encountered a major accident at the intersection—a large truck had collided with a sedan, surrounded by police, paramedics, and onlookers. My brother disliked crowds and pulled me away towards our building.

Pointing at the lengthy truck, I told him, “I was supposed to drive something like that.”

He pondered for a moment before asking, “You mean they wanted you to do that job?”

“Yeah. They managed to get me a job in transportation through some connections.”

“Why didn’t they do it themselves?”

“One’s drinking ruined their liver, and the other’s mind is shot. They couldn’t handle it.”

“Seriously,” my brother said, touching an old scar on my elbow as if it still hurt, his touch feather-light. “I hope I never see them again, or I might not be able to stop myself from killing them.”

“And then what? You go to jail for a decade or more, leaving me alone out here?”

My brother vehemently disagreed with my view, holding his breath until we reached the entrance to our complex, then finally said, “If it weren’t for them, our lives could have been different.”

Indeed, life is full of crossroads: a left turn could lead to the city, a right turn to the countryside. Had it not been for my hospitalization, my brother might have been finishing his master’s degree by now.

Actually, before the college entrance exams, my foster parents had already told me they couldn’t afford to send me to university. They wanted me to start working in transportation as soon as I graduated from high school to help pay off their debts from the factory closure. I had made it clear that I would find a way to fund my own education and help them with their debts after I graduated. Although we never fully agreed on this, they hadn’t resorted to physical coercion since then.

That day, as usual, I was preparing for the exams when there was a sudden loud knock at the door. The people outside were shouting my foster parents’ names, demanding they stop delaying. My foster parents hid in their room, my foster mother about to scream but muted by my foster father covering her mouth. I peeked at them, and my foster father shook his head at me, signaling not to open the door or make a sound.

That’s when I knew it—the debt collectors had come.

Since my foster parents wouldn’t deal with it, I wasn’t about to jump into the fray myself. The noise outside lasted about half an hour. I was about to set the dinner table when suddenly, I was hit hard enough on the head to be knocked out. Dazed by the impact and the delayed pain, I was dragged to the living room and realized my foster parents, spurred by the debt collectors’ visit and seeing me still preparing for the exams, had reignited their mission.

I knew I had passed out afterward, waking briefly twice—once to a blur of white coats and loud noises, then blacking out again; and another time to see my brother’s distraught face. I wanted to tell him not to cry, but I couldn’t speak with all the tubes in my mouth.

That was the day before the exams.

When I awoke three days later, a nurse told me I had been asleep and that police would soon take my statement. She returned my phone, which was flooded with unread messages from my brother asking why I hadn’t responded. The call log was full of missed calls from him, except for the last one, which had been answered—not by me. The nurse had picked it up.

“He came right after you were taken to surgery. He’s been looking after you these days.”

“Who called the ambulance?”

“Your neighbor,” she said.

My complex wasn’t the worst.

As the nurse left after checking on me, my brother came in. He froze upon seeing me awake, and only approached when he saw me clearly. His eyes were so swollen they were nearly shut. I was about to tease him, but he suddenly grabbed my hand with unexpected calmness and removed the IV from my hand. Shocked by his action, I watched him take a backpack from under the bed, put it on, and help me out of the bed. He then threw what looked like over a thousand dollars onto the mattress—a hasty estimate—his movements practiced as if he had rehearsed them in his mind over and over: decisive, calm, and proficient.

I was a bit scared; this was not like my brother at all.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking you away.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here.”

He wouldn’t explain further, no matter how many times I asked. It wasn’t until he led me to the bus station and onto an old tour bus with a destination I’d never heard of that I realized I should resist. But my entire body ached terribly, and every time I moved, he clamped down on my hand, afraid of reopening the stitches in my elbow.

“Bro, don’t scare me. What are we going to do there?”

“Live, just you and me.”

His tone was serious, and I remembered what the nurse had said. The pain seemed to leave my body for a moment as realization dawned on me. My hands trembled uncontrollably, and I quietly steadied them with the other.

“What was the essay question?” I asked.

He remained silent, not even bothering to look it up online or ask a classmate.

It felt like spending a lifetime preparing a gourmet ice cream—milking the cow, pasteurizing, mixing ingredients, flavoring—only to drop it before tasting, watching it mix with the mud into a puddle of filth. The imagined taste of the ice cream, forever unattainable, magnified a thousand times over.

I heard my own sobbing before I realized I was crying, and knowing this only made me cry harder. My brother seemed to have run out of tears and stared blankly at the windshield.

Wiping away tears, I asked him, “Where did you get the money?”

“Stole it, from home. So I can’t go back either.”

In that moment, all I could do was cry. Eventually, exhausted, I fell asleep on his lap, waking only to cry some more. My eyes ended up swollen to twice the size of his.

The bus was in terrible condition; the seats had lost all cushioning. By the time we reached our destination, I couldn’t feel my back or buttocks. My brother instructed me to sit on a broken chair at the station and sternly told me not to move. I tried to keep my eyes open as I watched him hustle around the station—chatting with long-distance drivers, running to the convenience store to buy food.

The destination of the second bus was a small city to the south, crossing provincial lines. The bus looked even more unreliable, as if it might break down any moment or be used for human trafficking. One advantage of such buses, I observed, was that they didn’t record passenger information.

“Will this keep us from being found?” I asked.

My brother opened a bottle of water for me to sip and tore off pieces of a large sandwich to feed me. As he watched me eat, he said, “If we had decided to be independent earlier, we wouldn’t be so helpless now.”

I couldn’t imagine how a high school student could be expected to be independent, but from that day on, both my brother and I would have to live independently.

I pushed the sandwich he was offering back to him. “You eat too.”

“I already ate.”

He was still lying, as always.

Leaning on his shoulder, I said, “Brother, eat.”

After wiping my face, which was wet, he reluctantly took a few bites.

The ride was rougher than it looked, the bus shaking unnaturally, the air conditioning barely better than a fan, and the windows sealed shut. The only good thing was the loud engine, which could cover up any noise on the bus—you could commit murder here without anyone noticing.

This once-in-a-lifetime experience of fleeing was intensely thrilling—fear, excitement, and novelty all mixed together.

I brushed away the crumbs around my brother’s mouth, maintaining my position leaning on his shoulder. “Brother, I’m hungry.”

My brother panicked at my words. This wasn’t a taxi; he couldn’t just stop it, and there were no stores on the highway. “Should I ask other passengers for some food?”

I covered his neck with my palm, pulled him close, and whispered in his ear, “Brother, I want milk.”

“Ah?” He looked around at the other passengers. “I didn’t notice anyone bringing milk on board.”

I pulled his neck back toward me, deliberately blowing into his ear: “You have some.” Then I slid my hand down his collarbone and under his shirt.

It took my brother a while to respond before he held my wrist and pulled it away, saying, “That was when we were kids and didn’t know any better…”

“I still don’t know any better.”

I slipped under his shirt as he resisted, and every time he pulled or pushed, I winced and complained of pain—my arm, my back, my sides. He couldn’t apply force for fear of hurting me and couldn’t simply lift his shirt to shoo me away, so he eventually just let the shirt hang over me, lowering his head to whisper that there were people around.

He was lying. Before I had crawled under, I had made sure our immediate vicinity was empty. The bus wasn’t crowded during the off-peak hours, and only half the seats were filled.

As a child, how I had suckled then, I did now with more vigor. I ate from one side and then the other. Others couldn’t hear, but my brother definitely heard my smacking lips. They say to think of the source when drinking water; having tasted the water above, I now considered the spring below. I opened my brother’s zipper and, through a thin layer of fabric, began to massage him. My brother might have been shy for a few minutes, but once he got into it, he began to instruct me on the pressure and speed.

The thrill of seeking pleasure while on the run was too intense, leaving me dazed for a long time after I had attended to him. I crawled out and rested my head on his shoulder, and he tried to touch me, but I held his hand back.

The road was still long, and I began discussing life plans with my brother. It turned out that after I had been hospitalized, he had gone to my house, intending to retrieve my documents regardless of my foster parents’ resistance. But he found the house abandoned, my foster parents had fled. After he once again broke down the door, he easily found my documents left behind. If we were to flee, money was essential, but he hadn’t stolen all his foster parents’ money. The cash he’d left on my hospital bed was hardly enough to cover the medical bills, but he needed to keep some for running away.

“What can we do without a high school diploma?”

“Restaurants, convenience stores, delivery—there will always be work, even if it’s just sweeping streets.”

“We don’t have enough money for rent. Where will we sleep?”

That stumped my brother, who frowned deeply for a long time without an answer.

I grabbed his hand, pulled open my pants, and placed it inside: “Find a place quickly. I want to f— you.”

Our first night on the run was spent on the bus. After nearly a day and a night of travel, we finally found a place to settle down.