For the next few days, Dylan spent a lot of time with his brother, but he had never been able to ask Thackeray what he wanted to. When he was with their father, the one who had shaggy hair like Thackeray’s, he didn’t feel comfortable asking this either, but it was when Thackeray went to stay the night with Tom, that Dylan finally asked Fenn, “Why does Thackeray give me such a hard time sometimes?”
“About?” Fenn blinked.
His father was never oblivious, and Dylan didn’t believe he was now.
“About my looks.”
“Have you seen what you look like?”
“What?” Dylan shrugged.
“Now you’re being dishonest,” Fenn said.
The older man got up, and went upstairs for a moment, and Dylan waited. A few moments later he brought down a photo album and said, “Go through those.”
“Did you steal this from Thack’s room?”
“I GOT it from his room, because his room is in my house and everything in this house is mine.”
Dylan flipped through pictures of himself and his brother while Fenn, who had been rinsing a chicken out, its organs in a plastic bag on the counter, continued to do so and said, “What you will see is a lot of pictures of a weedy, skinny, bespectacled boy with too much hair who is standing in the shadow, in every way, of a well muscled twenty something who wears fitted jeans and, Abercrombie and Hollister, and who is either in fitted shirts or…. Often no shirt at all. You’re so comfortable with the way you look, and with being attractive to other people.”
Dylan put down the photo album.
“Me and Thack are twins. You know that. Eileen got pregnant with us from the same sperm and just had him later. You take off his glasses and he looks just like me.”
“Well, he doesn’t look just like you. He looks just like himself.”
Dylan opened his mouth.
“And don’t say that he could look just like you if he worked out and wore contacts and shopped at the same store because that’s not him. He isn’t you, and he can’t even say he’s the smart one or he’s the musical one because you both are. He’s just the younger one, and the one who isn’t as glamorous. And I know what that’s like. When I was with your father it was the way I felt.”
Dylan frowned and was a little pissed off because there was a picture of him on the beach in faded skin close jeans, his shirt off as he threw his arm over his skinny black tee shirted brother.
“Well, what am I supposed to about that? Stop being myself?”
“No,” Fenn said. “but you are supposed to understand your brother when you being yourself gets to be a bit much for him.”
“We used to be best friends.”
“You still are best friends,” Fenn said, touching Dylan on the shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to make him feel like that. I never thought about it. He’s so like Dad. And he’s a genius and….”
“You had a hard growing up,” Fenn said. “You spun out of control trying to find out who you are. However, you never had bad skin while it happened, or bad hair. Pretty people spin out of control in a different way. But everything that was in you is in him, happening in a different way.”
Later that night, when he came to bed, Elias was waiting for him. Lance was a few blocks over at his parents’. Dylan stripped, climbed into bed, and pulled the sheets over himself and pressed his back into Elias’s
“Are you asleep?”
“If I was, I’m not anymore.”
Dylan ignored this and said, “Do you and Bennett ever fall out?”
“Not anymore. Not really.”
Dylan was quiet and Elias said, “You know what?”
“Huh?”
“You and Thackeray met so late in life. Every time you act like normal brothers the two of you freak out. It’s kind of sweet. You’re so careful of each other.”
Dylan lay in bed a little longer, and Elias said, “You’re going to call Thackeray up, aren’t you?”
Dylan didn’t answer, but he riffled through his jeans for his phone, and then went out into the living room and called his brother.
“What’s up?” Thackeray said.
“Are you asleep.”
“Not really. I’m sorry if I…No, that’s punk ass. I’m sorry for saying what I said. You’ll be a great… whatever you do.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry for overreacting. And I’m sorry if I’m too much sometime.”
“You’re not! I brag about you all the time. I think you should be an underwear model! It’s just… I don’t know. I think I’m just being eighteen.”
“Well, I brag about you all the time too,” Dylan said.
“What for?”
“Are you serious? Look, I’m really tired. I’ve got to go to bed. I just wanted to call you. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
When Dylan returned to bed, Elias said, sleepily, “People always wonder if I get jealous of you and Lance. But I always tell them it’s not Lance I worry about. It’s Thackeray.”
