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It had been too long to remember whose idea Texas was, all those conversations faded by the years in between. All they remembered was that it all started in the back of their parent’s car. The leather bench seat was peeling and hot as a pan under the sun, the winding country road seeming to stretch forever in the eyes of a child. Endless white stripes and endless blue sky, pine trees like soldiers guarding that little patch of summer. Their parents talked more then, seemed fonder of the boys back when they were still young enough to be their pride. Barb Woods angled the rearview mirror so she could see into the backseat, her eyes nearly the same shade as the big turquoise rings she liked to wear. The wind blew her coppery bangs back and jostled the air freshener hanging off the mirror, as well as the rosary under it. “How are y’all doing back there? The air’s blowing?”
The boys both perked up. Liu’s attention was momentarily pulled from the view outside, and his little brother Jeff looked up from his portable DVD player. “Yeah, the AC’s working,” Liu confirmed, though the cold air wasn’t that strong at all. Jeff nodded and echoed something similar. And that was all their mom needed to know, her attention returned to the road ahead while she drove the family further out.
Jeff was only half watching the DVD, his attention was split between looking out the window and the movie he’d seen a dozen times. Halloween, of course. Liu leaned over to watch it, too, and Jeff took that opportunity to tell him about it.
“You know they call him the Shape in the script,” Jeff said. He paused the movie on a frame of Michael Myers, the sun’s glare on the screen reducing the killer to little more than a dark blob with a white mask. “But they just use his name in the movie.” Liu nodded.
“He looks like a shape. Can’t see with the glare.”
“I know, it’s buggin’ me.” Jeff shaded the screen with his hand, and it made little difference. “They said calling him that, the Shape, made him scarier. But he’s really not that scary, all he does is just stand around until he gets in the house with Laurie.”
Liu regarded the screen. “You’re still watchin’ the one from the seventies? They made other ones, you know, and they’re makin’ a new one soon. I saw a commercial for it.”
“They’re always makin’ new ones,” Jeff replied. His brown hair glinted copper in the sun. It was darker than Liu’s, but it still shone the same in light like this. “First one’s the best, even if it’s not gory. You know they didn’t even have any blood in it? Not even a drop.”
Liu frowned as he reached over to tilt the DVD player his way. “How’s there no blood? He stabs everybody, it’s a slasher.”
Jeff had an answer, of course, easy as an exhale. “They wanted it to be more like a thriller.”
“Oh.”
And that was all for conversation. Liu returned to the pines outside as the station wagon cruised down the road, watched the way the painted lines moved in blurs and the sky seemed to roll on slowly, like it wasn’t even moving at all. One glance away and back, and the cotton-ball clouds had shifted an inch further. The sun only blazed on, as Liu knew it would all the way down to the horizon. Louisiana sunsets had a way of burning brighter the lower they went, the same way his mom’s cigarettes would shine orange, then wither to grey. She had one now, that was the reason the comparison had floated up into his consciousness. Liu looked at the back of her seat and at her hand hanging out the window. Her other stayed on the wheel, but the one he could see held a just-lit Marlboro and a ring with a turquoise chunk, fat as a beetle. Barb and her statement-pieces, as she called them. The wind blew Liu’s hair back from his forehead, cooled the sheen of sweat that lay on his face, and came with an undercurrent of wispy smoke. He tilted his head away. The sun was no longer glaring at Jeff’s DVD player, it had shifted away as well. Michael Myers crept through the house, searching for the girl, Laurie. “He’s gonna get her,” Liu mumbled to himself.
“I know.” Jeff took a drink of the can of Sprite that sat in his side’s cup holder, a can that was several hours old and undoubtedly flat. “She’s gonna get him back, though.”
“How?” Liu hardly had the word all the way out of his mouth before his brother interrupted.
“Just watch. Can’t spoil it.”
“No, just tell me. I’m not even really watching.”
Jeff twisted the tab off his soda can, and tilted his head a bit to indicate the screen. This time, he relented, though Liu knew he hated movie talkers. “She’s gonna stab him before he stabs her, and she’s gonna get away.”
“Oh yeah? With what?” Liu’s attention was already beginning to wander, his voice held only a modicum of interest. He watched his mom flick her cigarette butt and tried to see where the little thing even went, but the car cruised at least sixty miles an hour and the air seemed to swallow the cigarette butt right up. He knew littering was wrong, but maybe she didn’t get taught the same thing when she was in school. Liu made a note to tell her one day. In the back of his mind he knew, as only a son could, that she would keep buying her cigarettes, and so she would keep littering, and he wouldn’t make much of a difference in the middle of it.
In the seat beside him Jeff bit at his thumbnail. Halloween was playing out exactly as he’d said it would, and now there was a chase. To Liu it all looked about the same, just two shapes in the dark. One armed, one not, both running. The sun had gone a twinge yellower, and it was only five in the afternoon at most, but Liu noticed the shift because he had nothing else to look at. He wondered whether there would be lightning bugs by the time they reached home while his dad dialed through the radio stations.
The backseat had two speakers on either side and both sounded equally crappy, but Liu laid his head against the door and listened to the chorus of some Creed song. He only recognized the band by the voice of the singer. If Fred Woods loved anything, it was Creed.
Sometimes Mom and Dad would call Jeff’s name and ask him, who sings this one? And Jeff would guess, he’d usually be right, and it would be over. Liu looked over to his left and saw Jeff undisturbed, the movie had wound closer to its ending and he held his soda tab in his fingers like he’d forgotten it was there. His little brother would not seem so little anymore in that moment, even though he had only just turned nine. The air freshener and the rosary would tangle in the breeze under the rearview mirror, the car would roll on down the road and stay guarded by the trees, and Liu would come to think that he hadn’t been asked who sang this song. He hadn’t been asked for a few years now.
Half-focused on the view, Liu wished he could drive. His eyes dropped to his shoes and he thought about what kind of car he’d have. No, a truck. A nice pickup truck without a backseat and with what Dad called good mileage. Just enough room for him and what was important, and enough gas to keep it going.
“How long til’ we get there?” Jeff’s question cut into that thought, his attention finally pulled from the DVD player. Halloween was going to go back in its box soon, the credits had begun to roll. He frowned while his question hung awkwardly in the air. Neither Mom or Dad seemed to hear.
Liu answered because they didn’t. “About fifteen minutes.”
Jeff made a short affirmative sound, less concerned with the to-and-fro of the drive than occupying himself somehow. He wasn’t ever great at it, so Liu took it upon himself to provide a distraction. Besides, Jeff got carsick from staring out the windows.
“You know, just be glad we’re going somewhere. You could drive fifteen minutes in Texas, and you wouldn’t have even left the neighborhood.” Liu had never been, but Fred Woods Sr. had grown up there. Naturally, the boys got an earful about the Lone Star with every visit, and there had been quite the tale about it today.
“Huh, well, I don’t think so. It’s big, but it’s not that big.”
“It is too. It takes eleven hours to drive from one end of it to the other.” Jeff didn’t look too impressed until Liu followed up to put it in perspective. “And it takes twelve-ish to get from here to Florida.”
That made Jeff raise his eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Texas is all hill country, though. Nothin’ to do if you’re not in the city.” All this knowledge was secondhand, of course, told over Grandpa’s kitchen table. Liu felt kind of silly to repeat it now. It felt like wearing boots too big for him to rehash all he knew about Texas, when he’d never been and Grandpa was too old to take them there. “But there’s lots of ranches.”
“I like ranch,” Jeff mused.
“No, like, cattle ranches. You know the longhorns? They all come from Texas.” That may or may not have been true, Liu didn’t know for certain. But it seemed sensible to him then, so he relayed it to his brother. What else was he going to do with that kind of knowledge? “Grandpa said their horns are wider than… two of you, maybe.”
At that, Jeff frowned. He was at that age where the idea of things larger than him sounded almost fantastical, and he was never big on fantasy. “Bullcrap.”
“Hush.” Liu cast a glance up front, but neither Mom or Dad seemed to hear that mild obscenity. “They’re gonna think I taught you that, Jeffrey.”
“You did. Well, kinda, cause Dad says it a lot. But crap—”
“Hush.”
“—isn’t even that bad, it’s not like I’m saying the f-word.”
“You’re still cussing.”
“Both of you, cut it out.” One tanned hand reached up and angled the rearview mirror down again, which cast a blue-eyed glare into the backseat. “Stop fighting.”
“We’re not fighting,” Jeff piped up immediately, because that was true. He wasn’t quite old enough yet to understand that the truth didn’t matter as much as the perception of it. And Liu watched him as he got shot right down before the words even left his mouth completely.
“I hear fighting.” One blue eye narrowed at Jeff in the rearview mirror, and he frowned under his mother’s glare. “Just cut it out and stop backtalking. Understand?”
There was nowhere to go from there. Jeff screwed up his face into a scowl and slouched down in the backseat. Liu killed a few minutes of time with the view outside, and saw that the back road had begun to lead back into town. The pines no longer lined the road like soldiers, and the sky no longer looked quite so large. Every so often a billboard stuck out against the blue and advertised gas, fast food, accident lawyers, all things that only mattered to adults. Liu waited until the song on the radio was over before he talked to Jeff again. “Sorry.”
“S’ okay,” Jeff replied, and that was the last of that topic. He waited too, and before he spoke again he made sure neither Mom or Dad was listening. It was easy enough, they hardly listened anyway. “Why don’t we ever drive out there? To Texas?”
There were several answers to that. Mainly the time, because it was already enough to have to drive an hour to see their grandparents. There wasn’t enough money to spare. But most of all, there was nothing out there to go to. And he almost said that, but Jeff looked at him and the reply dissolved on his tongue like a bitter pill. Liu scratched at a mosquito bite on his arm. “We just don’t.”
The plan took more shape over time. During the summers it was easier to think up a way to make it happen without much distraction. Liu, now fourteen, wiped away the sweat on his brow as he stared up at the ceiling fan from his bed. Across the room, Jeff bounced a tennis ball repeatedly off the wood paneled wall. It thunked every two seconds, and it would have annoyed Liu had it not been so quiet in the room. Any sound was better than no sound, and it made the time pass by just a fraction faster.
They were grounded today. Day three out of seven, or however long it would be before Mom and Dad remembered to unground them. The day was sweltering outside anyway, the kind of weather that made Liu want to go out and see if he really could fry an egg on the sidewalk. A few years ago and he would have tried it. But he was cooped up in here with Jeff, and Jeff had been the one to get them grounded in the first place, and a hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit wasn’t hot enough to cook an egg anyway.
The tennis ball hit the wall again. “I think we should sell something.”
Liu turned his head. “Like what?”
Jeff made an unhelpful I-don’t-know sound. He let the ball smack against the wall one last time, and when he caught it he left it on the bed beside him. The afternoon had already begun to lengthen the shadows. Particles of dust floated in the sunbeams, and two dead flies lay belly-up on the windowsill. Liu knew this because he’d stared at them off and on ever since being grounded, had watched the pair of them buzz against the blinds until they’d gone quiet. He spoke up again. “We already tried it anyway. We don’t have anything to get rid of.”
“Not like anybody cares about a stupid garage sale.” Jeff got up off the bed and kicked a few dirty clothes out of the way on a hunt for something to do. He was eleven now, and just about everything was stupid to him these days. As annoying as it was to watch him glower at everything, sometimes stupid was the only word that fit the situation. His brown hair caught the sun when he looked at the carpet, and Liu thought about church. Stained glass windows with the halos around the saints, sun filtered through colored glass.
“You’re the one that said we should sell something.” Liu regarded his little brother again. “Doesn’t have to be a garage sale.”
Jeff opened the closet door and pulled the cord for the light. “Well, we can’t get jobs yet, so we need ideas. You sure we don’t have anything we can get rid of in here?”
“You dug through that closet a hundred times. There’s not gonna be anything new in all your crap.” The flies on the windowsill had big green eyes like Dad’s Stella-Artois bottles. Their legs were curled up in the air and there was a chip in the white paint they laid on. From the other side of the room, Jeff rummaged through the closet for the umpteenth time and grumbled about how stupid this was. A catch-all complaint for being grounded, for having only twenty dollars between them in savings, and for the fact that they just weren’t old enough to leave yet.
“Find anything?” Liu asked, and stared at the wood paneling on the opposite wall. There were twenty-six boards all in a row and there was nothing to do but count them again.
Jeff huffed. “No.”
“I told you so.”
“Shut up.”
In lieu of reply, Jeff received the finger. Naturally he gave it right back. Neither of them truly meant it.
“So Dad was telling me ‘bout this truck his friend Jay has.” Liu changed the subject in the way only an older brother really could. “You know the blue one, the one in his yard? He said he’s been talking to Jay, and he said once he got it running I could buy it for a couple hundred bucks.”
Jeff looked over his shoulder. “That shitbox?”
“Nobody says shitbox anymore, watch a movie from modern times for once. But that’s dirt cheap for a whole truck, so I’ll have it once I get the money.”
His little brother gave a disinterested hum. Liu thought about the truck and the scratched blue paint. It didn’t run, and neither did a few of Jay’s other vehicles. They just laid in the yard like husks and the grass grew long over the tires, the dust collected inside and the rain beat down on them until they eventually rusted. Where he would get the money anyway was a problem there wasn’t much solution for. A job, of course, but try as he may he was still fourteen and fourteen wasn’t old enough to earn a living. The idea of Texas at all sat on his chest like a stone. Liu lay in the bed on his back like the dead flies on the windowsill, both him and them, like they all were going to collect the dust that hovered in the long sunbeam. And he figured for a moment that he might die here too one day. He had a molecule of hope, but here lately it had dwindled as he’d gotten more insight into things. The heaviest part was when he had talked to Dad a few times out on the back porch. It had been a month ago, maybe, and Dad had been in his folding chair with a beer and a utility knife. Liu remembered he had stood there and leaned on the railing until he could pocket the bottlecap.
Fred Woods was a man of stock, broad-shouldered and farmer’s-tanned. A homegrown sort of man that looked out at the night and drank a beer or two before heading to bed, before he’d need to wake up tomorrow and do everything all over again. He wiped his stubbly mouth with the back of his hand. “You know, bud, your mom grew up in this house.”
She did, they both knew it. Liu had heard it all before, but he listened anyway. Sometimes Dad just wanted to chat, and sometimes he wanted to hear his own voice. Tonight was the latter.
“Never thought she’d wanna stay, but after your grandma passed, she and I decided we’d settle. Wish you and your brother coulda known her, but…”
Dad took a drink. Liu let the quiet hang over the porch. And when he cleared his throat he said, “I thought she wanted to go live in the city.”
“She thought so too.” The Stella-Artois was nestled into the mesh cupholder of the chair. “But she met me and we settled down, had you, and after that she decided she’d stay around here. Most folks do.”
Liu thought about Texas. The plan was a house with a couple acres and jobs that paid all the bills, it was a truck for Liu and another for Jeff that’d sit side by side in the driveway. It would be a quiet house, a happy house, and Liu would go to school and get a degree in something important. But he stood there with his hands in his pockets and listened to the crickets chirp over each other, and he thought about what Dad would say if they ever did run off and leave this house behind. He didn’t know, and he didn’t know why the idea of it was so bleak now. The plan used to feel hopeful. Now it was a guilty secret he had to keep and an act he had to play along with.
Liu lay still, stared without seeing as he mulled over the memory, until there was a clatter from the closet’s junk and a triumphant exclamation that pulled him away from that night. A sideways glance revealed that while elbow deep in the closet, Jeff had come across a fiver. He held up the crinkled bill and it fluttered under the slow ceiling fan like a catfish on a line. Liu raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Where’d you find that?”
“In these jeans, I was checkin’ the pockets.” Jeff slung a pair of blue jeans over his shoulder that were too long to be his.
“Put it with the rest.” The mattress squeaked under Liu as he settled himself back down where he was. He didn’t have it in him to be excited.
There were twenty-six wooden panels that made up the opposite wall. The stain on them was the deep brown of coffee at the bottom of a mug, and somewhere across the room there came the thunk of a mason jar. That jar lived at the top of the closet and held all twenty, now twenty-five dollars for Texas. Jeff stuffed the bill inside, and the change at the bottom shifted and clinked against the glass. “We keep digging around like this, and soon we’re gonna have…”
He shook the jar and didn’t finish his sentence, because how was he supposed to know? It could be any number in the world, but realistically it’d probably only be twenty-five and change. Jeff didn’t think about things like that, and Liu couldn’t be the one to tell him he was saving for nothing.
Jeff stood on his tiptoes to shelf the jar again, in its usual spot next to his shoebox of bones. When it jostled, Liu couldn’t resist a jab. Maybe it was just to take his mind off it all.
“Are you ever gonna do anything with that? Those bones?”
“I dunno.” Jeff poked his head out the closet to answer. “I’m just collecting them for now.”
“It’s nasty, man. You’re keeping dead animals in the closet.”
Jeff rolled his eyes. “I’m not arguing with you over this again, it’s not a whole dead animal. It’s just the bones. And I cleaned ‘em, so they don’t even smell.”
“Still.” Liu propped himself up on his elbows. “It’s weird.”
“No it’s not.” The back-and-forth was being dismissed again for the hundredth time. Jeff resumed his organization (read: destruction) of the junk in the closet, and Liu wondered why in the hell anyone would want to keep a box of bones. Maybe it was just a kid thing. He could remember being all into the scary stuff when he was a few years younger. He never went out on walks to look for roadkill, though, and he never scouted the thin woods in the park for animal carcasses. All things considered, it could be worse.
And it got worse in fact, though no animals were harmed in the process. Only people.
Two years had flown by since that day, and in that time the Woodses had packed up and driven almost an hour out to Mandeville. Dad had transferred locations of business after a promotion, and would work under a new boss for more money. Mom wanted to use the new house as a stepping-stone towards what she actually wanted. She had been on a real kick about owning land lately, and talked at length with Dad about the merits of a real country house, a real nice place they could all grow old and die in that wasn’t her mom’s house. Mandeville was just an in-betweener until then. The boys would start school a few days late in the fall, but who cared? Liu didn’t. Nothing would’ve changed if he did in the first place.
The move had been made and all that was left to do was settle in, unpack everything, find its right place in the new house. It was one of several in those suburbs that made you a little more aware that your neighbors enjoyed a higher tax bracket than you. The kind built for people in general and not for yourself, a far cry from the house they left in New Orleans. Liu missed his room already, even if he’d had to share it with Jeff. The carpet might’ve scratched and the fan might not have been strong, but it was strange to think about not living there. Liu could hardly wrap his head around it. This new neighborhood was just boring, and the only real excitement came in negative cases, which therefore didn’t count.
Jeff had gotten himself into trouble again because of his goddamn mouth, something stupid about some kids trying to take their bikes. Liu didn’t really want to get his hands dirty until the other kids got aggressive, but by that point Jeff had a good handle on it. This bullshit showed itself more and more in him, when he just couldn’t leave well enough alone because he had to show how grownup he was. That and his short fuse soon had Liu doing a stint in juvie for a kid’s arm he didn’t break. There were other events prior but Liu couldn’t sort them now. It weighed too heavily on him tonight and was right about too much to breathe under. It had been preventable. But Liu was in juvie when Mom told Jeff to save face and go to that goddamn birthday party, which ironically did everything but.
They had gone to the hospital today for the last time. When Jeff had been burnt an ambulance took him, called by one of the parents that had finally looked up from the bottom of a glass and realized that the smell out back was not in fact barbecue. Something about a prank that went wrong, though Liu didn’t understand how anyone could buy that story. Kids got bored, kids were jerks, but kids didn’t accidentally light each other on fire. He blamed Randy, the little shit that had instigated a fight with Jeff in the first place, and somehow no one else did. How could they? Randy sniffled and hicupped and said he didn’t mean to, that he told Jeff a hundred times not to mess around with the gas, but apparently his desperate pleas went unheard. Mom and Dad would have been madder at Jeff if he wasn’t hurt as bad as he was. They were still mad, though, and Liu didn’t see that changing anytime soon. At least they kept it a little bit of a secret, talking about the bills instead of their sons.
The three remaining piled into the station wagon today in silence that choked. Everything had been haunting and quiet ever since Jeff got hurt. The Woodses moved as a unit through the pristine white halls, then stood at the bedside later and let the nurse run through Jeff’s discharge instructions. As it was all pretty straightforward, read off a packet they’d take home anyway, Liu’s mind wandered immediately and focused on his brother. In the background, Mom and Dad bitched back and forth with the nurse, and Liu felt a twist of embarrassment in his belly like a fish on a line.
“He’s gonna need surgery,” Mom grumbled to Dad as she shoved the paperwork at him. “Lord. You see all this damage? On top of that, we’re gonna have to do it. He can’t be walkin’ around lookin’ like that.”
“Barb,” Dad warned.
“Don’t you “Barb” me, you know damn well he needs it.” She lowered her voice to a whisper that cut through the din anyway. “It’s an embarrassment. We just moved in, what, two weeks ago?”
The nurse bared her teeth in a large, uncomfortable smile. And Liu didn’t miss how in the background, still stuck in front of the mirror, Jeff paused when he heard the money talk. All Mom and Dad seemed to do these days was agonize over the bills and mutter disapproval for Jeff, since he’d supposedly gotten himself into all this mess. He knew his face was a wreck, too, but hearing Mom say it not-so-secretly had a sting to it like nothing else. The gunmetal grey of his eyes flickered for just a moment in Mom’s direction, and even the very dust on the handheld mirror’s glass stilled in the wake of it. As soon as Liu had noticed it, the stare was gone and the world had all its working parts in motion again, his parents continued, and Jeff touched his face with the reverence of a lover. Liu watched him from behind and kept his expression neutral as he took in the pale skin seared to raw, reddened roughness. The fog in one eye that the doctors said would maybe still work if treated properly. Like a marble pressed into uncooked ground beef, Liu thought, and his insides twisted up tighter with secret, shameful disgust.
“…It’s not that bad,” he finally offered. A piss-poor attempt to dissuade any fears Jeff might have had, and an even worse one at lying. He always made a point never to lie to Jeff, but now look where he was. He stood only a few feet from his little brother and it still felt like he’d talked into a dark hallway. And presently, the dark would answer back from that long stretch of silent hall.
“I know.” Jeff tilted his head. The fire had scorched his hair down to nothing on one side, and on the other it was uneven and brittle. He stroked it like a pet, and those strange, glassy eyes never once parted from his reflection. Narcissus, but without the glamour (and without much of a nose, too).
Jeff’s whisper was more of a rasp. “It’s beautiful. ”
And he never did think anything really was. Liu’s brows furrowed, the two parallel wrinkles between them notched and the hair on the back of his neck slowly prickled.
Jeff only made himself more beautiful that night. All through the car ride home he stared at his reflection, and his fingers walked over every plane of his disfigured face until Mom finally snapped and told him to just fuckin’ stop it, Jeffrey, you’re gonna mess something up. Words didn’t mean a damn thing when he could still see, and Liu stared resolutely out the window at the city while Jeff stared at his reflection with equally rapt attention. The nurse had said something about him being traumatized or shocked, which would account for the weird hangup on his face. Therapy was in the cards, Mom said, which meant she’d get it when she got it. Which Liu knew wouldn’t be for a while. Maybe he should have said something, maybe he should have offered up a topic of conversation, but it was quieter than a funeral in the car and Liu didn’t want to be the one to sever the silence. He dealt with the discomfort like a headache– ignored it until he got home to sleep it off. It was six, almost seven PM by then. It would be ten PM when he woke up.
The yellow glare of the hallway light was what did it. Liu scrunched his face up and buried it into the bed like a vampire. And when the light didn’t go away, Liu grumbled drowsily that he wasn’t hungry for dinner. He waited, curled like a pillbug under the covers, but the door didn’t shut again.
“That’s not what I said,” Jeff mumbled. His voice sounded odd, all the vowels too open. Assot wha’ I zed. And when he coughed it was a hard, wet sound that racked him like tuberculosis. His footsteps shuffled over the carpet and Liu begrudgingly lifted his head from the pillow. It took him a second to register what was in front of his face, and when he did all the color drained from it.
Jeff was covered in blood, and not all of it looked like it was his. Liu’s eyes flicked for a split second off to the side, where his flip phone sat on the dresser. He’d call an ambulance, maybe the cops, if it came to that. But when he got a better look at Jeff he felt a bead of cold sweat run down between his shoulder blades. His mouth was the most grotesque part, it was slit open from ear to ear with a messiness that was somehow worse than a clean cut. The idea of Jeff, little brother Jeff with a knife and a determination to saw it through his already burned face was a terrible one. In the dark he looked like a wraith dredged up from hell. Vomit burned up the back of Liu’s throat as Jeff crawled up on the bed, and he fought the urge to kick him down to the floor. He didn’t miss that kitchen knife clutched in one bony hand. Its blade left dark sticky stains on the covers and it flashed in the yellow light in much the same way a snake rattled.
“Shh.” It didn’t sound like Jeff. Too soft, too sing-song. There was too much blood in his mouth to speak properly, it dribbled out and ran down his neck into the collar of his shirt. “Just go back to sleep.” Go ack tuh zleep. Jesus, what had he done to himself?
Liu looked past Jeff and swallowed. There was blood on the hall carpet and a handprint smeared in it on the wall. Did he do that? God, he was gonna be fucking sick. When Liu found his voice, he found Jeff’s face just an inch from his. “What the fuck’s going on? ”
He didn’t get an answer. Jeff, little brother Jeff, tore at him with the knife like an animal. Whatever he was saying then was unintelligible at first, but it was all the same thing over and over. Liu held the knife back as it came just inches from his neck and felt Jeff’s wrist tremble with the force he couldn’t exert. His eyes were wide, too wide, and he seethed through his bloody teeth. “You lied to me,” he snarled. You ‘ied tuh me. Flecks of blood spattered over Liu’s cheeks. “And y’know what, you’re gonna… gonna look just like me. Understand?”
He understood all right. The knife swiped hard over Liu’s cheek as he ripped away from Jeff, but he moved too slow to avoid a jagged cut on his own mouth. The sight of it made Jeff look like something wearing his face like a mask, something ugly that had eyes like a shark and screamed like a banshee.
And when their fight wrestled to the floor, both of them trying their hardest to kill each other, Liu strained to reach the Texas jar on the bedside table. It broke when he threw it at Jeff, who made a horribly wounded scream, and both change and blood flew in the air as he scrabbled back over with teeth and knife bared.
When the police came, Liu was barely alive on the floor. His phone was somewhere under the bed with a puncture stabbed into the little screen’s glass, but he’d still managed to dial 911 before that. There were pieces of thick glass over by the wall and shiny change strewn over the carpet, most of it darkened with Barb and Fred Woods’ blood. But Jeff was gone, and so were the crumpled dollar bills that used to be in the jar.
Even with the money, he never did go to Texas.