𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 [𝐉𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐫 - 𝐓𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭]

11 | Double-Bind

            "Would you think it's wrong, if—" And Rune is patient, because his mum was patient with him the first time he tried to squeeze out the words, mouth slipping around the words 'I like a boy' like trying to stick a needle in a stone and draw blood.

            "Sometimes," he tries once more, still in that crackling little whisper, "I feel more like a girl than a boy. And I don't think that's right."

            He's hunched on the floral cushions of the bench, staring at the great streams of water coming off the roof and soaking the very edge of the porch fencing. Like he's willing the words back into his mouth — or better yet, banishing them into the din of the rainstorm.

            "Sometimes what's wrong for others is right for you." Rune replies, after a great deal of consideration. He tries to think of what his mother had told him, but this isn't the same situation. It doesn't feel right, what falls off his tongue, but he hopes it's enough. "All that really matters is that it's right for you, that you feel comfortable, like yourself." Nick leans into him a little, but stays tightly crunched around his knees, like a clam that's sealed shut, or a pistachio shell with no split to pry apart.

            "But it's still wrong." His younger sibling mutters, a surprising degree of heat in his voice. Rune sighs through his nose, thins his lips and presses them into the neck of his Washington State hoodie. The cream edges are going threadbare and off-coloured from years of use, making it look perpetually unclean. His hands wrap around each other in the pouch pocket, and he tries to stir up those dredges of shame, of hate, of guilt, he must've felt when he realised that every boy aside from him seemed to have a crush on Chrissy from across the street or Rebecca the Volleyball Captain. He wonders where all those complicated feelings went, how he got them to dissipate, if they ever did, ever would. Or if it was more like dislodging the loose sediment at the bottom of a stream — a poke of a stick and suddenly the clear water went gritty and brown. Like waiting for the dirt to sink again, displaced.

            "Wrong for someone else, maybe. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be yourself. Living for the peace of others, but feeling horrible in yourself... that's not a way to be." He thinks of Callie, of himself, both pressed to the fringes for something as simple as who they are. He worries, even as he says it, that he's enabling hate, that he's letting his own jaded outlook tarnish someone else's, someone as young and sheltered as Nick. Young and sheltered, but still so exposed to the casual disdain of their community; like a fox cub hiding in a den, but still too close to the exit, chilled by the frost that creeps in.

            He pulls out a chilled hand and tucks it around his brother's head, into the slightly greasy blond mop of hair, and pretends to not notice any unsteady breaths or hasty scrubbing of eyes. "Nick, no one else should get a say in what you do. It's your life, not theirs. It's hard, but you've got to not give a shit, sometimes."

            Nick laughs, quiet, subdued, like always. Rune wonders if there was ever an excited little kid in him, if it was there long before Nick joined their family, if something tied and bound that child and jammed it into a locked room.

            "How? You don't care about what other people say, ever."

            Rune snorts, pulls the other into a hug he otherwise wouldn't initiate. "Yeah, I'm cool like that." But that's also not true, he thinks. He'd only found a way to live around others, wedging himself into the slim spaces like a parasite, hissing and spitting and flinching away whenever faced with the warmth and noise of another, like two wrong magnets repelling each other.

            "We'll go shopping." He says, instead of anything else he should say, anything that might make it better. "I'll drive us out to Port Angeles, and we can get you clothes. I'll even do your make-up, if that's what you want."