Bryn Pomfret // District 4 // FIN
Oct 27, 2019 12:02:15 GMT -5
Post by pumpkinbagels on Oct 27, 2019 12:02:15 GMT -5
Bryn Pomfret
Female
17
District 4
When I was fourteen, my brother punched another boy for kissing a girl without her permission.
Socked him straight in the jaw, is what the principal of our academy told our parents. My brother’s victim had a nasty bruise in the meeting, smeared across his chin like purple paint, and he held a pack of ice up against it petulantly, parents both in near hysterics as they demanded my brother be punished for it. And he was, being sentenced to three months of helping the janitor clean the school property after classes were over. Mother was upset, asking him what he would’ve done if it was a Peacekeeper’s son, or if he had gotten in legal trouble for it. Maybe non-legal trouble. She told him that it wasn’t worth the risk, but our dad was proud. He took us out together for ice cream down at the dockside parlor by the beach, just me, him, and my brother.
”It’s better,” he mused, ”to stand up for what you think is right and be punished for it than to be silent while there’s injustice happening.” He’d smirked, leaning across the table conspiratorially. The cone of strawberry cheesecake ice cream in his hand leaned precariously, structural integrity unsound from repeated consumption. ”I’d have punched that boy, too.”
My brother and I share the same wavy blonde hair, the same freckled skin and big, dark blue eyes, but his expression holds a rage to it that mine doesn’t. With his furrowed brow and clenched jaw, ”He’s the coming storm, Bryn,” our mother would say. She’d hold my shoulder with trembling hands, a smile on her lips that would never reach her eyes. ”Keep him safe for me, you know he won’t keep himself safe. You have to protect him for me when I can’t.” She was always worried about him, always fretting for one reason or another over his well-being. If he was late coming home, she’d speculate over why he’d been gone for so long. When he’d finally enter through the front entryway after however many hours unaccounted for, she’d interrogate him over where he’d been. And, well, if he came home muddied, or cut-up, or bruised and battered, he was in for a hell of a scolding, but she’d never touch him. She treated him like he was a glass doll, as if he’d fall apart if she touched him.
My childhood was spent looking after a brother who didn’t want looking after.
For the most part, it’s been easy. I spend my time at school or doing the things I love, like helping out with our family’s little cafe on the edge of town or going out to do activities with my close friends. It’s a part-time job, going out to search for him if he’s late past the point of it being acceptable, or stopping him from making public scenes. I’m respected in our city as someone who’s a hard worker, as someone who’s amenable and helpful. Simply by being my brother, people cut him slack that he likely doesn’t deserve in the moment.
He’s only gotten in really big trouble once, when he was out past our city’s curfew with a few friends and they’d gotten confronted by the Peacekeepers. They’d been drinking illicitly, so we weren’t surprised when we learned one of his companions had spat on the man’s foot. Things had gotten physical quickly, and with four drunk, unruly teenage boys against three armed adults, they’d quickly been subdued. It was forty lashes for the instigator that morning and fifteen for my brother and the two others, alongside the warning that the next time he got in trouble, it’d be worse for him. More lashes. Detainment. Maybe death, if it was bad enough. He may have been just a teenager, but the Capitol couldn’t afford to tolerate troublemakers.
That was the only time our mother slapped him. Dad took her into their bedroom after that, and we could hear her sobs through the wall as she bemoaned the troublesome son who made frown lines appear around her dark blue eyes and her golden hair turn white. Egret had just sat on the couch in our cozy living room, singular eye staring down at his lap as his other was swollen shut. I could see the bandages underneath his shirt, the scrapes on his palms that had scabbed over. We sat without talking as our mother wailed. When I placed a hand on his knee, he stood up and shuffled towards his bedroom.
Despite the fact I succeeded in keeping him on a leash most of the time, he never wanted me to.
Dad hadn’t been as proud of him in the morning as he was when he clocked the kid in the jaw when he was thirteen. I could hear the rumbling of his voice through the walls, individual words indistinguishable, and at breakfast, I didn’t mention anything about the crying I’d heard. I’m still not sure if it was my brother, or him.
My life has revolved around taking care of a brother who doesn’t want to be looked after, but I don’t do it because of our mother. No, I love her as one is supposed to love a parent, but no more than that. There is no special attachment. But my brother is the boy who plucked wildflowers and made necklaces out of seashells for me. He used to curl up next to me in bed when his nightmares kept him up, would tug me down to the docks when I was upset to go fishing with our dad’s rods. When he doesn’t come back home, I go looking for him. I take him to the beach when his jaw clenches in that familiar, bitter way of his, separate him from whatever injustice causing his torrid anger at the moment. I joke about nothing important until his shoulders loosen and he’s combing his fingers gently through the sand, reluctantly smiling when he thinks that I’m not looking. Since that night, I’ve gotten better at predicting where he’ll be, and I’ve adapted to calming him down at school when his hands tighten into fists. He may have our father’s moral compass, but my protectiveness comes from if our mother was proactive. Maybe if she was willing to sit and talk with him, he would listen to her for once. As it is, he’ll hear my counsel, and for that I’m thankful.
Our mother says I’m his better half, while our dad says that we’re two halves of the same whole.
There’s a difference.
