My Brother's Shadow

It was winter when he arrived. The chill wind
blew through his ragged clothes, turning his skin a raw pink. Chapped lips and bloodied gums, his face pressed against the window.

When I saw him that first time I screamed—a small and silent scream, all inside, in my gut. It was the most terrifying, the most thrilling, the strangest thing to happen in a maths lesson in a long time.

The boy dipped below the frame like a duck. He soon resurfaced.

His eyes—a sharp, cold gray—searched the classroom, passing from face to face. I stared right back.

When his eyes met mine through the frosted glass and my heart was stilled in my chest, I thought perhaps, for just a moment, a flickering smile parted those cracked lips.

Smiles can be small, tiny even, minute. Smiles can be just in your eyes. Magic, secret smiles that you don't want anyone to see but you can't help. Or magic, secret smiles that you want just one person to see—the one person you love the most, who knows your face the best.

Later, even when I knew that face, after hours and hours of staring at that furrowed brow and those thick charcoal eyebrows, hours of afternoons shared, I still wasn't sure if in that first glance there'd been a smile.

That face was the biggest mystery of all.

Last term Mr. Wills gave us each a yellow notebook
filled with empty gray pages.

“This is your holiday homework,” he said. “You're to write a diary of everything you do over the break.”

I didn't write anything. Well, what was I going to write?

Mum went to work. I was meant to be going to the holiday club at school. Instead I made a sandwich, went to the big park and sat under an oak tree (
Quercus robur
).

Mum was “sick” and didn't go to work. Heard her boss shouting at her down the phone. Think Mum's lost her job.

My mum from before would never have acted this way. My mum from before loved her job. My mum from before loved me.

I made a sandwich, went to the park and sat under a different tree, silver birch today (
Betula pendula
—the best name of any tree).

Mum “sicker.” I stayed at home so she didn't hurt herself. Hoped she didn't hurt me.

No, I didn't write anything. But then the boy appeared. So I decided to fill these empty pages. I had something in my life to write about and someone in my life to write about.

*  *  *

I think they tried to take the boy away. The police probably, social workers, the teachers. They all tried to get him to leave. He screamed and barked, yelled and growled. I heard him from the classroom, where I shivered and glanced at the window. Mr. Wills set us reading to do.

I used to love books—each one a mystery waiting to be uncovered.

Long, long ago, back when no one called me
idiot
or
freak
, I used to read books just like the other girls. Now they read big fat books with thousands and thousands of words, big fat books with big fat mysteries and pretty pink covers. I still read the same books, the same books as a year ago, when I was ten, when everything stopped, not just my reading.

I'm frozen in the past. I'm frozen in a day which I'll never forget. Frozen. Frozen. Frozen. How do you defrost yourself from something you cannot see? How can you change what's happened?

I Kaia am forever frozen.

Forever frozen Kaia I am.

I forever Kaia am frozen.

So I'm not reading. I don't want to remember. Instead I'm writing this.

In the end, I don't think they could make the boy go. His wails and wild shouts must have stopped the whole school from working, so they let him stay.

At the end of the day, when Mr. Wills had given us our homework—yes, more homework—and we'd finished our daily scramble for bags and coats and empty lunch boxes, we lined up as usual outside the library. And there he was, perched like a blackbird, his knees pulled up to his chest and his toes curled around the lip of a chair amongst the bookshelves.

He stared at us again. Dev and his stupid friends made stupid jokes about his dirty, raggedy clothes.

“They're definitely from Oxfam, mate,” Dev said.

Poppy, Hanaiya and all the other girls giggled. I stared right back at the boy.

It's rude to stare
. That's what I've been told. But I don't know why; sometimes it's not. We're told to keep our eyes on our writing and focus on those maths problems. When I gaze at the sky or lose myself looking up through the branches of trees trying to see some pattern or order, no one tells me off. But if I stare at a person, an amazing, unique, miraculous person, I'm being rude.

We should be allowed to stare at everybody. We should be made to stare at everybody. All these incredible people and we're not allowed to stare. It's madness.

Have you seen them all? Well, I know you've seen them, but have you
seen
them? Scurrying here, busying there, all thinking different things, dreaming different dreams, with a different past and a different future, every single stupendous one of them.

It's good to stare
. That should be the rule. That's
the kind of rule Moses made for me when I was sad or worried or sick.

“Tears let the sadness out,” he said.

Or, “The future is full of possibilities.”

Or, “Everyone's gotta be sick someday.”

That's what he said—before.
Rules for life
, he called them.

It's good to stare
.

So I stared right back. The boy stared. I stared. He stared. I stared. He stared. I stared.

“Come on!” Mr. Wills called. Everyone else had gone. It was just me, staring.

Someone in the library—who hadn't been as interesting as the boy—closed the door, and I scuttled after Mr. Wills with my own thoughts and dreams and past and future.

After the boy arrived I dreamed. Mum says that
my brother is in heaven. If that's true, then he came down for the night.

With his hat pulled low he looked just the same as I remembered him. He looked just the same as when I found him, just the same as I see him every day. Well, apart from the wings.

“Hey, Tiny,” he said.

I reached out my hand. Moses the angel stepped back. He stretched out his wings and rose into the air.

“Sorry, Tiny. Looky, no touchy,” he said.

I asked him how he was, which I can see now was a stupid question.

That's often a stupid question:
How are you?
People don't want to tell you how they really are unless you're their brother or their sister. Even then we don't share everything, do we? Mr. Wills was always asking
“Are you OK?”
And I always lied.

“You're not to worry about me, Tiny Girl,” my brother continued. “You need to worry about yourself.”

But that is all I've done for twelve months and twenty-three days. I worry about school, about the stupid kids calling me names and cackling like hyenas. I worry about Mum, about the drink and about money. I worry.

When I awoke, and the world of dreams tinged the waking one, worry still ate away at me, but perhaps Moses the angel had lessened it just a little.

The boy prowls the playground, a lion amongst
the hyenas—all the chattering, cackling children. His rags have been replaced with a hodgepodge of lost property and an adult is with him, tailing him—Harry, who works with one child at a time in school. His job is to find out what is going on inside a child's brain. An impossible job.

Even with his escort, the boy looks dangerous.