The Devil's Metal Read Online Free Page B

small, short, skinny and pale with a shock
of dark hair. Our eyes were the same though, brown as coffee, and
we shared our mother’s slim nose and high cheekbones.
    “What were you doing after school? You
didn’t come home,” I asked him, pulling out a chair at the dining
table. There was one brown banana in the fruit bowl and I decided
to make it my breakfast. I wasn’t a picky eater. I couldn’t afford
to be.
    “I…I asked out Sheena Warner,” he said,
clearing his throat in another one of his tics. I could tell he was
trying to suppress them around me when he shouldn’t. See, my
brother has Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s nothing like the stereotype.
I mean, I guess there are a lot of similarities but my brother
doesn’t go around making obscene comments or swearing at people. I
think the doctor told us that was in a different category. Even so,
my brother makes these little hoots and barks, sometimes randomly,
sometimes during a sentence. He has three tics that appear all the
time: his left shoulder shrug, his facial twitch, and his
throat-clearing. The shoulder one can be really violent at times
and the more he tries to suppress it, the more stress he causes on
his body. Emotions make the tics wilder, too.
    He had a crush on this girl in his class,
Sheena, for the longest time. She was pretty but not too popular
and kind of bookish, and they were friends as far as I knew. But
growing up in a small town and having a noticeable affliction made
Eric a target for mean girls and bullies alike. At least once a
month he was coming home with a black eye, or he’d lock himself in
his room close to tears. I personally wanted to go down to the high
school and beat up every punk that looked at him funny, but I would
only make things worse. Having my brother in my life was a constant
heartbreaker.
    “Oh?” I said. I knew from the way he kept
clearing his throat and the way his eyes were focused on the banana
and not me that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
    “She said no,” he said softly.
    I gave him a pained smile. “Maybe she just
wants to be friends.”
    His eyes flew to mine. They were watering
from frustration. “She doesn’t want to be friends. She said I
attract too much bad attention and I’ll distract her from her
scholarship.”
    “What a fucking nerd,” I spat out then put
my hand to my mouth. “Sorry Eric, I didn’t mean it. I just mean…you
don’t need someone like that in your life. Friends are your friends
no matter what attention you get.”
    “But I need someone in my life!” he wailed.
“I don’t care who.”
    His shoulder jerked up and he screamed at it
in agony, as if it were another being.
    I got to my feet and tried to embrace him to
let him know things were okay, but he pushed his way out of my
grasp. Sometimes I forgot that even though I was more like a mother
to him than a sister, sometimes boys didn’t want their mothers
either.
    “Eric, I’m sorry,” I called after him.
    “Leave me alone,” he mumbled and ran
upstairs to his room. I heard the door slam, which made the spoon
in the cereal bowl clatter.
    When Eric was younger, we were told that
he’d most likely grow out of the syndrome by the time he was
eighteen. I know we were all holding our breath for that, but it
seemed that he was getting worse over the years, not better.
    Life , I thought. You can be a real
bitch .
    I threw the banana peel in the garbage and
looked back at the message that was scrawled on the pad. It had
somehow lost all the excitement I felt earlier, and I doubted it
was actually Creem Magazine, the best rock and roll publication out
there with all my favorite writers, because that was the stuff made
of dreams, not the cards I’d normally been dealt. Still, I had to
wonder. My dad was out at work, so I couldn’t ask him about it and
I wasn’t about to bug Eric. It didn’t matter anyway, all I had to
do was call and I’d find out. I just hoped it wasn’t a crank call
or someone