Bound by Secrets

by Angela M Hudson

  “Says the guy that bought me one for my bedroom.”

  “And now I’m thinking I should take it out.” He shut the door behind us. “Or maybe subscribe you to the documentary channel instead.”

  “Why, so I can watch lions have sex?” I said loudly, making him blush while the neighbors looked up, shaking their heads as they loaded their young children into their car. “Sorry.” I waved apologetically, suddenly remembering that people didn’t use the ‘s’ word very often. Or loudly. Apparently, everyone liked sex but no one admitted it. They even ignored the fact that, to get those three kids they were taking to school, they had to have had sex.

  “What are you thinking?” Brett asked, studying my blank stare.

  “What if I meet a boy and I want to have sex with him?”

  Even though he wasn’t eating or swallowing at the time, he somehow managed to choke on something, coughing it out loudly. “What?”

  “Well, you said people only do that stuff behind closed doors. So if we’re in a classroom with the door closed—”

  “No.” He wiped the air clean with a flat palm. “Do not, under any circumstances, have sex with any boy, for any reason—”

  “Relax, Brett.” I laughed, patting his arm as I walked down the front steps. “I was kidding.”

  I felt the relief swim around him as he followed me to the car. The fact was, I knew sex involved two naked people and that boys had a penis in place of what we had, so I figured the penis rubbed against the girl’s back for some reason, like lions, but I didn’t know why. I only knew a baby came out after.

  I had so many questions I couldn’t ask Brett, because he went bright red whenever I broached the subject with him. So I was kind of hoping I’d make some girlfriends that I could eventually ask, because none of this made sense to me. There was Google, and obviously porn sites I could look up for help, but based on how people acted about sex, I was a little afraid of what I’d find.

  As we both climbed into the car and shut the doors, he paused a moment with the key rested at the ignition. He gave me that long, thoughtful look again—the same one that always crossed his face after he spoke to the king.

  “Just drive, Brett,” I said firmly, putting my seatbelt on.

  He started the engine and said nothing more.

  * * *

  “We have a few new students this year, class, so I’d like you all to write down what you did this summer and tell us a little bit about yourselves, then we’ll read it out and have a class discussion.”

  Everyone else groaned and I grimaced at the blank sheet of paper the teacher placed on my desk, trying to envision the words there that could describe my crazy summer. Well, crazy year, really. And I guess, if I think about it, it started with a dark room and a face I didn’t know was a face. But I couldn’t write that down. Even if I could actually write anything other than my own name and a few three-lettered animals, everything I told people would have to be the lie I’d rehearsed every day since Brett enrolled me in school.

  “Hey,” the boy beside me whispered, leaning in. “What are you gonna write?”

  I smiled mischievously. “Hm. Well, technically, I guess I could leave it blank.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “I was in an accident,” I informed him, tapping my head to indicate the half-dead brain within it. “Had to learn to talk and walk again, so other than moving to a new country, my summer has pretty much been a blank page of its own.”

  That standard reaction—you know, the one where people get the instant shock first that soon simmers away to a major look of pity—moved across his face, and his mouth popped, as they usually did, lost for words. Before ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Man, that really bites’ could come out, I cut him off. “What about you? What are you going to write?”

  “I spent the last six months in juvie—which is why I’m in Special Ed class,” he whispered, his sparkling eyes showing no remorse whatsoever for that. “So I guess I could write about the daily beatings, the starvation and the solitary confinement and…” He stopped to take in my horror. “I was kidding.”

  Relief swam over my face, making my cheeks drop enough to bring out a smile. “So you weren’t in juvie?”

  “No. I was. But it’s not really like that, you know,” he said, “like it is on TV.”

  We both looked up as the teacher directed a new and very late student to sit at the desk behind us. I only caught a flash glimpse of him, but I was pretty sure he was the boy I met outside the school this morning. David or something: the library lady’s son.

  “Even if it were,” I continued, leaning in to hide our conversation, “I wouldn’t know any better. I surmised the fact that juvie was some kind of lock-up only by what you were saying, but—”

  “So you got nothing, no experiences, no knowledge of the world?”

  “I know a little. But—”

  “But you’re like a little kid?” He tapped his head with his pen tip.

  “A toddler, in a lot of ways.” I looked back at my blank page. “So I’m told.”

  “Can you write? Spell?”

  “Not really. Not much.”

  “Read?”

  “I can read ‘The Cat in the Hat’,” I offered enthusiastically, and he laughed, as did the new kid as he sat behind us.

  “Okay then.” He slid my paper over the desk and under his pen. “Then dictate. I’ll take notes for you.”

  I smiled appreciatively, if not a little forlorn. I knew myself to be a pretty independent sort of girl; well, I think I did. But since I first opened my eyes with a strange feeling in what I now knew was my stomach—the feeling then quelled by a warm rush that I now knew was vampire blood, my staple food—I’d had to rely on others to tell me what I was feeling, what I needed, what basic things were, like a hand or a car or a toilet. Brett only recently stopped supervising me in the bathroom, since my passion for discovery usually always led to me either flushing something un-flushable down the toilet or squeezing out the toothpaste to see what color it was at the bottom of the tube. And all this help I’d needed just to get me independent enough to attend school had been almost suffocating, yet now, on my first day out in the real world without Brett, I found myself actually relieved to accept help.

  “I’m Cal, by the way,” he offered. “Callum for short.”

  I laughed. “Ara. Um, Amara-Rose for short.”

  He laughed too, accepting my hand in a shake as I offered. He had a firm handshake—a quality that Brett told me demonstrated good character—but Cal clearly held back a little for the delicate and rather petite hand of a girl.

  “So, Ara…” He tapped the blank page. “What did you do this summer?”

  “Let’s see…” I looked around the room for the answer. I could say that I furthered my language skills after mastering walking, mostly, but that sarcasm and slang still eluded me, and I could say that I learned I was a unique breed of vampire called a Lilithian—that my ‘brother’ spent the better part of five weeks teaching me to hunt vampires or drink from them without draining them dry—but that last bit would land me in a very different kind of class than this; the kind with bars and straightjackets. So I said, “It was a struggle learning to be a person,” and Cal started writing. “I don’t know who I was in my past. I only know what I’m told—only know some of the things I did, not how I felt about them or grew from them. My brother guards me with a kind of ferocity that sometimes suffocates me, but I know it’s only out of love. I probably spent more of my summer observing the relationships between person to person than learning how to be one, which is mainly because of my deep need to understand why.”

  “Why what?” Cal asked.

  “Why he does it. My brother.” I narrowed my eyes at nothing, thinking back to the nights when he would lift me from the floor when I rolled out of bed or when he taught me how to wipe my own butt—that girls had to wash in a very different way to cats. “I suppose the answer I’m seeking is… what is love made of? And why does
it make us do horrible things to either protect and care for a person, or outright harm them? And how can we emulate that love, or find it, and if we do find it, how do we know it’s real? And—”

  “Okay, okay, Miss Philosophy, take a step back before you cook your own brain,” he said with a laugh. “Didn’t anyone teach you this yet?”

  “Teach me what?” I asked, hopeful that Cal had the answer to all the questions I’d been living with.

  “There are things in life no one knows the answer to.” He put the pen and paper down with my hopes. “And you’ll drive yourself bat-shit crazy trying to find it.”

  That, I already knew. Brett had dedicated himself to my rehabilitation with so much love and compassion that I was left wondering how anyone could be so committed to another, taking nothing for themselves. I knew he loved me, but I guess I wondered if he’d loved me before I died or if he grew to love me after, and then I’d find myself wondering how he could come to love me when I was really nothing more than a big chore. And from that, I would wonder if I could do the same for him, or for someone I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I could, which left me wondering if I was a bad person or if I was normal and Brett was just amazing, or if love just made people amazing, and then I’d go off on this carousel of thoughts about love and family and the world and why we’re here and what is God and what is love and then I’d get really tired and feel like crying and…

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, his smirk pushing a frown around his brow. “You have a funny look on your face.”

  “Could you wipe a grown teenager’s ass?”

  His sudden burst of laughter drew a long ‘shush’ from the teacher and a few raised heads. “No. Why?”

  “I feel bad, I guess. Because now I understand just how awful it is to wipe asses and bathe people, I feel sort of embarrassed that my brother did all of that for me. It’s like being a toddler one day, having your butt changed on a changing table, and then realizing the next day that… you know… that’s a kind of personal area.”

  “So you have the knowledge of yourself now.” His eyes moved to my nether region for a second, landing on the teacher across the room before he said, “You’re starting to get those ‘awakenings’ down there?”

  I pushed my hand across the space between us and gave him a light punch. “Shut up.”

  “I second that,” David snapped from behind us.

  “What’s it to you?” Cal gave him a dirty look and then leaned a bit closer to me. “It’s normal, you know—to be embarrassed about that stuff. But your brother obviously loves you, or he would’ve hired someone to care for you, right?”

  “I wish he had.” My cheeks went hot. “I find it hard to look at him sometimes.”

  “He’s your brother. I’m sure he’s seen it all before.”

  “I wish I could be as candid as you.” I took my sheet of paper back. “But the embarrassment led to me trying to understand how he could do such gross things to care for me, and that led to me learning that it’s out of love, which led to me wondering what love is and now—”

  “Now you’re searching for the meaning of life.” He shook his head with a derisive little laugh and leaned over his own page. “Welcome to being human.”

  I sat back and looked up at the clock on the wall, my attentions on the pulse in my neck for a moment. Yes, human. I might be an immortal with a thirst for vampire blood, but at the end of the day, no matter what I’d recovered from, I was still, at its basic and most elemental level, human. And I liked that. It made all my faults and failures and embarrassments seem a little less dramatic.

  “Thanks, Cal.”

  “For what?”

  I bumped one shoulder up passively. “For knowing stuff.”

  He scoffed. “Any time. Hey, it’s kinda nice to find someone dumber than me.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve got life smarts,” I added, backhanding him for calling me dumb. “Which is more than I can say for a lot of smart people I’ve met.”

  Cal smiled in a kind of way that made his eyes glimmer, like maybe he didn’t hear that sort of thing very often, and I knew, as we both turned back to our pages, that I’d made my first friend of the day.

  “You’ve got word-smarts,” he offered, after a moment.

  “Word what?”

  “Your vocabulary is pretty advanced for someone who can’t even write.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled, thinking about Brett and his dictionary. “It’s a game we play—my brother and me. He reads a word from the dictionary and I have to guess what it means.”

  Cal nodded, thoughtful. “That’s a pretty good idea.”

  “Yeah. He wanted me to at least be able to understand what people were saying, even if I couldn’t quite read and write yet.”

  “Well, it’s working.” He bumped me with his shoulder, which… I wasn’t certain, but I think maybe it was a friendly gesture. I smiled, just to test, and he smiled back, so I figured my guess was right.

  “Sorry to interrupt this sickeningly cute little exchange,” David said from behind us, leaning across his desk until his face nearly touched my hair, “but do either of you have a pen I can borrow?”

  I handed one backward, giving him nothing more than a half smile as our eyes met, and then secluded myself in my work—trying to read the words Cal wrote—until the teacher called on us to share our stories. Most people had pretty bland summers, spending days by the beach or staying with family further inland, but all of their summers sounded marginally more exciting than mine. I’d have easily swapped lazy days on the sand for the strain of learning to hold a pencil or use a fork.

  When it came time for the new kid behind us to share, he stood up and made a crass joke that the entire class laughed at, but I had no idea what he meant. Cal had to explain that it was a joke about a recent episode of a show I’d never heard of. I didn’t pay much attention to David’s story, other than to hear that he lived with his mother, who worked at the local public library, and that he’d spent his summer looking after his kid cousin Harry.

  When Cal hopped up to read, I expected a witty, maybe funny but ultimately short story about his summer of events that probably didn’t really happen, but my lack of ability to sum up a person left my assumptions falling flat. Instead, he started off with a rather heartfelt recollection of how his grandfather died. I was just wiping a tear from my eye when another kid put his hand up.

  “Uh, question?”

  Cal pressed his finger to his lips, and the kid put his hand down, laughing to himself.

  “No, what were you going to ask, Chase?” the teacher prompted.

  “His grandfather isn’t dead,” a girl stated snottily, folding her arms. “I’m friends with his sister and she never said anything about that.”

  “Cal?” The teacher looked at him disapprovingly.

  “What?” He shrugged. “You never said we had to write a true story.”

  “Sit down,” she huffed, shaking her head as though she’d really expected nothing less. “Um, how ’bout we hear from Ara now?”

  Just like kids on TV who get asked to speak in front of a new class, I expected my knees to knock, but nowhere in my body was there any signs of nervousness. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that I was in this class because I was a dummy, but so was everyone else, so if I couldn’t read, it was probably not that big a deal. “I spent my summer unpacking,” I said, reading words that weren’t actually on the page. “My brother and I moved here from… from…” Shit, I couldn’t remember the name of the place we used to live.

  “It’s okay, Ara,” the teacher said sympathetically, motioning for me to sit down. “We’ll work on yours later.”

  “Okay,” I said, relieved.

  The rest of the class paid attention to the new discussion, but I couldn’t focus on anything but trying to remember the name of the town I just left three months ago. Where had it gone? Fair enough I couldn’t remember my life before the accident, but forgetting thing
s that happened after I woke? That hadn’t happened before.

  “Are you okay?” David asked, leaning across his desk again.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked rhetorically, knowing full well that I’d probably gone a bit pale.

  “Do you need some fresh air?” Cal asked. “You look sick.”

  “I’m fine.” I put my head down on my desk and closed my eyes, drifting in and out of thought until I heard the bell.

  2

  David

  “What the hell were you and my brother thinking, throwing me into the ring like that?”

  “He tried to call us,” Elora said. “I have a bunch of missed calls on my phone. Apparently, he decided at the last second that we should tell you.”

  “And who decided in the first place that you shouldn’t?”

  “We thought it might be a nice surprise,” she started, but I didn’t hear the rest because a flood of noisy teenagers passed, their racket bouncing off the bricks and mortar. I ducked into a doorway and hid my phone in the shadows, since they were apparently not allowed out during school hours. I hated being a teenager again.

  “Well, thanks to you two, my wife won’t even give me the time of day. I made a shitty first impression!”

  “She doesn’t know you, okay?” Lors said. “So, yes, she might be a bit cold, but give her time. She’s new—to everything.”

  “But she’s usually so sweet to everyone—”

  “And she’s not herself, Dad. She’s not the girl you married. She doesn’t have any past to have built herself on—”

  “Which is why you should have told me she was here,” I said through my teeth, “I could have prepared myself.”

  “And yes, in hindsight, seeing the way you handled yourself this morning, you’re right. I’m sorry. But I really thought you were a lot cooler than that, Dad.” She laughed. “Turns out you’re actually a bit of a dork when it comes to girls.”

  “Fuck!” I buried my face in my hand. “I’m too old for this bullshit, Elora.”