Red

Clare Wu (11) | STAFF REPORTER

The first time, they’re 10, and his pet hamster lies dead on the pavement. There are tire-track blood stains tracing to Casey’s firetruck red bicycle. Casey says that it was an accident, Lucas knows it wasn’t. He cries, but he tells his parents that he lost his hamster. He loved him, but he loves his sister more. 

Casey comes home with red-bruised knees and sheets of paper declaring A+. He congratulates her as if she earned it. He tries not to look at the top of the sheet, where a blocked-out name sits under smudged red-red-red but it’s still ok when he does because that’s always been his little sister’s favorite color. Casey, he tells himself, is adjusting. It’s not a big deal.  

And so it goes. Casey, age 21, calls him at two in the morning, sobbing. She was drunk. She didn’t mean it. She never means it. He drives two hours to her college and spends another three doing things that make him hate himself. He tells her that everything is going to be alright and isn’t sure when he became a liar. When he gets back home, he thinks that it was worth it. He’s her brother. This is what he does. What else can he do but save her from herself, sometimes? And so it goes.

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And so it goes. 

The last time she calls him, she’s holding a shovel. I’m going to bury him alive, she snarls. There’s a lump at the bottom left of the screen. Lucas doesn’t look at it when he agrees with her, already thinking about how fast he could fly to New Zealand. He doesn’t look at it, even when it starts to shift. He’s gotten good at ignoring the things he doesn’t want to see, after all. It’s not until Casey’s shoved into the ground, six feet deep, that he realizes that maybe he’s gotten too good. It’s not until Casey is begging that he realizes what’s happened. She holds out her hands and says that she doesn’t mean it, that she loves him, and she’s crying, and he’s never been able to refuse his little sister, but he isn’t there right now, and the guy who is just laughs-

In the end, some monsters turn human much too late. There’s really no saving them once they’ve dug their own grave.