Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75663 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75663 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Still, I was willing to try most anything, so I’d been up here with Isaac and Timothy, working away. The room was for me, after all. I had to ask a lot more questions than Isaac did—especially since he rarely had any, but it was always him who tried to answer them. Or who would come over to see how I was doing or take the time to explain something to me.
Not that Timothy didn’t try or wouldn’t want to. He was a cool guy. He liked to teach us things. He always asked us to watch sports with him or to play catch or baseball, but those were more Isaac’s thing than mine. I was lucky that Mom had fallen for a man like him. From what I read in books and saw on television, stepparents tended to be jerks, but mine wasn’t.
My brother wasn’t either.
He was actually kind of perfect.
We didn’t have much in common, not really. I was quieter, while he was more outspoken. He was always dating some girl or other, and I’d never had a girlfriend. Isaac had a huge group of friends, everyone liked him or wanted to be like him, while I was content with the two people I hung out with—quality was more important than quantity. Isaac was the quarterback on our varsity football team, while I wouldn’t even go to the games if it weren’t for him playing and Mom making me go for family time. Though I’d do it to support him. And on nights like tonight, while I was at home, painting at midnight on a Saturday, Isaac was probably off doing keg stands at whatever party his friends were having this weekend.
Despite all that, over the past two years, he had somehow become not just my brother, but my best friend—though the latter was mostly just at home. We spent a lot of time together, getting lost in this or that. Isaac talked to me, shared things with me in a way he didn’t with anyone else. It had started not long after that night when I’d shown him my sketches, which I wasn’t so shy about anymore.
He even told me about his nightmares, how sometimes he dreamed about the day he found his mom after the aneurysm took her. How scared he’d been that he would lose his dad too; that in some ways, he’d lost him to depression after his mom died, until Timothy and Mom got close.
“Shit,” I cursed when I heard the attic door, then a stumbling sound on the stairs. I rushed over and saw Isaac coming up with a goofy smile on his face, before he almost missed a step again. “Shh.” I grabbed his wrist and pulled him along behind me. “Mom and Dad are going to hear you.”
Isaac was…well, he was the boy next door. While I’d grown over the past two years and wasn’t as scrawny as I had been, he’d always been this way. He was tall and muscular from sports. He kept his black hair in a styled crew cut, and his blue-gray eyes…they always had so much going on in them—happiness, sadness, everything was there, but no one took the time to look. They now met mine, and a small frown curved his lips.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. You’re always up here, and I was bored.” He flopped down on the couch. Other than the couch, there was an easel, a desk, and a chair, and that was all for furniture. Mom had gotten me a mini fridge for drinks because I could get lost in my art for so long.
“You literally just got home. How can you be bored? And if you wake our parents up, you’re going to get into trouble for being drunk.”
He fought to school his features, trying like hell to make a serious face but looking like he was biting his cheeks to keep from smiling. “I’m drunk not. Not drunk.”
“You’re so drunk.” I got him a bottle of water from the fridge. “Did you have fun?”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“You have a hickey on your neck.”
“Yes, yes I do.” We laughed. I still couldn’t believe sometimes how close we’d gotten. When Mom and Timothy started dating, while Isaac was always nice to me, I hadn’t see us becoming friends.
All the girls thought he was hot, and he got straight As and still partied, played sports, and helped his dad on the weekends in the yard. He kept his room clean all the time and never left his clothes on the bathroom floor. Sometimes it was hard to believe he was real. Half the time, I’d get lost in a painting and Mom would come up here three times to tell me to do something before I’d remember to do it. And my messiness bugged everyone.