Aaron Read Online Free PDF Page B

bare wall to his younger brother. Tears welled in Allen’s eyes as he looked at his big brother, nearly incapacitated by the drugs the doctors prescribed. Allen waited until Aaron’s eyes finally focused on him before he spoke.
Aaron
     
“I am so sorry, Aaron,” Allen said, the tears beginning to fall. “What I said to you was unforgivable. I didn’t mean it, I was just….” “Embarrassed,” his brother finished for him, his eyes glazed over. “Yes,” Allen replied shamefully, looking down at the navy blue comforter that covered his brother’s bed.
    “Now, let me tell you something,” Aaron said, as he fought the hold of the drugs and depression. Allen looked up to meet his brother’s level, glassy stare. “I never climbed into that fucking van. I was dragged into it, screaming and fighting.” The anger in his face, in his voice, was unmistakable, and Allen just nodded, wide-eyed and pale.
“I didn’t…. They never really told us what…,” Allen stammered.
    Aaron could see that Allen’s own behavior, his words, sickened him, and he didn’t need to do anything else to drive the point home. None of this was Allen’s fault; it was Aaron’s. He had brought this horror down on his family, merely by surviving.
    “As for the lunatic part,well, you’re probably right about that. Between the drugs and the flashbacks, I feel like a madman most of the time.”
    Allen took several short, very shallow breaths and looked like he was suffocating, crushed by the weight of his older brother’s disapproval. Before the attack, Aaron knew that Allen had idolized him. He was everything that Allen wanted to be—smart, funny, good-looking. “Aaron, I….”
    “If you came in here looking for forgiveness, you needn’t have bothered,” Aaron said, his gaze still unfocused. “You had it before you ever left the house.”
Allen dropped his head, the tears falling in earnest, mumbling something about Aaron being a much better man than he was.
    “It scares me,” Aaron went on, not commenting on his brother’s emotional outpouring, a dreamy quality to his voice, maybe because he rarely used it anymore. “What could happen to you, or to Anthony. I’m scared all the time, even with the drugs. When I saw you standing there, you and that girl who looked so much like Juliette, I thought that maybe if I stopped you from going that I could have stopped it all from happening.
    It triggered a flashback, and all I could see was Juliette and me. I had to stop you from going, to stop Juliette from dying. I had just woken from a really bad nightmare, and it was all… jumbled in my head. I’m sorry that I embarrassed you.” This was the first time in two years Allen had ever sat and talked alone with Aaron. His parents had told him the basics about what had happened to his brother, but maybe he never really appreciated the extent of the damage until today, when he heard it straight from Aaron.
    They both looked up at the sound of yelling—not screaming, as Aaron had become accustomed to in his dreams, but more like an argument. He couldn’t make out the words through the walls and closed door, so he couldn’t understand what was happening. His parents never fought, nor did they raise their voices to him or his brothers. Especially since Aaron’s attack, his family forced themselves to be exceedingly polite to each other.
    Making his decision, Aaron glanced at Allen, threw back the blankets, and crept to his bedroom door. He placed a hand on the wood and used it to steady himself as he turned the knob. The small click sounded loud in the confines of his room, but not so loud that it would have been heard over the shouting. Once he swung the door slowly open, the voices became discernible.
    “We are not having this discussion, John. I won’t do it.” A soft thump, like the slamming of a drawer, punctuated his mother’s disagreement. Slipping quietly from his room, Aaron crept down the hall with Allen right behind, each