Hey, there, sorry I've been away but the internet's been down. So here's the first half of a story I've been working for the past few weeks. And more to come!

A Helping Hand Where Needed

The first time I noticed that Kent was weird was when I was five years old. He was practically still an infant at this point; two years old, in the high chair, babbling about this and that as, I’ve since learned, two-year-olds often do. Mom and all of us were having lunch together and he began making a fuss.

Mom pulled her head in close to the child and made a few googly noises along the lines of: “What duz you want, huh? Duz oo wanna go outside? Duz oo wanna make a poopie? Oo wants to make a poopie? Okay!”

She got up and left the kitchen to go get the poopie gear, and I swear to you that my baby brother Kent was speechless. Now this is important; two-year-olds are never speechless. Or, rather, they always are. It’s a distinctive trademark of being a baby, if you hadn’t noticed. But Kent had this look on his chubby little head that said some thoughtless straw had just gone and broken his favorite camel’s back, and that he could well say plenty about it, but was just too dumbfounded to at the moment.

Then he rolled his eyes, and muttered, ‘Just pass the dang French fries, you stupid woman,’ under his breath.

A two-year-old.

He must have noticed me looking, because he immediately turned his face to that semi-vacant drool stained thing he used as his default expression. “Jenna gim fen-fyes?” he chirped.

I’m Jenna.

I gave him the French fries.

I forgot about this of course. Life was happening, and it’s all so overwhelming when you’re a kid. Bicycles, teeth falling out, learning to braid hair, learning Miss Mary Mack, candy, shoelaces, Christmas, dreams, all sorts of things jostle for attention in any given memory of that time. But I do remember when he finally went to school that he was just about the weirdest kid you’ve ever seen.

It was brought to the fore when, in the first grade, he called Principle Walters, and here I quote directly, “a self-absorbed fascist opportunist bully who picks on people to compensate for your flaccid baby-parts” to the man’s red, nostril-flared face. It probably didn’t help the boy’s cause that several nearby female teachers broke out into loud applause.

He got into a lot of trouble in those days, I’ve just realized. It is a realization. It’s always been, I get good grades, Mom gets clueless, Dad gets either drunk or yelled at, Kent gets in trouble. Just the way things are. You didn’t really think about it.

In the third grade he glued Shane Medeiros’s locker shut with some substance they still haven’t identified, in the fourth grade he got nearly expelled for allegedly making Mikey Rizzo’s lunchbox explode (the only thing that stopped them was the fact that no one believed a nine-year-old could synthesize nitroglycerin on his own). In the fifth grade he’d gotten detention for calling his science teacher a “troglodyte hack with a Napoleon complex”. When Mr. Willings went home the day after and found his house facing back to front and a note tacked to what had up until recently been the front door saying “THIS is how a fulcrum works,” no one was uncertain of where to look.

But nothing he’d done, no punishment he received, compared with the trouble he got in the first time he disappeared.

It was November of, hmm, let me see, it would have to have been 2000. Everyone had Election Fever, and it was the subject of much study at our school. We had a lot of fake elections at our school, and Mr. Al Gore always won by a landslide because, well, let’s face it, the other guy? Pfft.

In fact I’m really glad President Gore won the election.

Anyway, a few days before the counting began, Kent didn’t come home from school. So my mom called and found out from the office that he’d never even gone to school that day.

She called the police, and everyone was frantic for a few days until he showed up on the doorstep, tired and dirty and hungry and looking immensely satisfied, the day after President Gore was elected.

Naturally Mom chewed him out most thunderously. Even dad got in a few choice yells, timid though he usually was. And yet, when he finally came up to bed that night, he was grinning the grin of the crazy.

I asked him, framed in the door of my bedroom, where he’d gone to, after all.

“Would you believe Florida?” he said, still smiling.

I shook my head and went to bed.

But this time I didn’t leave him alone. He fed my parents some story about staying in a friend’s basement, but I knew my parents were making a very parental oversight: Kent didn’t have friends. Except maybe for me, I guess, and that girl Tracey, who was in his grade. So I knew it had to be something else.

But what?