The Suit My Brother Left Behind

Midnight

By midnight my room looked like a fabric store had been hit by a tornado.

I had no money, no time, and no idea how to take in a suit. I folded the waistband over on itself and forced the safety pins through the thick wool. I turned the sleeves under and pinned them too. I tried to make the whole rig look like it was meant to hang that way, like it was a style and not a surrender.

It did not work. There is no folding a lie into a fit.

When I finally sat down at my desk to run through the interview questions one more time, one of the pins at my waist snapped open and drove its point into my side.

I hissed, pressed my palm against it, and looked up into the cracked mirror over my dresser.

That was my family’s idea of support. A suit that did not fit and a cut nobody would ever see and a message I had been fed since before I could read.

You are less.

You are the leftover.

You are the one we make do with.

The truck at the crosswalk

The next morning Trent found me on my way to the bus.

Of course he did.

His new silver truck was parked crooked across the crosswalk at the corner, engine running low and mean. Mandy, his girlfriend, sat up in the passenger seat with a gas-station coffee and a smile that could take the paint off a barn.

Trent lowered his window.

“Watch the paint, huh,” he said. “This thing’s worth more than your whole life.”

I stopped on the sidewalk.

“Move the truck, Trent. I’m going to miss the bus.”

Mandy leaned across the seat and laughed out loud.

“Oh my gosh. You actually put it on.”

Trent’s grin spread wide.

“Mom said she handed you my old junk. I told her to just haul it to the dump, but she said it was perfect for you.” He looked me up and down, slow, the way you size up a calf at auction. “A hand-me-down suit for the hand-me-down kid.”

Something cold moved through me then.

Not rage. Not yet. Just a kind of clean, quiet seeing. Like a window I had kept fogged up my whole life finally cleared.

“Good luck in there,” he added. “Try not to embarrass the family name any worse than you already do.”

Then he stomped the gas.

I jumped back from the curb as the truck lunged forward and roared off toward the highway. Another pin popped loose at my hip and the point of it dug deeper into my side.

I stood there on the sidewalk in my brother’s ruined suit, bleeding a little under the wool, while the county bus wheezed up to the stop beside me.

And I got on it anyway.

Because I had not spent four years studying loss tables and reserve math in the public library, living on store-brand noodles, teaching myself everything nobody in that house cared to learn, just to let my brother’s cruelty pick my future for me.