CHAPTER FOUR
DELILAH
When people throw out words like black and white, angry or sad, large or small, I’m not sure I envision the same meaning as the majority of society.
Not with all of the words, at least. Not after the meanings he taught me.
Perhaps if I hadn’t been raised with a unique soul like my brother, I would have seen things the same way, believed the same way, idolized and coveted the same way as every poor person that came before me. But it’s impossible to see the world the same when you’ve been shown how reality and circumstances always come down to a person’s perspective.
Black isn’t black when it comes in shades. Angry isn’t angry when it can grow into fury or rage. Large and small don’t simply mean the physical size of a person or object, they also describe the magnitude of what’s inside them.
My freshman year of high school was the worst for me, the feeling of being lost, of being insignificant, of not being seen by my classmates and peers because I didn’t have what they had, or very much of anything to offer them. I had me. I had my friendship. I had a listening ear and a friendly smile. I had the small things in life, the forgettable, the cheap or free. Eventually, I made a few friends, girls who only gave me a chance because they felt sorry for me, but it was like a domino effect. Once they spoke to me, somebody else did, and before too long, I wasn’t an outcast anymore, a girl forced to be alone because she wasn’t worth it.
The original friends - those girls who did something nice because they felt sorry for me - they didn’t like my tenuous popularity. They turned on me, and they were vicious.
Within a week, I was a pariah at Tranquil Falls High, an untouchable to anyone who didn’t want to be cast out themselves. I don’t know what those girls said about me because no one would tell me, and I broke down as soon as I got home, my tears a lazy river of pain that would never stop flowing.
Holden - my brother, my protector, my rock - he was the one who fixed me.
He appeared in my doorway with his standard dark presence, the black hair and black clothes hiding the light that existed inside. It drove me nuts to see him purposely exclude himself, it angered me to see him take the potential of being a big man on campus and so carelessly crush it beneath his boot. He had no concern for anything or anybody.
Anybody, except me.
As soon as he saw the tears, the corners of his mouth tipped down, his eyes softening with genuine sympathy. He cared when nobody else did, and I repaid him for that steadfast devotion by screaming at him and calling him a freak. By calling him crazy.
Yes, even me. His own sister.
Rejecting Holden ensured you were accepted in school because people love to join forces in hate, as if having the biggest team somehow validates your ugly opinion. I’d refused to reject him before that moment, but I was so desperate to fit in that the pressure of it all broke me.
Holden had every right to hate me, and I didn’t miss the sharp slice of pain cutting through him, the flash of betrayal behind his blue eyes. Walking toward me instead, Holden took me in his arms, rested his chin on the top of my head and held me while I cried and raged. My fists beat on his chest, my feet kicked at his shins, but he held on.
It’s okay, Deli. I already knew this would happen. I knew this was coming.
Having experienced high school already, Holden knew the kids would judge me, he knew they would hurt me because they’d already tried to hurt him. Sitting me down on the side of my bed, he knelt in front of me and talked about being large and small. At first I didn’t understand, but that’s how it was with Holden. He didn’t think like everybody else.
“Stop being small, Del. You’re letting them crush you by taking away your size, they’re making you small like them. Just chipping away until there’s nothing left of you.”
My brows had pulled together, my mind trying to digest what he was saying to me. I was a petite girl, five foot two and didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t grow bigger.”
He laughed. Holden always had the best laugh. It surrounded you and hugged you. Comforted you if you felt alone.
“I don’t mean large like that. These wealthy kids think they’re large. They think they’re more valuable, more worthy, and more entitled. But the truth is that most of those kids are small. They’re empty. They’ve had it so easy that there aren’t enough memories and tragedies and victories inside them to fill them and make them bigger. They see you walk by and you shine. You have so many victories that you are large. You’re genuine so you overshadow them. They don’t have what it takes to get large, so to win against you, they have to steal your size, make you small like they are. But they’ll never roar as loud as you can, their lives aren’t as magnificent, large and loud.”
His speech helped me get through that day, but there was something I knew that he didn’t:
Holden was the one who was large. He was the good person. The strong person. Holden didn’t have to make other people small so he could be larger than them.
But he wasn’t large now. Not in a hospital bed with a net of small tubes running everywhere, with a thick one running down his throat, with his head shaved and bandaged, his eyes closed, his life silent. This wasn’t right, wasn’t real. Holden should have been roaring instead of quiet because Holden was never small - he was large.
“Where are the doctors? I want to know what’s wrong with my son. Is there anybody here who can help me?”
Tears burst from my eyes as my dad paced and complained at the end of the bed. My crying made my mom cry harder, her hands fluttering over Holden’s face too afraid to touch anything. Taking his hand, I was careful not to touch the IV. His fingers were limp and lifeless.
“Can I please talk to someone who can tell me about my son?”
Dad was angry, every festering drop of it directed at himself. He blamed the fight on Holden’s accident, believed that if he hadn’t kicked Holden out, we wouldn’t be here now. He was right. But that didn’t make the accident, itself, his fault.
Deep down, in a place I didn’t want to admit was there, I blamed my parents for this, too. I blamed my dad for hurting Holden. I blamed my mom for stopping me when I tried to chase him and bring him back inside. I’d broken free of her and reached the door by the time his taillights were blazing red down the road. “Holden, come back!”
He kept going.
The phone was ringing and a police officer was knocking on the door an hour later.
The hospital was twenty minutes outside of Tranquil Falls in a larger town that was more of a city. When we arrived, I wanted to run to my brother, to feel his warm hands in mine, to see him wink to tell me he would always be all right. But he wasn’t, not this time. I didn’t know that for four long hours. He was in surgery when we’d arrived. He was in a coma. There was swelling on his brain and they didn’t know when, or if, he would wake up.
How do you look at a person who had always been your superhero and not shatter to see them broken?
So while my father raged at himself, at the hospital staff, at anything or anyone because the anger and guilt were too powerful to hold inside, Holden lay quietly. Tranquil Falls had stolen his size. They couldn’t be as large as him, so in their hate, they’d made him small like them.
I understood it now, saw it so clearly it might as well have been one of Holden’s beautiful paintings staring me in the face. The naked, raw truth revealing the way Holden looked at life, the way we would all look at life, if we weren’t so damn small.
All three of us had stayed in his room that night, my mom and I taking turns talking to him, hopeful that our voices would bring him back to us, would show him that it was safe, that nobody could hurt him while we became the superheroes.
Holden didn’t wake up at first, he stayed in his dark space for over a week. I was there every day. I missed my last week of school before winter break because I fought tooth and nail to convince my parents I needed to be by his side when he first woke up again.
Sitting beside him, day after day, hour after hour, I didn’t care about what was occurring outside the room, didn’t want to hear the details of the accident, didn’t care that my father lost his job because it had been his employer’s son that almost ruined my brother. My father had demanded the medical bills be paid by the Thorne family, and they were, but my father would never be allowed to return to work again.
I didn’t care what happened to Jack, didn’t care that Michaela felt so bad that she’d begged to be allowed to see Holden at the hospital when she was here visiting Jack.
She was small. Holden was right about that, and beside his bed I wouldn’t let a single small person come into the room for fear they would scrape away what was left of him so that they could win.
I became large so I could protect him.
Nine days after the accident, nine long days that made me feel like life would end, Holden opened his eyes. I’d jumped up to see him staring at the ceiling. I’d whispered his name. I’d squeezed his hand. I’d danced inside myself to discover that Tranquil Falls hadn’t destroyed him.
But he wasn’t the same.
The doctors said it would take time. It would take rehab and a bunch of testing to determine the extent of permanent damage. But I didn’t care if he wasn’t exactly who he’d been before the accident. I didn’t care if it would take years before he was whole again. Because that’s the other truth about people who are large. No matter what happens, no matter how much you whittle them down, they will grow large again.
Holden wouldn’t be contained by prognosis or diagnosis. He wouldn’t be relegated to some box where strangers told him if he would succeed. I knew my brother well enough to know that the light inside him was so warm and pure, it would cure all the damage inside him.
Confusion held him firmly in the first days he was awake, but eventually he was smiling again, laughing and making jokes. My parents had spoken to him and cried, my father apologizing for every mean word he’d said, and Holden had forgiven him.
That’s what large people do. They’re so big and so deep and so wonderful that grudges and resentment and anything deemed ugly are crushed beneath the weight of their virtue.
Three weeks out, and my brother was my brother again. Until that night. The last night. The night after we had been told that Holden would recover fully.
We were eating dinner at the kitchen table, the winter wind outside howling its discontent, when the phone rang from where it hung on the kitchen wall, a corded device Holden and I both had called ancient.
Normally, Mom would ignore the call if we were eating dinner, but with Holden at the hospital still, she’d jumped up, her fingers had tightened over the receiver, the color draining from her face in response to what she was hearing.
Holden had a seizure. A full one, the nurse had said. He’d stopped breathing, he’d bitten his tongue, he hadn’t needed resuscitation, but the event was scary enough that the hospital felt the need to call.
They’d told us to wait.
They’d said there was no rush.
But when it comes to family, when it comes to someone you love being in pain, there is always the need to drop what you’re doing and run to be beside them.
History has a screwed up way of repeating itself. Just like fear has a way of reviving intuition while panic sweeps in to prevent you from hearing what intuition has to say.
Maybe we should have sat back down to finish our meal. Maybe we should have waited an hour, a minute, five seconds before grabbing our coats and racing out the door. Maybe we shouldn’t have left our plates full of food sitting on the table for when we returned.
We would never return.
Not the same.
Not as the people we had been before tragedy struck.
Maybe is a word every person can regret for the rest of their natural life. It’s a heavy word filled with vacillation and indecision, of what could have been and what will never be. It’s another word I’m sure Holden would have given a new definition if circumstances had been different.
But maybe was what we were left with after jumping in the car to rush to my brother.
Maybe.
And I love you.
I’m sorry.
And goodbye.