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“You don’t scare me. Maybe you did once. But not anymore,” I said, not backing down an inch.
For a moment, the driver looked like he would hit me. But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes softened. He ceased to be my father’s enforcer and again became my brother.
“Hil, I have to take you back.”
“You don’t have to do anything. Neither of us do. I thought we did. That was a lie that we were fed from when we were old enough to walk. But I left all this behind. You can too.”
Remy didn’t speak. I couldn’t tell if he refused to accept what I was saying or if he didn’t believe it.
He and I had lived different lives growing up. He was the son who no one dared to mess with. And with good reason.
One of the few times my father had allowed me to go to a party, I had gone thinking I would have a good time. Alone with the other kids, one of the other boys had called me a faggot and had started making fun of me. Remy found out and nearly beat the boy to death.
For a long time, I wondered if the reason I wasn’t allowed out was because my brother was too protective. I couldn’t hide who I was and the kids around me couldn’t stand it. So there was no stopping Remy from doing what he would do to protect me. Was I not allowed to go out because he would have ended up in jail?
That didn’t stop me from hating my brother as much as I loved him. Now here he was taking me from the first guy who had made me feel like I was worth something. I was pretty sure I hated him again.
“I will never forgive you for this,” I told him realizing it was true.
“Hate me all you want. You’re gonna do it anyway,” he said with a chill in his eyes.
“You don’t know what you’re stealing me from, Remy. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing this.”
“Oh yeah? Then tell me.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why? Because I have no heart? That’s always what you’ve thought about me, isn’t it? That I am a mindless thug, one incapable of feelings?”
“You know me so well,” I said, hoping it would hurt him as much as he was hurting me.
“Do you think I like doing this to you? Is that why you think I’m here?”
“No. I’m sure you have some good excuse why you’re following father’s insane orders. Would you have killed Cali if he had tried to stop you?”
“Hil, I’ve never killed anyone.”
“Yeah, right. You and father, you’re both priests,” I said snidely.
Remy swallowed. I had found his nerve. I was considering how much to poke it when something in him changed.
“I’m not the animal you think I am, brother.”
“And I’m not the helpless gay boy that you think I am,” I insisted.
“I’ve never thought you were helpless. Never! Not once!”
“Then why do you act like it every chance you get?”
“Because one of us needs to live in the real world. We don’t get to have lives like other people do. We’re Lyons. They try to take us down at every turn. We have to be hard to stay alive.
“For some reason, you don’t seem to get that. Or maybe you’re incapable of mustering that type of resolve. But we do what we need to to survive. One day you’ll learn that. The rest of us just need to keep you breathing until you do.”
I didn’t say anything to him after that. It was partly because I was too busy hating him and partly because I knew what he said was true.
My father once said that ‘You don’t raise a lion on a beach when they need to survive in a jungle.’ Our crazy life was a jungle, yet I refused to act like it. I refused to fight. I refuse to deceive. I refuse to look another man in the eyes and then punch him in the face.
That wasn’t me. I wanted no part of it. Yet, that was the life I was born into. Maybe Remy and my father were right. Maybe I was never meant to survive.
