Branches, Birches and Junipers/Chapter 10

When Macintosh Juniper, fourteen, entered the school, he felt like choking, as if destiny declared him half-dead already.

Freshman year and he was already straining. Falling, failing, flailing from homesickness and an absent father and a mother whose demeanour went from kind to killer.

A brother without a sister braving the wide corridors and narrow minds of Ever After.

Sophomore year and Marlene arrived. Brown-eyed, a grin etched on her cheeks. A grin that never faltered when she suffered through the recounted words of her destiny, a grin forced through aching teeth.

She was sweet. Scuffed shoes and bruised knees from all the skateboarding, but the words from her mouth were compliments and never threats.

At fourteen, Marlene bet up herself with thoughts of incompetence that she would never protect her brother, and minded no skateboard falls because nothing at all could hurt more than what she knew already. She bet herself up so much, stored her anger and pain so that the only words from her mouth would be “thank you” and “please.”

At fifteen, anger and pain filled and overfilled and flowed, until that sweet girl became a walking injustice machine. With cut bangs to unsheathe her eyes, she embraced bared teeth and uncovered wounds because bandaids would never mend her heart.

That was Mac’s Junior year, when anguished and bruised, Marlene hid behind motorcycle jackets and sunglasses, stubborn remarks at teachers and broken rules, skateboarding in hallways and reading magazines in class.

She still cared. In fact, Mac would have said she cared too much. Even though she sewed her heart patch on the inside of her jacket and not the sleeve, the spark of compassion in his sister never died.

If school suffocated, then home life choked.

A mother, no longer a mother, awaited for them with a sugared fruit smile when they arrived home. Mac remembered that her words used to be soft and she would never raise a hand or voice.

Until now, that was.

Even school was less dreaded than home comings. The judging eyes of teachers and deans more preferable to the glares of stepmothers and unresponsive.

And sitting on the front porch before the parents left for work was the only freedom the siblings could know in those bitter months.

“We’ll be better than them,” Mac said, choking through tears. “I promise, Marlene.” His voice pitched upwards, as if he was asking a question than making a statement.

And she nodded in grave silence, and huddled herself in the spaces of her jacket.

In his senior year and her junior, Marlene took a look at her scuffed boots and leather jackets and decided that she had to do something to accentuate the image she always portrayed.

Life was unfair. Destiny was unfair. The world of Ever After, she decided, was unfair.

There was nothing more punk that disrupting the system, nothing more punk that destroying that injustice.

So she helped people, started businesses, funded endeavours and made her mark as revolutionary and progressive. No one escaped her hand of aid, except the most important.

Macintosh.

There was something tangible about helping people with parents who had lost jobs and kids who skinned their knee and broke their bone, but something so personal like the rift between brother and mother?

Grimm, Marlene could never understand it or avoid it completely.

He tried to remember her. She tried to remember him.

Tried to remember childhood bliss and the never-ending threat of summer and school. And cold ice creams on warm country afternoons and parents who would tuck them into sleep every night. The sleepovers they had every weekend, where they would turn on book lights and read aloud to each other until a parent would inadvertently enter and scold them for staying awake.

Tried to remember holding hands through hallways, being siblings again, happy to suffer through their destiny.

For each other.

But when Mac swung the square hat on his head and was declared among the recent graduating class, he shot a look back at his sister, but not the girl he knew.

People change. But Marlene did more than change her clothes and her attitude and her lifestyle. She changed the core essence of what he knew her as – his sister.

As he followed the procession of his year mates, he could see the train of students behind him, like an unravelling tape marking the distances between.

She came home after her Senior Year. “I’m going into business,” Marlene declared, slamming her high school diploma on the table. “There’s a bunch of schools I’m considering an–”

“Business? You only get a business degree if you wanted to graduate,” Mac scoffed.

Of course she wanted to graduate, to get out of school, to find her place in the workforce, and work work work to get herself out of this legacy.

“What, as opposed to what?” Marlene slammed her palms down on her hips. “I can't stay with these fairytales any longer... I have my own life! Once destiny is through..."

"That's rich for you to say. It's not like you're going to die."

"Neither am I going to be reborn," she said. "Why can't you just be supportive? I..."

She gave up on words, and merely stormed upstairs. It would be one of their last exchanges before destiny come.