As we walk down the hallway towards the lobby, Helena grabs my hand, lacing her soft fingers with mine. I look over at her with raised eyebrows and she merely smiles, tightening her grip. The lobby is overly crowded for some reason. People scatter around by themselves, in pairs, or in groups, some crying, and some smiling; a rainbow of emotions casted upon each of their faces.

I stand on the balls of my feet and crane my neck, looking for Mikey’s toffee colored head. I spot him in the back of the lobby, by the door. He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed across his chest, his face twisted into a mixture of worry and sadness. I quickly yank on Lena’s hand and gesture with my chin towards the wall. She nods, scampering on ahead of me, seeming to slip through the thick mass of people without bothering a single person. I blame her grace on the fact that she’s supposedly a ghost, and lumber my way through the crowd, accidently elbowing a few sides and backs and getting several dirty looks from their owners.

Helena grabs my hand again as we reach Mikey. His face lights up, his lips curling into a grin and his eyes shine bright with happiness.

“Mom and Dad are getting their cars,” He tells me quietly, reaching out for my hand. I pull my fingers from Lena’s, letting Mikey grab hold instead.

Helena frowns. “Why can’t I hold your hand? I wanna hold ittttt,” She whines dancing to my side as Mikey leads me to the door.

“Cause Mikey gets to,” I say, squeezing my brother’s hand.

“What’d you say?” Mikey asks, looking over at me curiously.

Oh shit. Did I actually say that out loud? I forgot that Helena is a ghost. No one else can see her. I mentally slap myself for talking to her in front of someone. Stupid stupid stupid.

“Uhhhh, nothin’. I was just… um…”

“Talking to yourself?” Mikey chuckles.

“Yeah.” I blush a little. Yeah, talking to myself. That’s exactly what I was doing. Totally not chatting with my dead grandmother.

All the while Lena’s complaining in the background of my thoughts “-so not fair. You’re the only person who can see me. It’s not every day I get to hold someone’s hand, Gerard! Not fair-“ And I tune her out as quick as I can. She complains too much, and I’ve realized that she’s only going to keep hanging around, and the only thing I can really do is just stop listening.

Mikey leads me out of the Hospital onto a cement walkway. The November air is chilly, creeping up under my hoodie, and sprouting goose bumps on my skin. The sky is gray, the cement a bit damp, but the rain seems to have stopped. The parking lot ahead of us is jam packed with cars and behind that are a line of pine trees and a road leading out. We wait on the curbside for a moment until an old chunky pick-up truck and a tiny black Mercedes pull up to the curb, one behind the other. My father steps out of the truck sauntering around the front and stepping up onto the sidewalk, his hands in his jeans pockets. My mother climbs gracefully out of the Mercedes, scampering around the back and opening the door for us, her pencil skirt stretching around her thin lanky legs.

“C’mon boys, we better get going. Marcia’s making us dinner and we can’t be late.” My mother grins, opening the back seat and waving us in.

“Who’s Marcia?” I whisper into Mikey’s ear, our hands still linked.

“Mom’s maid,” he mutters to me and then he turns toward my mother, carding a hand through his hair. “Mom, can I go with Dad?”

My father’s head perks up, and he smiles lightly. My mother isn’t quite as happy.

And I’m just confused. My brain runs to try and piece everything together, but I can’t quite wrap my head around everything. How did they have a maid when my father only worked as a police officer? Why did my mom have a Benz but my dad only a Chevy? It didn’t make any sense.

“Why on earth would you do that?” She sputters, placing her hands on her thin hips.

“’Cause all my friends are there. And all my stuff. Just until I finish the school year? Please?”

My mother rolls her eyes and purses her lips. “Fine. But just until June. As soon as school lets out you come right home mister, understand? C’mon Gerard, get in the car.”

I shake my head.

“Gerard? I said get in the car,” she’s not asking, she’s demanding. Just as the boy had in my dream. I wince.

“Uh… can I stay with Mikey…?” I ask quietly, looking at the floor.

“Seriously?” My mother huffs. “You want to spend time with your father rather than the woman who raised you?”

“I just wanted to stay with Mikey. I’m sorry.” I scuff my feet on the floor. She was harsh.

“You two are ridiculous,” She mutters to herself, slamming the back door shut, and walking back around the car, her kitty heels clicking as she steps. She gets into the car and rolls down the passenger window, leaning in to talk to me and my brother.

“June. And then you guys come back. Call me when you get the chance, I want a full update on how you’re doing,” she goes to roll up the window, but stops. “Christmas, you guys better come up too, got it?”

Mikey and I nod hurriedly.

“Alright. See you later sweethearts.” She waves, closing the window and racing off down the road.

“I don’t like her very much,” I say quietly, crossing my arms across my chest.

Mikey and my father bust their guts laughing.

0-0-0-0-0

“So are you and mom like divorced, or something?” I break the thick silence that’s overcome the vehicle we all sit in.

We’re sitting in the truck, stopped at a traffic light, on the way to my father’s house. Sitting in the back seat is Mikey, leaning forward a bit to be in the conversation. To my right, driving is my father, his work boots pressing on the brake petal. I sit in the passenger seat, arm pressed against the door, body turned toward the driver’s side.

My father frowns, shaking his head. “Never married her.”

“Oh,” I say, and the silence sets in again. “So you had two kids, but didn’t marry her?”

“We’re twins, Gerard.”

I look at Mikey. What? How in the blue hell could we be twins? He’s about four inches taller than me, with broader shoulders, lighter hair, and a more masculine face. I stare at him, struck with confusion.

“Fraternal twins.” Mikey speaks again. “Y’know, when the kids only look like siblings?”

I frown nodding hesitantly. I honestly had no idea twins could be twins and not look alike. I guess you learn something new every day. Like your entire life story.

Silence.

I ask another question. “So it was a one night stand, then?”

My father raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t look at me. The truck has started to roll again and he has to keep his eyes on the road. “I wouldn’t call it that. We dated for a while.”

“And then what? You fucked, got her pregnant, and left her?” I ask, coming to my own conclusions. I had held my father with high respect before (really only because he was much kinder than my mother) but if this whole ‘knock her up then leave’ thing was true, then the respect I once had would vanish. It didn’t matter if my mother was a bitch. You don’t leave a woman helpless like that.

“No! Of course not. That’s not… no.” He frowns, looking sort of in pain, his eyes clouded over with memories. “She didn’t even tell me she was pregnant.”

“Long story short, Dad went into the Navy, Mom didn’t tell him about us and she didn’t wait for him. She got an modeling gig in LA and brought us there,” Mikey says from the back seat, deciding to tell me, because obviously my father is having a hard time.

“Your mother and I… we… well she didn’t love me as much as I thought she did.” And that is the end of that.

It takes us about ten minutes to get from the hospital to my father’s little house down a side street in Belleville. The silence makes the drive feel much longer. After our initial conversation, the three of us sit quietly, Mikey and me staring out the window, my father driving mechanically.

The little city of Belleville is small and sort of junky. Most of the roads need to be fixed, and the buildings have graffiti all over the place. There are some shady things going on in the Downtown area, which we have to drive through to get to where we’re going. I think I saw a couple prostitutes and a drug dealer or two. Not a nice place to live. We pass the high school, small and beaten looking. It’s Monday so the parking lot is full.

When we finally get to the little house my father owns, I’m sort of surprised. It’s white, two stories, and very well kept for a single middle aged man. There are no weeds in the garden, purple rhododendron lining the front atop black mulch. The grass is thick and cut short and the little mailbox up front is neither rusted nor crooked. Both the downstairs and upstairs windows have curtains and the paint is well spread, not cracking. It looks nice.

The inside is just as well kept. We pull in behind a black Mustang (which I’m assuming is ours, considering that our mother was a model) and shuffle out of the car, my father unlocking the front door and leading us into a clean swept entry way, making us slip off our shoes and stack them by the door. The kitchen is clean, all the counters wiped down, the dishes put into the washer. Everything is almost too clean. I squint at the stove and oddly enough there isn’t a single spot of burnt food anywhere.

“Your room’s upstairs, Gerard. I’ve got to go to work real early tomorrow, so I’ll get you enrolled in school on Wednesday. You can just stay home by yourself, I guess,” My father says to me, tossing his keys on the counter.

“Can I stay home from school?”

“Nope.”

Mikey pouts. I snicker. He slaps my shoulder.

Like I knew who he was. Like we were normal siblings. Except, I didn’t and we weren’t.

“C’mon, I’ll show you our room.” Mikey grabs my arm and pulls back into the hallway. To our left is the kitchen, our right the living room, and in front of us the stairs. Mikey drags me up them, bringing me to a second floor. There are four doors lining the small square landing. Mikey explains to me that one of them is a bathroom, one of them is a closet, and the other two are the bedrooms. He points to the one on the far right. “That would be ours.”

I nod examining the door for a second and then I turn to Mikey again, having an idea. “Can I use the shower?”

“No Gerard you can’t shower.” Mikey says, blatantly.

“What why- oh.” And then I catch on to his sarcasm, feeling ashamed for not getting it in the first place. Mikey giggles. I roll my eyes, walking over to my room.

“Dinner’ll be ready in like ten minutes. Instant Mac ‘n Cheese!” He grins and skips down the stairs leaving me be.

My stomach rumbles. I head to my bedroom quickly, wanting to shower as fast as possible so I could eat.

Opening the door on the far right, I enter into my room. It’s sort of strange calling it that. ‘My room’ is something you would call a place that makes you feel safe not almost uncomfortable to be in.

I fumble on the wall looking for the light switch. It takes me a minute but I find it, flicking on the light. The room is small, just big enough to hold the two twin sized bed and the tiny dresser it contains. The walls are a light blue robin’s egg color and the dresser a dark hard wood. One of the beds has a spread sporting the label TMNT and a bunch of turtles standing on their hind legs with samurais and colored Ninja masks, the other has a spread with little cartoon skeletons all over. I decide to place my shoes by the skeleton bed, guessing that it was mine, and then pad over to the dresser. Miscellaneous items (a set of keys, two wallets, a pack of gum, a pocket knife, and a soda bottle top) are scattered across the top, and a little white shaded lamp sits in the corner. Inside the drawers looks like all of Mikey’s clothes so I head to the closet in the corner, opening the door carefully. The racks are lined in every shade of black you can find. There’s a few pairs of gray skinnies but mostly everything is just black. I fumble through the clothes looking for anything with color. Honestly, all this black is sort of boring.

But I don’t find a colorful t-shirt. Instead I find a box.

The box is heavy, whatever’s inside jostling around as I pick it up. It’s a shoe box with the word Converse printed across the top in white letters. There’s a note tapped to the top written in thin slanted script.

‘Mikey, if you open this, I swear to god I will come and eat you’

Honestly I hope Mikey won’t find it. He doesn’t seem like he would taste very good.

Popping the top, I bring the box out into the light of the main room.

Knives. Six in total. One pocket knife and five kitchen knives, varying in size. Plus two half packs of Marlboro Cigarettes and a large wad of cash. I place the box on the dresser and examine the knives. Each of them is sharpened and polished, not a single spot of anything on the shiny surfaces. One of them has a wooden handle however, and it’s stained with a dark substance.

I drop the knife, letting the sickly object clank back inside the box.

I quickly lift my shirt, hoping, praying that I’ll find something. If I don’t… well I’ll probably be charged of assault sometime soon, maybe even murder.

Luckily I find what I’m looking for. Along my side I find a neat row of jagged white lines. Scars. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now they stick out like a sore thumb. I fucking cut myself.

I’m beginning to feel like I was dumber than a freaking stegosaurus, which had a brain the size of a hot dog. (Don’t ask me why I know that. Apparently when you lose your memory, you remember stupid facts about dinosaurs.) And honestly, I probably still am that dumb. It’s not like anything changed while I was out. Other than not remembering your own twin brother of course.

I feel like I’m going to be sick. There’s something about learning all the bad things about yourself in one night that twists your stomach into knots. I slam the lid back on the box, shoving it into the closet, grabbing a few miscellaneous clothing items and dashing to the shower.

The bathroom is just as dark as the bedroom and I fumble with the switch to try and turn the light on. But this time when I do I’m not so alone.

Sitting on the closed toilet lid is a certain dark haired girl, in a black and red dress. I jump, squeaking in surprise.

“Well fucking finally. You haven’t even looked at me since the hospital.”

And I realize that I actually hadn’t. She just sort of disappeared. All my concern for myself washes away, and my attention falls back to her. “Where were you?”

“I sat in the backseat of the truck. And I was sitting on the kitchen counter. And I was standing in your room.” She glares at me.

“You were?” I hadn’t seen her. She was pretty much gone from my mind for the past twenty minutes or so. But by the look on her face I feel like a big huge ass hat.

“Yeah, you little-“ and she spews a bunch of fairly nasty words at me. I cringe.

“I’m sorry…”

“No you’re not!”

“But I am!”

“Nope.”

“Yeah huh.”

“If you were sorry then you would’ve actually paid attention to me. I haven’t spoken to anyone in three months. Do you have any idea how lonely that is?” Her voice cracks as she talks to me, her face growing red. She hides her tears in her hands, choking up.

“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t cry.” I stumble towards her, encasing her shoulders with a hug, rubbing her back. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll pay attention to you next time.”

“You promise?” She says, her words muffled in my neck.

“Scouts honor.”

She pulls away, swiping a hand across her tear stained cheeks, and sniffling. She smiles and laughs sadly.

“Now you gotta go so I can take a shower.”

“Can’t I stay?”

“While I shower?”

“Yeah! I won’t look, I promise! I… I just don’t want to be alone anymore.” Her eyes well up again and she looks down at the floor.

“Yeah, I guess…” I give in. I guess I just can’t handle someone crying.

“Yay!” She giggles, placing her hands on her eyes. “Go ahead.”

And I do. Running the tap, I strip, and hop into the long awaited shower. It’s quiet for a while, the only sounds being the water running and the occasional click of the shampoo and conditioner bottle as I open and close them.

At one point I start to sing to myself quietly, forgetting that Lena’s just outside the thin curtain.

“You have a pretty voice, Gerard.”

“Huh? Oh… thanks?”

“You’re welcome.”

And that’s just about all the conversation we have.

When I’m done, I tell her to close her eyes, and I step out drying off and dressing hurriedly. We both go back into my room afterwards, so I can put my laundry in the basket.

“Hey Gerard?”

“Hmm?” I toss the clothes in the hamper and turn towards her, making sure I’m in between her and the closet door, protecting my knives.

“What’s this?” She’s standing by the one window on the right wall of the room. Outside are the street and the yard, the sky still gray and beginning to darken. But Lena isn’t looking outside, rather inside at what looks like a single blue sticky note, stuck to the glass surface of the window.

I come close to her, leaning in to get a good look. It is in fact, a sticky note. And it has words written across it in black sharpie. I peel it off the window to get a good look.

‘In the morning, come get some ice cream in the basement.’

And below that is an address and a little heart.

Why wouldn’t Mikey just tell me about the ice cream, instead of leaving me a sticky note? I shrug my shoulders, asking Lena if she has an answer to my questions. But she just shakes her head, telling me Mikey was just weird like that.

We head down stairs to have dinner. Lena doesn’t eat of course. But she does ask if she can sit on my lap. I decline with a head shake, motioning to the chair next to me. Mikey gives me a weird look, but dismisses me, digging into his macaroni and cheese.

“So what was with the sticky note on the window?” I say casually, looking over at Mikey.

“What sticky note?” He says through a mouthful of food, looking up at me, eyebrows raised.

“The blue one on the window in our room.”

“I didn’t put a sticky note on the window.”

“Dad?” I look to my father, figuring if Mikey didn’t do it, then he must have.

“I didn’t even know we had sticky notes.”

I frown, glancing over at Helena who just shrugs.

We finish eating.

Later that night, I lie in bed, Lena next to me, Mikey across the room, both of them fast asleep. I sigh, jealous of their lack of insomnia, and step out of bed, going to get a glass of water. While in the kitchen I decide to go look around the house to see if we even have a basement.

We don’t.

Notes

Yes the title is from The Used :D

I assure you it's THE LAST filler chapter before the action. I just needed to get enough background info in there before it started and it's kinda hard to get enough back ground when the main character doesn't actually remember anything. o-o

Gerard may or may not start to get his memory back in the next one. I won't tell x3

-Roach