ezekiel brooks / d5 / fin

Ezekiel Brooks knows his sister is still alive. Nobody else wants to believe him, but he knows.

He stands smaller than the other boys in his class, lean and hunched over like he wants to curl into himself. Collarbones poke out from under the collars of loose shirts and sweaters. His mother tells him to stand up straight, fix that back of his, and he quips back that he can’t readjust the bones of his spine so easily. Then, he’ll push his dusty blonde hair in front of his eyes, a non-verbal signal that the conversation is over. It’s a quirk he picked up from his sister years back when she was in her own disgruntled teenager phase.

He has other nervous ticks that you can see in the picked skin on his knuckles and the bald patch just above his ears. His inheritance from his sister also includes the dark clothes and the mouth curved in a seemingly permanent scowl. He wants to be like a poisonous animal, dark colors screaming Fuck off! Stay away! Still, there’s a lightness in his face that betrays the tough demeanor he tries so hard to put on. If you catch him before he tamps it down, you can see him smile, all straight teeth and chapped lips.

Ezekiel knows what people think of him— he’s the emotional boy who raves on and on about his missing sister. They whisper amongst themselves, “He knows she’s dead, right? She must be dead” as if they think he cannot hear them. He’s treated like a child by the community, somebody in need of coddling. They play into what they call his delusions while condemning them at the same time. He hates it, the way they treat him, but he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. He finds comfort in the fact that he knows he’s smarter than them.

He doesn’t have friends, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t. Socialization is not high in importance for him. He knows that everybody has hidden agendas, and even if somebody is nice to his face, he doesn’t trust that they’re nice about him behind his back. His reputation precedes every interaction he has. That isn’t something he wants to bother with. It’s better for him to be his only company.

He’s prone to fits of anger, violent outbursts consisting of screamed curse words and thrown punches. He doesn’t let his emotions show to anybody, so by the time his feelings are overflowing, they’re too much for him to handle. His parents have stopped wanting to deal with him when he gets like this, so they leave him to his own devices. Sometimes, he thinks that maybe if it felt like people actually cared about how he feels, if people believed him, he’d be more emotionally open. He knows that will probably never happen, though, so he doesn’t get his hopes up.

If you ask him about it, here’s what he’ll tell you. He’ll tell you the story of Malia Brooks. She was born to loving parents, four years before her brother was born. She was a difficult child, always getting into trouble, but she loved her family. She dragged her little brother to school and shops whenever her parents asked and never complained about it. She taught him how to throw a punch without breaking his thumb, how to run fast out of a shop after you hid pastries in your pockets. Her parents, exasperated, gave up on trying to calm her down. Then, she vanished on the morning of her seventeenth birthday.

For everyone else, that was the end of the story. Malia Brooks was never seen again. Her parents came to the conclusion that she’d run away and was probably killed in the open forest. Ezekiel wasn’t satisfied with that answer. His sister was smart, just like he was. There was no way she’d run away so haphazardly. She must have had a plan. He dug through her room, threw her belongings across the floor, opened every drawer and box, and found nothing. Maybe she’d been smart enough to not leave any trace behind. Or, maybe their parents had gotten to it before he had. He decided that he couldn’t be sure of anything until he figured it out himself.

Nobody ever talked about his sister to his face. His parents didn’t like it when he talked about her, telling him that she was most likely dead, there was no use speculating about it. As he grew angrier, his parents decided they wouldn’t be as lenient with him as they’d been with their daughter, and in the midst of his worst episode they called a doctor to haul him away. He was strapped to a hospital bed for days while he screamed his voice hoarse and thrashed against the restraints. Everybody was wrong, and he knew it, and nobody believed him. When he was released, he brought a promise with him— he was going to find his sister, and he was going to prove everybody wrong, no matter what he had to do.