Unstuck
She held two pushpins between her teeth as she pushed one into the drywall, her brow furrowed in concentration.
"That's what you bought? Jesus, Laynie, why can't you buy N*Sync posters like a normal girl?"
"Because I have some taste," she managed to spit back around the pins still in her mouth. The other pin finally struck home. Only two left to secure her new poster.
The Scarface poster had caught her eye too, but Laynie didn't think her mother would buy the explanation that Pacino was really sitting in front of a bowl of sugar. Her mother was clueless, but not that clueless.
Laynie Hart never had posters of ballerinas in her room. Okay, she did, but only for about an hour before she cut them up to use for an art project. After that Mrs. Hart had given up, her only daughter obviously wasn't going to hold with the pink and frilly set.
She stood back and checked to make sure her poster was even. If it wasn't, it would drive her nuts. Satisfied, she secured the last two tacks and looked back to her brother, standing in her doorway with a smug look on his perfect face.
"You're still here?"
Colin grinned.
Even Laynie wasn't immune to her brother's charm.
"Yeah. Laynie," he paused and sat down the wrong way in her desk chair. "Why the Cure? Aren't there plenty of more recent bands to devote your little black heart to?"
She flopped on her bed and brought her knees up to her chest. "Sure, but none of them are as pure and simply," she sighed, "wonderful."
Her big brother leveled her with a look then. It was the look that made her shiver and her heart ache -- like he knew too much for his own good and for once would show the world exactly what kind of guy he could be.
"Just don't go and get weird on me, all right?"
"Deal," she answered flatly.
St. Margaret's -- girls upon girls upon girls, and here she was without a single lesbian thought to her name (well, not yet anyway). What a waste.
Laynie surveyed her new room: two little beds, a even smaller window that let in the weak autumn sun, and there, just over the one bed -- space for her poster.
Later her new roommate eyed the poster warily but switched her focus to the picture of Colin that Laynie kept on her nightstand. It was of Colin the day he got his letter jacket. His smile was wide and there was a mischievous sparkle in his eye.
It was the Colin everyone saw, the one they all expected.
"Oh, who's this? Boyfriend?"
"Brother."
"Oh," the roommate's face fell. Just a bit, but not enough because the brother of a roommate was an easy in.
"He's gone."
"Oh." Again.
That effectively ended that discussion.
Colin was gone. Laynie might not have loved everything about her brother -- he could be an asshat sometimes, but that was mostly because people let him. He would pull her hair and call her names, set her up on double-dates with Bright Abbott, and make her hang around his dopey ass friends just because.
Because he was worried about her. The big baby.
She could handle herself.
Back again at St. Margaret's and after Ephram she might have to rethink that whole lesbian thing.
She had such a good feeling about Brown. She knew right off that he understood all her so-called darker impulses. He hasn't hit bottom yet -- there's no plane ticket hiding in his room. Ephram doesn't seem to like happy people either. But he does like Amy.
Oh well. Her brother is back and her parents are once again focusing on him full time. It had never been any different, even before the accident.
Laynie is the afterthought. The strange child, the one left behind.
She finds the makeshift toothpaste spackle on the wall with her fingertips and hangs the poster just to the right of the old spot.
She steps back to admire her work.
Boys don't cry and neither does Laynie.