Vergil
isn't my brother, but we don't go around correcting people who think
that. We grew up together. We tackled our ABCs and 123s as a team. We
spent Halloweens trick-or-treating together and Christmases waiting
for Santa together. We sent valentines to eachother long after our
classmates tried to drill into us that best friends don't send
valentines to eachother unless they're going out. I suppose Vergil
and I could've gone out, but we figured that it would've felt way too
much like going out with your sibling. Besides, as close as we are,
Vergil is so far out of my league that he may as well be on another
planet. While I'm not the easiest on the eyes, Vergil is a picture
of Asian perfection. He could pass for a member of EXO. He's tall,
clean, with deep black eyes that take up most of his face, and black
hair in a neat crew cut that he slicks back with gel. My hair looks
like a bundle of sticks, and it never lets me do anything but clap a
beanie on it and let it do what it wants. My eyes are too tiny for my
face, which is why I wear glasses even though I don't actually need
them. The bitch girls in my classes always had something to say about
my pointy nose and my puffy eyebrows, and called me “stumpy”
because I was so short. I never understood how Vergil could stand to
be seen with me, but it helps that he's known me since we were both
in pre-K.
As we got older, Vergil became painfully aware of how others perceived me, and so he developed a protective streak. All brothers, even unrelated brothers, have a desire to look after their sisters. I guess some part of Vergil understood that I had a disadvantage in all of the social departments that he hit high marks in: looks, charisma, style, and confidence. He'd lock his arm through mine and say “Stick with me, Tracy,” as we made our way through the treacherous high school hallways. When the boys would jeer at me, he'd run at them, throwing rocks and swinging his fists until they hauled ass. The bitch girls meant absolutely nothing to him, and his refusal to acknowledge their existence hurt them more than anything else he could've done to them, because my pretty Vergil was the envy of them all.
In spite of all his good qualities, Vergil was never very popular. He was quiet for the most part, simply because he chose not to talk to anyone but me and just a few others. He didn't play sports, wasn't in the band, didn't go to parties, and essentially exiled himself from the typical high school social life. His few friends were other socially awkward nerds like me. We played videogames and watched superhero movies and stayed up late playing Cards Against Humanity. We didn't do much else. Vergil never spoke unless I was around, and then suddenly he burst into life as if I had switched off his invisible silencer. He went to the senior prom only because I insisted that he couldn't miss it, taking me instead of a date, and instead of dancing we chased eachother around the gardens pretending to be Godzilla vs Mothra. It just about killed everybody that one of the best-looking guys in school would rather play kids' games with an ugly nerd than have anything to do with them.
After high school, Vergil and I went to the same community college, but pursued different degrees. “If we're together all the time,” he reasoned, “we won't have anything interesting to tell eachother after class.” In reality, Vergil just wasn't interested in my degree program and I wasn't interested in his, and he was just trying to reassure himself that I'd be just fine without him and him without me. For the very first time, I detected some anxiety in Vergil. For all of his stoicism, he was scared to death of being alone in a sea full of people, and all the time he spent “protecting” me was really a way of protecting himself.
“Don't worry, Verg,” I told him, giving him a hug. “We're gonna do this just fine!”
We did. The time apart gave us the opportunity to experiment with who we were as separate people. I discovered that even in college, when most people put aside the pettiness of high school, I wasn't going to be anything popular, and it was okay because my classes were filled to the brim with nothing-populars. I wasn't alone. Vergil learned that no matter how good you look or how well you talk when you talk at all, you can still go completely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Adults have more complex reasons for noticing you than being handsome. The experience was liberating and made us both closer than we had ever been. It was us against the world.
Vergil graduated a year before I did, and I used that extra year to show him just how much I could make it on my own. Afterward, the two of us moved to a rental in Tanager. We didn't care what anyone had to say about an unmarried man and woman living together. I would've married him, except that it would've felt like marrying my brother. It wouldn't feel right.
Tanager was a new experience entirely. In Mayfield, where we'd lived for all of our lives, people kept to themselves and let you keep to yourself too. Everyone was always in such a bustle of their own business that they didn't have the time or energy to mind yours. The population of Tanager, in contrast, couldn't have gone over two-thousand, if even that. Those two-thousand people grouped together in little clusters and decided for themselves whether or not their cluster would accept yours. The social atmosphere was enough to scare the crap out of an introvert like Vergil, who never had any desire to know anybody other than me. Now he was in a world where everybody knew everybody, and we quickly found out that there was no way to remain unknown in a place like this.
Vergil grew more protective of me than ever.
Our first few weeks in Tanager, he made it clear that he didn't want to be seen in public without me. When he snagged a job working IT at the Tanager Public Library, he tried to convince me to apply at the library too. “It's a good job for you, Trace,” he insisted. “You love reading, you know all of the classics and just about everything about Shakespeare, and...”
He didn't finish the rest of it, so I finished it for him. “And I'll be with you all day long. We'll never go a day without seeing eachother’s faces. You'll be right there and you can look after me.”
He became very interested in the floor.
“Vergil,” I said, “you don't have to look after me all the time. And honestly, as much as I love books, I'd rather not spend my entire day inside surrounded by them. I want to spend my days out in the sun, Vergil.”
“You won't like that when winter comes around,” Vergil said.
“Well, it isn't winter now,” I told him. “It's summer. We'll figure winter out when winter comes.”
There was nothing he could say that would change my mind. I applied to be a recreation assistant at the civic center, and I was enthralled with my days spent playing kids' games in the summer, and organizing holiday crafts and movie nights in the winter. I even taught the kids the games that Vergil and I had invented, like Territory Ball and Godzilla vs Mothra. I was released from work two hours before Vergil, and those two hours became my extremely valuable uninterrupted Tracy Time. When Vergil got off work, we'd crack eachother up with wacky stories from our work days and use Smash Bros to determine whose turn it was to cook or order dinner. There was no work on weekends; those days belonged only to us, and eventually to the nice little cluster of friends we had amassed for ourselves, the other “RiffRaff” of the town of Tanager.
“RiffRaff” was what the Others called us. They would turn to their neighbors and say, “There’s the local RiffRaff,” as they watched us play Manhunt or make chalk drawings in the streets. “That's RiffRaff, all right,” a straw-hatted man would say with an air of authority on the subject, as we made our way down the back road and cut through the woods to get away from them and their judgy eyes. Mothers would hold their toddlers by the hand and point and whisper, “RiffRaff,” as we walked by. If we got too close, they'd freeze up and lock eyes with us as if we were about to eat them right up. They were the Others, and they were afraid of us because we weren't like them.
In Tanager, “RiffRaff” was anyone that didn't fit into the cute little mold they had established for us. If you went against their expectations for what a person was supposed to be, you were RiffRaff. You could lose the title of RiffRaff just as easily as you had gained it, if you simply fell into line and kept your head down and acted like a good little example of countryfied small-town existence. But who wanted to do that?
Vergil and I became RiffRaff fairly quickly. Vergil's silent nature and refusal to interact with his neighbors was just too much for the Others to handle. When it became apparent that I was the only person he really cared too much about, and that we were neither married nor related by any kind of blood, the neighborhood tongues started flapping and wouldn't stop. When Vergil rejected every advance from even such beauties as Greta Slokov and Heidi Margrave, it only added fuel to the fire. People wondered what he saw in a frumpy, bespectacled Korean girl, and they started to regard us in the same way they regarded fellow RiffRaff like crazy Arthur Ratliff and terrifying Talia Santiago. Vergil got a reputation for being standoffish and proud—two things he was certainly not—and one day he came home from work cracking up because he'd overheard someone describe him as “uppity.” “That's the exact word they used,” he told me through his laughter. “They called me uppity!” The sound of the word rolling off of his deep baritone made me lose it, too. Uppity?! That was a word for Southern grandmas!
The Others had spicier words about me. Word on the street was that I was runty, “rachet,” and very, very unfortunate looking. On top of that, I was childish and my brain “must not be wired the right way.” Coming back from an afternoon laser tag game over in Stonesville, in which I had won by three points, Vergil and I caught the tail end of a conversation about us. “Honestly, I don't know what someone like Vergil Cho could see in that little wreck,” a muscle-tee-clad douchebag was saying to a group gathered on the curb. “A guy like that, and he hangs around with that ugly little thing.”
The man was a fool. Calmly, Vergil headed over there and asserted his presence with his right hand propped up on his hip. “Yo.”
“Yeah?” The guy blew another cig puff into the air.
Vergil nodded slightly to the woman he was with, a curly-haired blonde straight out of a Sandals commercial. “Is this your wife? Girlfriend? Sister?”
“She's my girlfriend,” Muscle Tee said. “Why do you care?”
“Just wanted to know what someone who opens her legs for giant cockroaches looks like,” Vergil said. “May your future be filled with many little garbage-eating grubs.”
We both took off, laughing over the sounds of Muscle Tee and Sandals' hollers, till I was sure we were both going to piss ourselves. We kept on running until we reached the front porch, then we fell to our knees and kept on laughing until I thought we were going to die.
Vergil and I both know everything about Shakespeare. The two of us fell in love with him at the same time, in seventh grade English lit class. Like everyone else, we started with Romeo and Juliet. We loved the language and the dramatic flair of every scene much more than we liked the plot, which we didn't really care for. King Lear and Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra were much more satisfying. The two of us had read and re-enacted Act III, Scene I of Hamlet so many times I was sure we could recite it in our sleep. In ninth grade, Vergil and I went as Hamlet and Ophelia for Halloween. In our senior year, we won first prize in the school costume contest as Oberon and Titania.
When we signed up to perform at the cultural festival two weeks ago, I was sure everyone expected us to sing K-Pop or dance to BTS. But we recited Act I, Scene III of Antony and Cleopatra. We got honorable mention.
As we got older, Vergil became painfully aware of how others perceived me, and so he developed a protective streak. All brothers, even unrelated brothers, have a desire to look after their sisters. I guess some part of Vergil understood that I had a disadvantage in all of the social departments that he hit high marks in: looks, charisma, style, and confidence. He'd lock his arm through mine and say “Stick with me, Tracy,” as we made our way through the treacherous high school hallways. When the boys would jeer at me, he'd run at them, throwing rocks and swinging his fists until they hauled ass. The bitch girls meant absolutely nothing to him, and his refusal to acknowledge their existence hurt them more than anything else he could've done to them, because my pretty Vergil was the envy of them all.
In spite of all his good qualities, Vergil was never very popular. He was quiet for the most part, simply because he chose not to talk to anyone but me and just a few others. He didn't play sports, wasn't in the band, didn't go to parties, and essentially exiled himself from the typical high school social life. His few friends were other socially awkward nerds like me. We played videogames and watched superhero movies and stayed up late playing Cards Against Humanity. We didn't do much else. Vergil never spoke unless I was around, and then suddenly he burst into life as if I had switched off his invisible silencer. He went to the senior prom only because I insisted that he couldn't miss it, taking me instead of a date, and instead of dancing we chased eachother around the gardens pretending to be Godzilla vs Mothra. It just about killed everybody that one of the best-looking guys in school would rather play kids' games with an ugly nerd than have anything to do with them.
After high school, Vergil and I went to the same community college, but pursued different degrees. “If we're together all the time,” he reasoned, “we won't have anything interesting to tell eachother after class.” In reality, Vergil just wasn't interested in my degree program and I wasn't interested in his, and he was just trying to reassure himself that I'd be just fine without him and him without me. For the very first time, I detected some anxiety in Vergil. For all of his stoicism, he was scared to death of being alone in a sea full of people, and all the time he spent “protecting” me was really a way of protecting himself.
“Don't worry, Verg,” I told him, giving him a hug. “We're gonna do this just fine!”
We did. The time apart gave us the opportunity to experiment with who we were as separate people. I discovered that even in college, when most people put aside the pettiness of high school, I wasn't going to be anything popular, and it was okay because my classes were filled to the brim with nothing-populars. I wasn't alone. Vergil learned that no matter how good you look or how well you talk when you talk at all, you can still go completely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Adults have more complex reasons for noticing you than being handsome. The experience was liberating and made us both closer than we had ever been. It was us against the world.
Vergil graduated a year before I did, and I used that extra year to show him just how much I could make it on my own. Afterward, the two of us moved to a rental in Tanager. We didn't care what anyone had to say about an unmarried man and woman living together. I would've married him, except that it would've felt like marrying my brother. It wouldn't feel right.
Tanager was a new experience entirely. In Mayfield, where we'd lived for all of our lives, people kept to themselves and let you keep to yourself too. Everyone was always in such a bustle of their own business that they didn't have the time or energy to mind yours. The population of Tanager, in contrast, couldn't have gone over two-thousand, if even that. Those two-thousand people grouped together in little clusters and decided for themselves whether or not their cluster would accept yours. The social atmosphere was enough to scare the crap out of an introvert like Vergil, who never had any desire to know anybody other than me. Now he was in a world where everybody knew everybody, and we quickly found out that there was no way to remain unknown in a place like this.
Vergil grew more protective of me than ever.
Our first few weeks in Tanager, he made it clear that he didn't want to be seen in public without me. When he snagged a job working IT at the Tanager Public Library, he tried to convince me to apply at the library too. “It's a good job for you, Trace,” he insisted. “You love reading, you know all of the classics and just about everything about Shakespeare, and...”
He didn't finish the rest of it, so I finished it for him. “And I'll be with you all day long. We'll never go a day without seeing eachother’s faces. You'll be right there and you can look after me.”
He became very interested in the floor.
“Vergil,” I said, “you don't have to look after me all the time. And honestly, as much as I love books, I'd rather not spend my entire day inside surrounded by them. I want to spend my days out in the sun, Vergil.”
“You won't like that when winter comes around,” Vergil said.
“Well, it isn't winter now,” I told him. “It's summer. We'll figure winter out when winter comes.”
There was nothing he could say that would change my mind. I applied to be a recreation assistant at the civic center, and I was enthralled with my days spent playing kids' games in the summer, and organizing holiday crafts and movie nights in the winter. I even taught the kids the games that Vergil and I had invented, like Territory Ball and Godzilla vs Mothra. I was released from work two hours before Vergil, and those two hours became my extremely valuable uninterrupted Tracy Time. When Vergil got off work, we'd crack eachother up with wacky stories from our work days and use Smash Bros to determine whose turn it was to cook or order dinner. There was no work on weekends; those days belonged only to us, and eventually to the nice little cluster of friends we had amassed for ourselves, the other “RiffRaff” of the town of Tanager.
“RiffRaff” was what the Others called us. They would turn to their neighbors and say, “There’s the local RiffRaff,” as they watched us play Manhunt or make chalk drawings in the streets. “That's RiffRaff, all right,” a straw-hatted man would say with an air of authority on the subject, as we made our way down the back road and cut through the woods to get away from them and their judgy eyes. Mothers would hold their toddlers by the hand and point and whisper, “RiffRaff,” as we walked by. If we got too close, they'd freeze up and lock eyes with us as if we were about to eat them right up. They were the Others, and they were afraid of us because we weren't like them.
In Tanager, “RiffRaff” was anyone that didn't fit into the cute little mold they had established for us. If you went against their expectations for what a person was supposed to be, you were RiffRaff. You could lose the title of RiffRaff just as easily as you had gained it, if you simply fell into line and kept your head down and acted like a good little example of countryfied small-town existence. But who wanted to do that?
Vergil and I became RiffRaff fairly quickly. Vergil's silent nature and refusal to interact with his neighbors was just too much for the Others to handle. When it became apparent that I was the only person he really cared too much about, and that we were neither married nor related by any kind of blood, the neighborhood tongues started flapping and wouldn't stop. When Vergil rejected every advance from even such beauties as Greta Slokov and Heidi Margrave, it only added fuel to the fire. People wondered what he saw in a frumpy, bespectacled Korean girl, and they started to regard us in the same way they regarded fellow RiffRaff like crazy Arthur Ratliff and terrifying Talia Santiago. Vergil got a reputation for being standoffish and proud—two things he was certainly not—and one day he came home from work cracking up because he'd overheard someone describe him as “uppity.” “That's the exact word they used,” he told me through his laughter. “They called me uppity!” The sound of the word rolling off of his deep baritone made me lose it, too. Uppity?! That was a word for Southern grandmas!
The Others had spicier words about me. Word on the street was that I was runty, “rachet,” and very, very unfortunate looking. On top of that, I was childish and my brain “must not be wired the right way.” Coming back from an afternoon laser tag game over in Stonesville, in which I had won by three points, Vergil and I caught the tail end of a conversation about us. “Honestly, I don't know what someone like Vergil Cho could see in that little wreck,” a muscle-tee-clad douchebag was saying to a group gathered on the curb. “A guy like that, and he hangs around with that ugly little thing.”
The man was a fool. Calmly, Vergil headed over there and asserted his presence with his right hand propped up on his hip. “Yo.”
“Yeah?” The guy blew another cig puff into the air.
Vergil nodded slightly to the woman he was with, a curly-haired blonde straight out of a Sandals commercial. “Is this your wife? Girlfriend? Sister?”
“She's my girlfriend,” Muscle Tee said. “Why do you care?”
“Just wanted to know what someone who opens her legs for giant cockroaches looks like,” Vergil said. “May your future be filled with many little garbage-eating grubs.”
We both took off, laughing over the sounds of Muscle Tee and Sandals' hollers, till I was sure we were both going to piss ourselves. We kept on running until we reached the front porch, then we fell to our knees and kept on laughing until I thought we were going to die.
Vergil and I both know everything about Shakespeare. The two of us fell in love with him at the same time, in seventh grade English lit class. Like everyone else, we started with Romeo and Juliet. We loved the language and the dramatic flair of every scene much more than we liked the plot, which we didn't really care for. King Lear and Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra were much more satisfying. The two of us had read and re-enacted Act III, Scene I of Hamlet so many times I was sure we could recite it in our sleep. In ninth grade, Vergil and I went as Hamlet and Ophelia for Halloween. In our senior year, we won first prize in the school costume contest as Oberon and Titania.
When we signed up to perform at the cultural festival two weeks ago, I was sure everyone expected us to sing K-Pop or dance to BTS. But we recited Act I, Scene III of Antony and Cleopatra. We got honorable mention.
