Page 35 of One Last Rainy Day
“It’s throw, imbecile,” Tobias snorts.
“Hush, both of you.” Maman sighs, looking over to Tobias the way she does when she is about to spank us with the big spoon. “Family is important,” she says as she puts the pictures in the box. “No matter how mad you make each other, you will always be brothers.”
I pick up the pictures to help her put them in the box.
“Careful, Dom...Merci.” She kisses my head.
“You can keep him. I’m leaving,” Tobias says, standing.
“You can’t leave.” I wiggle off Maman’s lap as she tries to hold me still. “You can’t leave Tobias...we don’t have any money!” I pull on his arm to stop him. “Papa said we don’t have any money to keep a roof and water! How will you brush your teeth? How will you poop?”
Tobias and Maman laugh.
“It’s not funny!” I yell. “Maman, he can’t leave when it tunders. The giant will eat him!”
Maman pulls me back into her lap, and I squirm against her when the house shakes. “It’s okay, Dom. It’s only thunder, not the footsteps of a giant.”
“You can’t leave now,” I tell Tobias. “Not with tunder.”
“Thunder,” he says, the way he does when he sounds out words when we read.
“Thunder,” I say back, and he smiles, his chest puffing as he rolls his eyes.
“If you leave, we will be brothers wherever you go, right, Maman?”
“Dom?” Tyler says as I stare through my brother’s signature.
“That’s right, Petit Prince.”
Always brothers.
***
For others, it’s most likely seen as a simple sentiment between siblings. Beneath the apparent, it’s been Tobias’s way of telling me I come first since he left for prep school at sixteen. Through the long years of enduring his absence since...I’ve struggled to believe it at times. Our call earlier being one of those times.
“Fuck, man. The suspense is killing me,” Tyler bustles next to me. I lift the heavy machine out of the box and examine it. It’s as sleek as a stealth bomber. The material seemingly indestructible.
Checking for a power button, I find none, but figure out the crux of why in seconds. Opening the laptop, I place my hands where the keyboard would be, and it lights up instantly. Typing what I know Tobias meant to be the master password, it sparks to life at the speed of light. The keyboard glitters red beneath my fingertips, the placement perfection. The screen itself looks like something out of a fucking sci-fi movie. As if you can reach in and physically touch the display and mechanical parts powering animatedly behind it.
“Holy fucking shit,” Tyler exclaims in rare animation as he grabs the slim black envelope and tears it open. “Instructions?”
I can’t help my chuckle. “Not for this.”
Within two commands, a menu of programs appears, and I choose every one of them. What I imagine is a junkie’s type of rush seeps through my veins as they download in seconds—programs that would typically take hours.
Tyler plucks a thick, lone certificate from the envelope, and I don’t have to see the front of it to know what it is.
“You didn’t grab this while you were in Boston?”
He turns my MIT degree toward me, and I jerk my chin. “I didn’t walk.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Wasn’t important.”
“To you,” he states.
“He wasn’t there.”
