Rad Bird

When they were little they would wrestle. They would roughhouse. They would tackle each other in the public pool and dunk the other's head. On the trampoline they would fly into the air and collide their chests like mountain goats or bowl one another over on the grass like pouncing tigers. Their mother said, "somehow I ended up with two boys," even though the older one was Evelyn and the younger one was Brandon. For two siblings who were best friends, they sure did cause each other a lot of injuries.

When Brandon was four he stepped in front of Evelyn's skateboard and accidentally tripped her requiring four stitches on her upper lip and a butterfly on her chin. When she was nine she accidentally broke her little brother's arm with a poorly timed jump with her BMX. At twelve and fourteen, they were both beaten up by a mall security guard because she had encouraged her brother to goad the man to a blind rage. Normal kids probably would have told their parents and gotten the young man fired or sued the mall but that never crossed the kids' minds. In fact they never even told anyone of the incident. Brandon and Evelyn were two kids against the world, made independent but the incredibly long leashes allowed by their parents and the inseparable bond they shared. Besides, they got the mall guy back.

Ev, as she became known because 'Evelyn' had never really fit her tomboyish, wild nature was also Brandon's greatest protector. Of the two, Brandon was the more feminine and it was Ev who could really throw a punch. She played basketball and he took theater. She skateboarded and rode trick bikes and he drew comics and printed zines. Brandon suffered bully trouble and had teachers who didn't like him and it was Ev who stood up for him and sometimes took a black eye in his place. "Don't mind them sayin your big sister fights your battles cause they'll be saying it through missing teeth," Ev told him, balling up a wiry fist and grinning at him crookedly.

As the challenges of puberty remapped the terrain of their young lives, they also were each other's greatest confidants. Though they got little help regarding birds and/or bees from their parents and only slightly more useful information from teachers or other students, they each felt less freakish or abnormal through the sharing of fragmented knowledge with each other. They pieced together a pretty decent, surprisingly accurate picture of the way things worked all with nearly no adult intervention or peer recrimination. For a couple of poorly informed kids, they had a lot of good sense and stayed away from that particular kind of trouble.

From this time came the understanding that they both had certain predilections not shared by most of their classmates. Ev, liked girls as well as boys though her range of females she considered enticing was broader than her very specific interest in very select boys. Brandon also had a certain kind of boy appreciation which he seemed to share with his sister. He and his sister also had the same taste in girls. Out of this were born a habit not normal to siblings of opposite sexes, the practice of girl & boy watching together, the comparing and contrasting of tastes and the sharing of desired application of those tastes.

Being the elder sister and, therefore, purveyor of arcane knowledge, she took it upon herself to instruct, and elucidate her brother. In return, she benefited from his very intuitive understanding of human psychology. He was a natural at understanding relationships and what motivated people to act in such confusing ways. When Evelyn felt frustrated in her pursuit of a particular boy, or even more often, a girl, it was Brandon who could parse for her the complex and perplexing responses and signals of her current schoolyard crush.

They shared secrets with each other. Both had variously come across magazines and vhs tapes. They read the same penthouse forums and Brandon wrote erotic stories that his sister would read and then give advice on how to make even hotter. At fifteen, Brandon wrote prolifically and drew darkly witty underground comics. Ev was his biggest supporter and fan, especially of the more adult work.

As they grew older it was Evelyn who dated more. Brandon was naturally more shy and, though he understood the dance of dating better than his sister he participated far less. Many nights during their late teens took on a kind of pattern. Brandon, though he might have a crush, would seldom act on it, leaving him at home on Friday nights and weekends. Evelyn would hotly pursue her latest target but frequently put them off by coming on too strong. The pair of them would find themselves at home, together on a night were every other teen their age was necking at the lake and even their parents were out at a cocktail party, they would be at home, in Ev's room together, a support group of two discussing their various teen heartbreaks.

It is without question that some lines of propriety were crossed in small ways. These two siblings shared a kind of intimacy and lack of restraint few family members would be comfortable with, nor would society examine them kindly were they to have ever come under any significant public scrutiny. Fortunately for them, their apparent bisexuality was enough for people to chew on and implications of possible impropriety between siblings never found their way to the surface.

Both made their way through the tumultuous time of high school graduating classes of '98 & 2000. Neither were virgins either, by graduation and prom, though neither found steady sweethearts. Brandon once lamented, "you know the problem with having every option, is you have a lot more trouble being satisfied with anyone for very long." Similarly Evelyn dated lots of boys and girls at college but never managed to find someone she wanted to spend more than a few weeks with.

Brandon wasn't so much picky in truth but he did want to find someone he could really trust and open up to. As he left high school, he found himself dating older women for a short time and, one, really much older, effete man, named Gerrold, who paid for some of his publishing costs. This delayed Brandon from college as he plowed full ahead building a small, indie press.

By the time Evelyn was in her second year, Brandon had gone into business with Gerrold and was printing sixty-thousand zines a month distributed locally and had a sizable fan base. Unfortunately, he didn't have enough business sense to know Gerrold was screwing him and taking upwards of eighty percent of the fledgling company's profit for himself, even as Brandon did more than ninety percent of the work.

It took only a couple weeks from the time Brandon realized this to a 'blow-up' with Gerrold and a rapid folding of the company. Brandon consulted a couple lawyers but found out quickly the depth to which he had been rolled. Not only did he lose out on most of the profits he had helped create but he didn't own the rights to his characters or even one sentence of his own writing. Gerrold walked away with almost a quarter million dollars and quickly hired a new artist and writer to replace Brandon. Brandon left the company with roughly three thousand dollars to his name.

"Come visit me at university." His sister said. "I'll help you figure this out."

He did. Of the money he made half went into savings and the other half he planned to use to travel and rebuild. He bought a small, beat up Honda Accord station wagon, the cheapest Nokia cellular phone available, camping supplies and drove east to reconnect with his best friend and sister. The girl who had always protected him, stood up for him, and the roughhoused him enough to make him resilient.

"Fuck I'm so glad to see you!" She said hugging him tight as he met her on the campus quad. She was taller now and her chest had filled out. Despite her boyish clothes she was really shapely and her bright green eyes made him want to weep they were so heart-breakingly beautiful. For his part he was no longer so scrawny and had a decent little artist's soul patch on his chin. To her eyes he was as gorgeous a male specimen as she had ever seen. "Damn, I'm lucky." She said. "Sorry it's under such shitty circumstances but I am so damn happy you're here." It was probably twenty minutes before they finally broke the hug.

"Here's my key. I wrote the address down for you. I live in off-campus student housing about a mile from here. I have to go back for afternoon classes but I want you to settle in. Get something to eat, fridge is not entirely empty. There's cable and I don't have a roomie right now. How was the drive? Oh shit! Parking! You'll have to get a student sticker but we'll figure that out later. Just park a couple blocks away for now near the library. There's always parking there. You can unload your stuff parked in front of the student housing building but just have your blinkers on."

"Drive was great. I cried a bunch about stupid shit but I was glad I was coming to see you. I missed you so much the last year." He kissed her neck below her ear and, though he couldn't see it, she started crying." She kissed him back, on his neck and then planted five hard kisses against his neck and cheek, hugging him tighter. "So good to see you again."

She walked him to his car and when he was about to get back in she grabbed him and hugged him again, kissing his cheek over and over. He kissed her forehead and over her eyelid and she crushed him against her again. "See you soon Brandon. I'll be out of class in just a few hours. I have one more three-hour lecture and then a meeting with my councilor. Relax. Watch a movie..." She sniffed him exaggeratedly, "have a shower." She teased. They parted and she couldn't help watching him drive away and she walked backwards toward her next class.

In truth, she hadn't meant the shower comment. She had missed his smell so much she kinda hoped he'd stay stinky. She was late for class but she had trouble hurrying. She felt warm all over and she ruminated on their deep history. It didn't take long to drift to thoughts of his body, how it was a bit different now. He was even sexier, more manly and she could feel her pubic area thrum. She knew she would get little out of class that afternoon, busy as she was thinking about having her brother back in her apartment.

As Brandon followed Ev's hand-drawn map he thought about her breasts pushing into his chest and her warm, moist kisses on his neck. He could still feel the warmth of her body and the sense memory of her skin against his. His driving became distracted as his penis got harder than it had at any time in recent memory. For his part he was disquieted. He was a bit afraid his body was responding in a way his mind did not want to go. If he let his body have its way, things could go really badly. He could really fuck things up. He was staying in his sister's apartment, he couldn't afford to make her think he was skeezy. "Stop fucking perving on your sister!" He whispered to himself. "Get your dumb dick under control." By the time he found her address, he was angry at himself.

He parked across a driveway to a garage that didn't look used and put on his emergency flashers. The building was four stories of stucco built in the 30's or 40's and had one of those buzzer intercom systems. There was a aging paper sign taped to the inside of the glass side window which read, 'Check all guests through student services. No entry after 1am'. He hoped his sister would do whatever she needed to to keep things kosher with her housing.

He found her apartment on the third floor. Her door was chipped black lacquer and there was a drawing he had done posted there. A photocopy of his Rad Bird character. An ostrich with a backwards ball cap and a skateboard posing nonchalantly. It was a character based on Evelyn. She had colored it and added a word balloon which read, "Bitch House Rules, don't be a pu$$¥" with the 'S's and 'Y' replaced by dollar signs and yen. He pushed the door open and immediately grinned. Hanging from the ceiling on a hook was her BMX like a potted plant. There was a coat rack covered with hoodies and a broken skateboard laying upside down by the hall closet. The deck, snapped nearly in half, was still holding together by the grip tape. Another one of his characters was on a tattered sticker on the bottom.

The place was small. The hall with a shallow closet lead into a small living room with a pass-through to a cracker box kitchen. There was a small bathroom with claw foot tub taking most of the room. A curtain hung from a brass oval suspended from the ceiling with a small pedestal sink and antique toilet. Most charming were the tiny white hexagonal tiles. The place would have been beautiful if not for a hundred coats of chipped paint and the thousand students who had lived here over the years. There was one more door he didn't look into. Presumably Ev's bedroom. He set his bags on her futon sofa and went to re-park his car.

He walked around the small tree lined streets dropping autumn foliage in colorful drifts around curbs and lampposts. Glass fronted cafes and bistros with pretentious names in gold leafed script. Upscale toy shoppes and bicycle galleries. Independent bookstores and co-op groceries. It seemed like a nice town but he worried about how much it cost to live there. He peered at the menu posted in the window of a low lit Italian restaurant and saw entrees listed at fourteen dollars. Damn, he thought, how does anyone afford to eat in this town?

A little further down the way he did find a somewhat rundown Mexican food place that smelled promising. They had a taqueria style burrito for six bucks that came with chips, salsa and an Agua Fresca. He also got a pair of queso con carne sop'es for Evelyn to-go. Cantaloupe Agua Fresca was her favorite. He hoped she had a toaster oven because a microwave would make the sop'es inedible. If worse came to worse a frying pan with a lid wasn't the most awful way to reheat them.

Getting back to Ev's, he set up shop in her tiny kitchen. The only real work-space was the pass-through to the living room and while plating the burrito he noticed her bookshelf in the living room had a dozen or so of his comics. He was touched. He had sent her a couple but it looked like she had sought out others and was now displaying them prominently. He wondered if she came to his house, not that he really had a place right now, but if she had, would she see evidence of his pride in her? He didn't know but he resolved to be a better brother. He set aside the sop'es where he could heat them up just a bit before she would get home. He found she had her favorite hot sauce in a cupboard and he brought it out with him to the futon where he planted himself to eat. He still had about two and a quarter hours to kill before she got home.

She had some early 90's copies of thrasher magazine on the makeshift coffee table; an old buckled trunk. The cover was Elissa Steamer, who he knew was a hero of hers. Evelyn had always been a bit too distracted to commit hard enough to skateboarding to be really good. Now that she was older she mostly focused on basketball. He thought about her body which he had hugged tightly against him just an hour earlier and felt his dick respond again. 'Fuck!' He thought, 'stop getting wood on your sister!' God she felt nice.

She had more of an hourglass figure now. His mind flashed to a vision of her naked and he almost couldn't handle it. He knew he would burst a blood vessel if he ever saw her undressed. 'But you won't because that's not why you're here, right, Brandon! Just calm the fuck down and don't be a monster.' His boner wasn't subsiding though. He got half way done with the burrito before deciding he should take a shower. Maybe a cold one.

***

In class, Ev was thinking about Brandon and had taken little or no notice of the afternoons coursework. She hoped her friend Barbara would be taking good notes. She'd try and catch up later. She wasn't really that into the class under normal circumstances but with her brother on her mind it got even harder to concentrate. He had really filled out. He had a pretty great hug, that was for sure. Strong and enveloping. When she had kissed his neck her hips had been close enough that she thought she could feel his penis pulse. There had been layers of fall clothes but it felt like his heart had pounded hard against hers. A picture of his heart appeared in her mind, cartooned with arms and legs and a big boner humping toward her. It did the Time Warp with hands on hips. She guffawed inappropriately thinking what the uptight girls in her class would think of her thoughts right now.

Afterwards she saw her councilor. A short, fifteen minute check in to see how she was doing balancing basketball and keeping her gpa up. She thought about blurting, "I don't think basketball will be half as distracting as my brother's dick!" Yeah, grounds for investigation and maybe dismissal for that. Her councilor may have wondered in that moment about her silly grin. She did look at her a bit quizzically.

"Nothing," she said, "just thought of a dirty joke someone told me. Sorry."

She promised good work and solid team spirit and moments later she was running out of the building, Jansport on one shoulder and tossing her skateboard down even before she'd left the doorframe. Ten long pushes and she was cruising to the top of a set of fourteen concrete stairs. A lazy kick flip put her 50/50 on the side burm followed by a nollie off the end and nose manual for fifteen feet or so at the bottom then a shovit from goofy to switch. A passing student suddenly fell madly in love with her but for Ev it was just an efficient way down the steps. Eight long blocks later she was at the front door of her building.

'Shit, he's got my key!' She thought. She hunted for her apartment on the buzzer system, never having had to be buzzed into her own apartment before. 'I wonder if I'll catch him naked?' She thought as she buzzed 304.

After a moment and some obvious fumbling he came through the intercom; "um, ah, hello? Evelyn Palmer residence?"

"Hogan! You better be prepared to defend that belt cause old hacksaw Jim Duggan is coming for you with his trusty two-bah-four!" She said in her best baritone.

"How do I let you in?" He asked.

"You let me in the same way you let Jake the Snake in! With a figure-four and an elbow from the top rope and before you know it, you've lost your WWF world title to me, the man who's gonna finally put the Hulk in his place once and for all!" Ev devolved into coughing as the attempt at the gravelly voice burned her vocal cords, undercutting her bravado.

"Okay, I think I found it." He said as the door buzzed.

"I'm entering the ring, Hogan!" she said trying one last time to get him to play along. Then she bounded up the stairs three at a time.

When she got to the door he was already opening it but she noticed the photocopy of his character on the door and was suddenly embarrassed. She had forgotten about it. What did he think of my using his character like that? He grinned at her as she came in. The apartment smelled of grilled onions and spicy meat. He hustled ahead of her to the kitchen and began plating the sope's. He brought them out with her only cloth napkin and a pint glass of cantaloupe Agua Fresca with a straw in it.

"I see you found La Candide," she said smiling wide and accepted the plate and glass. He brought out his own, half demolished burrito and a can of Diet Coke from the fridge. They sat down on the couch, half facing one another and ate, grinning like fools. Evelyn took off her hoody and hucked it in the direction of the coat hooks. It missed and flopped on the hallway floor with the broken skateboard. She was wearing a faded 'Cheers' t-shirt underneath.

"How'd you break that board?" He asked.