Young Writers Society

Mike Murphy wants Bitter, an Oracle, to help him find his brother. She is reluctant to. To know more, read Chapter 9.

Sam, the manager sent me on break before Colleen. I wasn’t in the mood to eat with the others in the breakroom, so I appropriated a corner table in the lobby. Mike Murphy’s constant badgering had made me lose my appetite. I demolished my burrito trying to get as much as I could past the lump in my throat, washing it down with orange juice, then I nibbled on my fries.

Paper crinkled in the pocket of my sweater. I took out the letter I had found on my doorstep earlier that evening. I opened it.

I’m not very good with words, was written in a choppy handwriting, but I love my brother Kyle. He is awesome. Our dad left when I was a baby, and our mother used to work a lot. Kyle always took care of me. He never gave me a hard time over that. I remember him giving me baths when I was very little and reading me stories. He tried to teach me to play hockey, but I wasn’t any good. He took me to my first Star Wars movie.

He’s my best friend. The saddest I’ve ever been was when Kyle moved to New York. I missed him all the time, even though he called me every day. Then, Mom overdosed on her sleeping pills and Kyle came back. He’s been there ever since. He has Sunday lunch with us every week. He helps Mom with her groceries. He takes care of us.

It's the first time even I’ve gone more than a week without hearing from him. Nobody knows where he is. He hasn’t been to work. His apartment is empty. I’m trying to reassure Mom, but I’m really worried. I know something happened to Kyle. The police say they can’t do anything. He’s an adult, he can just up and leave town if he wants.

Please, I need to know what happened to my brother.

Mike.

I rubbed my earlobe between two fingers. I wasn’t an especially good person, but I wasn’t insensitive to the heartfelt plea. I wondered how different my life would have been if my brother Danny had felt a tenth of Mike’s affection and hero-worship. I did do my best for him, but he wouldn’t accept anything from me.

He couldn’t seem to forgive me for my first Vision – my Vision of Danny and of our grandfather, and of the things Grandpa did to my brother in the boatshed under our grandparents’ seaside villa.

The Second Sight was truth, unveiled, undeniable, unforgettable and unambiguous. I knew. And I was a kid. Kid can’t keep secrets – I couldn’t, anyway. I told my parents. My father was furious, my mother was horrified. She wanted to call the cops. He ordered her not to: it was a lie, it had to be a lie. Please, no, it was his father! She called them anyway. He never forgave her – or Danny and me for that matter.

Saying that my parents’ marriage fell apart would be an understatement. It was violently torn apart, with anger and suspicions on both sides.

Custody of us fell to Mom. She never outright blamed us for anything, but we were constant reminders of the Thing. That’s how we called it, when it had to be mentioned. The Thing, capital “T”. Every time Mom looked at us, she felt it all anew – the shock, the horror, the anger, the guilt, the sense of failure, the shame and the disgust. Naturally, she maintained a distance. After she remarried, I suppose it was instinct to keep us away from her newly-refound happiness.

We sort of faded into the background like the second-class family members we were. Our step-siblings remained virtual strangers. Lucky bastards: Danny was a mess and I was a freak.

To Mom’s credits, she did her nominal best by us. We had a nice house in the Hills, roomy bedrooms, all the clothes, books and pocket-money we needed. And then, there was the private school, the riding lessons.

We were miserable, but not miserable together, of course. We never grew close. Danny always resented the hell out of me. I’m not sure why. Because I had witnessed the way Grandpa had played tiddlywinks with him? Because he was a screwup? Danny applied himself to failing in school, was asocial, a shut-in and started using drugs in middle-school.

“Little Miss OCD,” he used to call me. “Betty Better.”

At some later point, Better became Bitter. I’m not sure when. Not in a high-school. High-school was pretty good for me. I resented Danny for trapping me in this Betty Better persona, but there are worse curses than having an impeccable record. I never flunked a test, I never passed out in public, I never woke up in a stranger’s bed bleeding from all the wrong places. I wasn’t a wild child.

If anything, I was too neat. My OCD tendencies were kicking in. It was my way of letting out some of the pressure. I was suppressing my Second Sight as hard as I could. I felt that I had to, since everybody had apparently forgotten about my Scrying. There is no such thing as a one-off in the Oracle business, sadly. But with the shitstorm of Grandpa’s arrest and trial, my first Trance wasn’t a priority. Then, it became part of the Thing – to be forgotten.

I suppose it was good training. After that first time when I was eleven, I had over a year’s respite before the next crisis. But it did come, and the one after that one. Closer and closer together, until I was eighteen, graduating from high-school and up to one Trance a week. Only obsession and sheer despair allowed me to keep up a front.

Despite resenting Danny and being tired of his shenanigans, I tried to be a good big sister. It only added to the enormous amount of pressure I was under. I could never predict what he would do next. He was a ball of anger, of hate, but, after he first turned to drugs, he became awfully manipulative. If I had let him ride roughshod over both our lives, he would have ruined me.

I think I will always feel that, setting limits, I pushed him away. He checked out on me and disappeared. Nobody else cared, but I did. It hurt so damn much. I was just a kid, I didn’t know how to look for him.

I was so stupid.

I actually tried to Scry.

Didn’t work. Of course. Couldn’t work.

Oracles can’t peek into their own future, can’t Scry about something too personal. If we do, we get what we call a DPP – “Divine Punishment for Peeking”. It’s a sham, unreliable Vision. The more we try, the further away from reality our Visions veer.

I tried to use the Second Sight to find Danny. I soon realized that it was leading me astray. And yet, sometimes, in those first few years, months, I still Scryed for my brother. I knew it wasn’t a true Vision, but it was Seeing him – or a version of him.

Sometimes, Danny was prostituting himself for drugs. Sometimes, he was playing the guitar in clubs with a band of lost souls. Sometimes, he was falling in love. Sometimes, he was dead in a gutter.

I had to stop in the end, to accept that I wouldn’t ever know. But it gnawed at me.

Now that Bitter has reached a decision, see what she is up to in Chapter 11.