We moved across the off-white tiles as people crowded around us. But not really crowded. Only in comparison to the quietness of the house did this quaint mall seem bustling. Voices rising in laughter and conversation, blurred together so I didn’t know any of them. I walked along with him. He knew where to go, but I was only vaguely familiar, and feigned greater knowledge. He was kinder here than at home. Or maybe he just cared more.
To the sides of us, the shops changed appearance with each one we passed. A quilt of signs and advertisements and aesthetics, woven together by the halls of creamy white and patterned wallpaper. Patches of blue above, the skylights shining, never showing the clouds somehow. But still shining. He talked more than I did, as we walked. I didn’t follow it all, but some I did. He wanted me to try his skateboard, he started when he was younger than me. He told me there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Maybe I would try it this summer.
A few people waved to us. To him, really. Sometimes he blushed, other times he nodded back. I waved and they smiled. Their piercings looked strange to me, but my mother said not to judge by appearance, even when she did. He bought me lunch. Whatever I wanted, but he told me to pick carefully. Food that was more an idea, a product, a concept. He said we would do this again. I smiled at that.
Time passed.
In the house, the air held a tension, slowly growing. Words unsaid, but whose weight was felt anyways. It seemed, for a time, to be suspended above me. There but not quite reachable. Until soon it pressed on my shoulders too. Rooms which were not glad when the sun filtered past torn-away curtains, and hallways without conversation. Our parents’ whispers, which I did not hear, or chose not to.
His room was more often empty. Artifacts left in place, stuck in a time which had so clearly passed. I wish I had asked him to go to the mall again, but I was afraid. Afraid of the smallest, slimmest chance that he might reject it, reject me. So I never asked, and I never knew.
It was an evening. Wisps of clouds in the dimming sky, with an air that was clear and empty and still. Like the moment of a photograph playing out forever. I wasn’t there when they told mother and father, but they told me. That moment was like a sheet of paper close to tearing, being pulled tight, with nothing behind it. Wishing it was the swirling path of a dream I would leave soon. Father did not cry. Mother did. I only did later, so much later. In my heart, unearthing his empty room, and knowing that was how it would stay.