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When he was thirteen, his mom kicked his brother out of the house. Four years later, as though it were a rite of passage, she kicked him out too. Marcus had been expecting it since the day she'd tossed Brian on the street, dumping his stash after him (keeping some for herself), letting him sit in the rain, stunned and furious. It wasn't raining the day she threw Marcus out. The cops had brought him back the night before, telling her if he got caught again, they wouldn't bring him home. She would have to bail him out. She'd smacked him so many times (once the cops were gone) he couldn't feel his cheek for the rest of the night. In the morning, he woke up to a bruise. But it didn't matter. He'd planned. Brian had a place. It was a shit hole, but it was a shit hole with a roof, and it was a shit hole where no one cared if you passed out at four in the afternoon because you'd overdone it on the meth.
It was good for him, he told himself the first night he spent sleeping on his brother's couch, trying to ignore the unpleasant moaning coming through the paper-thin walls. It was good for him.
"Come with me if you want to live."
Once the coast was clear, Marcus took a moment to examine the kid who'd yanked him out of the line of fire, the kid who had taken out a monstrous creature from some Luddite nightmare single-handed. He couldn’t have even been seventeen. His eyes felt older. At first Marcus thought it was the same kind of look in the addicts who would trudge into his apartment at two in the morning, willing to do anything for a hit, a tired, done-with-this-mess expression, but it didn't take long for him to change his mind. Reese was not done-with-this-mess. He was just getting started. There was a resilience in his face that Marcus envied. He'd never been that strong.
Reese would always bounce back, and he wasn't the sort to let someone like Marcus bring him down. For the first time since his brother had died, Marcus felt safe.
He wasn't surprised when Brian left him passed out on the couch. It was all right. They'd already established that they cared more about the drugs than each other. At least, that's what Brian had told him when he'd found out Marcus had fucked the latest in his string of girlfriends. Marcus couldn't help it that girls like him. He always had drugs, and he hadn't let himself go to seed like Brian had. Marcus was only twenty-three. It was the first time he spent any real amount of time in prison. When he got out his friends learned quickly that he'd developed a temper inside. He couldn't take jokes anymore. Most of them watched him out of the corners of their eyes wherever he moved around the room. But Brian was the only one who could still laugh at him and get away with it. When Brian was around, Marcus was still the baby brother, little Mark who fumbled around girls and cried when you twisted his arm to give him an Indian burn. Brian treated him as he always had, but despite not being surprised when he woke up to the cops wrestling him down to the floor, Brian long gone, Marcus couldn't understand how his brother could care more about the drugs.