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Glenn didn't have a real last name. The people at the orphanage named him Glenn because the car seat he was left in on their doorstep was Glennco brand; something old, possibly discontinued, a name no one had ever heard of, and it smelled strongly of filth and urine.
Glenn didn't know all of this for a fact; he knew it because Daryl told him and Daryl knew because he broke into the orphanage’s records.
They didn't call it an orphanage but Daryl said that's what it was so it was good enough for Glenn. Daryl was older and so much luckier because he had a brother. Meryl was old enough to remember their last name: Dixon. Glenn didn't like Meryl because he had a mean look in his eye, a sharp glint that reminded him of the switchblades some of the older boys carried in their pockets.
"When Meryl turns eighteen, we're splitting this joint," Daryl hissed, like it was secret.
Glenn, barely ten, gaped, angry and lost, at his older friend. "You're so lucky, Daryl," he seethed.
"Meryl's already got himself a job. Said he's going to get us a house. We're going to escape all of this shit-"
"Daryl!" Glenn flushed at the profanity.
He just grinned, twelve years old and so much wiser and more worldly, spit his toothpick out into the grass, and leaned against the porch stairs with their peeling paint. "Family, man. We're finally going to be a family."
Glenn bit his lip, suddenly feeling empty at the thought of the sleeping alone in that room with all those other boys while Daryl got to go be a family. "Lucky."
Meryl turned eighteen in the fall just before school started. He took off the same day. The women who ran the orphanage, barely in their thirties but already looking so worn, had baked him a cake that was cooling in a window ledge. He didn't even wait for them to cut it before he was in his beat-up truck and leaving skid marks on the pavement.
He only left one thing behind when he sped away: Daryl.
The Dixon brothers were a matched set: wild eyes, rough builds, and dirty mouths. Where Meryl was, you could bet Daryl wouldn't be far behind, absorbing everything his brother did and said and stood for. That's why no good families would take Daryl: he refused to leave Meryl, and Meryl refused to be anything resembling good.
Behind Daryl, you could usually find Glenn: meek, wide-eyed, and runny-nosed. He would pull his too big baseball cap pulled close over his slanted eyes and high cheekbones and his too long-sleeves over his fingers, and cling to Daryl like a shadow.
"Ain't you going to do something about him, Daryl?" the other boys would say, watching Glenn frown murderously when Daryl would laugh.
"He ain't hurting us. I'll keep him around as long as he don't cramp my style. Ain't that right, Chinaman?" Glenn nodded furiously.
A lot of the boys had nightmares about things Glenn knew nothing about: the back side of a slim feminine hand, the overwhelming scent of alcohol on someone’s breath, or the rasp of a zipper pulled down in the middle of the night. Glenn had never had anyone to be scared of, except for the other boys. They had dead eyes. Daryl called him a sissy and an idiot but his eyes would fly open in the middle of the night too, awakened by the sounds of someone else’s worst memories. Glenn asked Daryl once, how come he didn’t have any parents. He only asked once because, no matter what, he never wanted to see Daryl with that same, scared, faraway look.
Daryl held the delusion that Meryl was going to come back for him for years. When he was fifteen, and Glenn thirteen, he still would talk about Meryl setting them up a house. They would sit behind the dilapidated shed, chain-smoking and cussing, and talk about things that they couldn’t dare say in front of any one else.
“He just knew he couldn’t take care of me,” Daryl said, lighting his third butt. “He’ll be back.”
Glenn’s hands shook from the nicotine, the cold night air whipping the smoke upwards into the sky, and didn’t say anything about it having been two years already. “You know they’re going to put us into homes soon, right?”
He couldn’t see much more than the red flare of his cigarette in the night and Daryl’s eyes, back-lit by the moon. The orphanage would push the older kids into foster homes, freeing up space for the bright, white babies that everyone lined up to adopt.
Daryl blew smoke in his face and scoffed, “what’s some fucking middle-aged, fat, foster mom going to do to us?”
“Nothing we can’t dodge.”
“Damn right.”
Glenn’s prediction came true a few weeks later. The matron pulled all of the older boys, the ones who were left after street gangs, drive-by shootings, and juvie, and had them pack their things, a kind smile on her face about how they would all get to go to new schools, make something of themselves, make new friends. Daryl told her she could go fuck herself, the other boys nodding in assent, and Glenn scowled. She glared at them, avoiding Daryl’s eyes, and said, “Make the most of it, boys, because these are the only people I can find to give a damn about you.”
That night, whispering to each other from their twin beds, Glenn confided, “I don’t want to go.”
“And you think I fucking do?” Daryl’s hands clutched at the thin summer blanket that served as his covering all year ‘round, white knuckled in the glow of a night light.
“No, not that,” Glenn sighed, his own hands in tiny fist under his own blanket. “I don’t want to get split up.”
Daryl opened his mouth, then shut it and jumped out of bed. “Put your jeans on, Glenn,” he said, shuffling around the room for his own discarded pants. The other boys watched silently behind half closed eyes as they jimmied opened the window and climbed onto the roof of the orphanage. Daryl pulled out a packet of camels, something cheap and probably stolen, his scuffed up Bic lighter, and lit them both a smoke.
“Did you really,” Daryl mumbled around his cigarette, “stop to put on your baseball cap?”
“It’s cold out here,” Glenn replied, innocent and wide-eyed and Daryl laughed.
“Fuck, you’re a piece of work.”
Glenn smiled, blew his smoke out in the black of the night, said, “Promise me you won’t let them split us up?”
Daryl pinched the lit end of his cigarette, hissing through his teeth at the sensation of burning, and gritted out, “Can’t do that, little man.”
Glenn felt it again, the anger he’d felt when Daryl talked to him in whispers about Meryl and their house and being a family without him. He felt the burn of the smoke in his throat and lungs and bite of frost in the air, all together making him feel like he was on fire. He flicked his cigarette out into the grass, figuring the damp grass would snuff it out for him, and rolled to straddle Daryl’s hips, leaning down to kiss him before he could say anything.
Daryl’s hands stayed thrown out, like he had been planning to catch Glenn, not daring to touch any more than Glenn was already touching him. He arched his neck into it, pushed his tongue against Glenn’s, only breathing when Glenn pulled away. “You going to tell me,” he panted heavily, his breath a fog in the freezing air neither of them could feel, “what the fuck that was?”
“That was a promise,” Glenn said, grinding his hips harder into the bulge of Daryl’s pants.
“Not one I asked for,” he growled, faces close enough to brush with every breath.
“Too fucking bad.” He bit Daryl’s lip, sucked the taste of blood into his own mouth, didn’t care about tomorrow or the day after.
In the morning, white, nondescript vans pulled up out front of the orphanage. They piled all of their things in the back of the same one, even as the adults told them they were going different places. Daryl blew smoke in their faces, laughing, watching as scrawny Glenn punched the driver in the nose for trying to take him backpack from him and ease him into the other car. “He’s a tad wild. Chinks are that way, you know.” Glenn fought free from their grips, the sound of his unbuttoned plaid shirt flying in the cold winter wind snapping as he pulled it back on his shoulders. He rubbed his arm over his nose, felt the warm trickle of blood where he’d come in contact with someone’s elbow, and leaned over to grab his hat from where it’d fallen off in the scuffle. “You done?”
Glenn didn’t turn around to look at him, just got into the van without a word. He didn’t bother to close the door, just waited for Daryl to slide next to him and place a possessive hand on the back of his neck.
“Might as well just let’em,” one of the women said.
“Might do them some good,” the other said.
“Little fuckers,” the driver gasped, holding his own bleeding nose.
“You sure taught them a lesson, little man.”
Glenn just snorted, dried blood flecking his sleeve where it was still held to his face. “I keep my word.”
Even at fourteen, everyone wanted to save Glenn. Daryl thought it had something to do with how young he looked, like the gleam had never rubbed off the new penny so it caught every one's eye. The foster mother took a shine to him, petting his hair when she realized he wouldn’t shy away from her touch like the other boys would. Daryl supposed it could have been worse: they could have gotten someone who beat them, like some of the other kids did. The thing was, he selfishly didn’t want Glenn to smile when she dropped fried eggs on his plate in the morning before she packed them and the seven other foster kids she kept off to school. Well, Daryl would be damned before he stopped Glenn’s chances of getting a real family. He was sixteen, he had a license to drive a car. He would get out of town, find Meryl, and maybe figure it all out somewhere along the way.
He didn’t get far. Shit, he didn’t even make it as far as the driveway, there was Glenn in his stocking feet, the summer sun flashing over his darkened skin. His eyes were dark, his jeans were too big, and his hat was missing, and fuck if it didn’t make Daryl feel guilty. Despite that, he still snapped, “I didn’t make no fucking promise to you. You fucking know that.”
“I do know that,” Glenn smiled sarcastically, “thanks for the update.”
“Bitch,” he said, even as he pushed Glenn back onto the hood on that car, their foster mom’s sensible Toyota, hands under his shirt in a desperate need for bare skin.
“We’re going to get caught,” Glenn panted whenever he could pull away from Daryl’s mouth.
“So what?”
“They’ll split us up,” he said, even as he dug his hands into Daryl’s back.
“Let them fucking try.” He punctuated his words with nips at Glenn’s lips, a hand in his hair to hold him in place. “You’re, like, a ninja. Fucking Asians, man.”
Glenn laughed, pushed Daryl off of him, and wrapped his hand around his wrist. “You know what they say about a ninja, don’t you? They aren’t very good if you can see them.”
Daryl quirked an eyebrow, let Glenn drag him out to the side of the house where no one could see them, and pressed them back against the siding of the house. “I wasn’t going to go nowhere,” he lied, nosing along Glenn’s cheek.
“F-fuck you,” Glenn muttered, hitching his legs higher up on his hips. “You can’t even hot-wire a car anyhow. Where did you think you was going?”
“I don’t know,” Daryl said, flipping open buttons with a practiced flick of his thumb.
Glenn stopped him, a hand to his cheek, and looked at him with his mouth open. Daryl didn’t really want words, though; preferred to hear what he had to say in actions, to tell Glenn everything he wanted to say on his own with the cant of his hips.
Daryl turned eighteen on a Tuesday. They had been moved to three different houses since they’d left the orphanage for good. Each one had been shittier than the last; too many kids and no adults who cared. It didn’t matter what the circumstances were because all foster homes sucked when you didn’t want to be there.
Their foster mom didn't bother to make a cake. The only acknowledgement she made was, "At least if you was still in school, I could collect the check for a few more months.”
Glenn had been gone all day, slipped out of his bed before dawn, hadn’t even stopped to run his hand through Daryl’s hair like he always did. Daryl sat on the couch, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, and tried not to think about that very much.
“I assume you got some place to go?” his foster mom said, settling in beside him on the couch with a beer in her hand. She snapped her fingers for a smoke and he grudgingly shook one out for her.
“And if I don’t?” he said, lighting her cigarette for her as it bobbed in her frosted pink mouth.
“I know you think I’m some dumb bitch-" Daryl snorted, appreciating her no-bullshit attitude for once. “-but one thing I ain’t is stupid.” She popped the tab on her beer, slurped at the foam on the top, before she held it out to him. Daryl took a long drink. “I know about you and Glenn.”
Daryl quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t see you doing nothing about it.”
“Eh,” she sighed, taking the beer back from him. “Ain’t no skin off my nose. Besides, he kept your ass out of jail.”
“That why you keep us around? You liked the peepshow?”
She shrugged her shoulders, sucked deeply from her cigarette. “More like I liked y’all.”
Daryl just rummaged around for the half-pack he had hid in the couch cushions and lit another smoke. He only moved when he ran out, was forced to pack his things in a rucksack, and sat back down as the other boys and girls slammed the door behind them, swearing and demanding food. The sun had sunk lower, red sky and pink clouds, and Daryl hadn’t spoken a word most of the day, just glowered at everyone in his immediate vicinity.
They all heard the roar of an engine and the younger children crowded into the window. “Your boy’s home,” his foster mom said, winking. “Happy birthday.” Daryl was out the door like lightening, tearing through the house and slamming the door behind him, not caring about the sound of shattering glass as her pictures were flung from the wall.
Glenn was leaned back against the driver’s side of a beat-up red Pontiac, baseball cap tipped back so Daryl could see the playful glint in his eyes. “So?”
“What the fuck?”
“Bought it today,” he said smugly.
“With what money?”
Glenn looked suddenly nervous, shy, and ducked his head, hand to the back of his neck. He was still two months away from his sixteenth birthday and Daryl could see it then. “Been saving up. Since I was ten.”
Daryl’s hands itched suddenly and he dug in his pockets for the fix that wasn’t there. Glenn just grabbed him by his wife-beater and pulled him backwards until they bumped into the hot metal of the car. “We can go anywhere you want,” he promised, not letting him kiss the words away because they had to be said.
“Why’d you do this?”
Glenn quirked a smile and said, “You think I’m letting you walk away? I've gotten far too many black eyes over the past six years to let you off without a fight."
Daryl laughed, sudden and too loud, and Glenn had to drag him in for a kiss, swallow all that emotion and keep it for his own. “You’re such a fucking-” He pulled Glenn’s hat down, making his ears stick out comically on the sides of his face.
Glenn smiled. “Yeah,” he sighed. "What a pity I love you."
Daryl's mouth went slack before it curved upwards in a wild grin. "I don't think people will take us for brothers." Glenn didn't say anything, just looked questioningly at Daryl. "Well, it's time you had a real last name."
Glenn kissed him, pressed the keys roughly into his hands. "Where're we going?"
Daryl let his fingers drag across Glenn's face, gentle and private. "I don't know."
They threw themselves apart and jumped in the car, slamming the doors behind them. The engine purred under their feet, a promise of the open road and a lifetime together radiating into their very bones until they were both vibrating with something inexplicable.
"Works for me."