You're listening to a song you haven't heard in a long time. It's one of those songs that's been so deeply carved into the back of your head that the melody & lyrics are muscle memory. You pat your hand on your leg to the rhythm of the guitar, something you've done on instinct for about five years whenever you couldn't keep yourself still. taptap tap tap tap tap ta-tap tap.
The first time you heard it, you were sitting on the floor in your cool older sister's room. She was on her bed, drawing something she wouldn't let you look at. You said you were bored & she told you to pick whatever book on her shelf & read it, but don't rip it up or anything. You opened up a comic book but the writing was too rough to read and there was no color so you couldn't really make out what was going on in the panels, and you didn't really have enough time to squint and analyze what was going on in there before your sister saw what you had and snatched it from you. She said you should probably be a bit older before you read that one, and you said you were nine and a half and that meant you were basically ten and that meant you were basically a teenager like her, so take that. She said okay well that comic's lame anyways, how about the two of us do something cool together instead. You ever listen to music, kid?
She didn't wait for you to answer the question. Whatever music you thought you'd listened to, it seems, she'd decided what she was about to show you was gonna be your first exposure to real, actual, capital-M Music. She took out her flip phone and unplugged her earbuds (there was a little skull drawn on the outer side of each earbud, you were obsessed with that design) and she turned the volume up and picked a track and sat close to you. She put the player on the floor between the two of you, speaker pointed at you. The song came out all tinny and compressed, but you were little, so the words "sound quality" never even crossed your mind. All you heard was the Music kick in. taptap tap tap tap tap ta-tap tap.
The stuff your parents played in the car usually didn't have guitars that sounded that moody. The singer was saying weird things like "asphyxiated" and "ethane". You couldn't understand all the words. For that matter, the singer's voice was kind of weird and you wanted to ask if that was a boy or a girl singing. You didn't have time to say something, though. You were too busy listening. When the song ended, you said you liked it, and your cool older sister grinned and said you could come to her room and listen to it whenever you wanted. You said okay.
A few nights later, your sister's hair turned green and you asked her what kind of paint she used for that and she took you to her room and showed you her makeup drawer and the box of green hair dye she'd borrowed from her best friend Liz and told you not to tell mom and dad. You asked if the two of you could listen to that song again and she said sure, and when she put it on you looked at the walls of her room and asked her about the posters. You pointed at one poster and asked what's with that skeleton, and she said that was from one of the best movies ever, wanna watch it? but you were creeped out a little by how it seemed to look at you, so you said no thank you. You pointed at a couple more posters and asked about them, too, and you listened to her talk a bit about each of them at the same time that you were listening to the music. As the song ended you pointed at one more picture on her wall, with a picture of someone with a black bob cut and nail polish and lipstick and a ton of eyeshadow. You asked your cool older sister who that girl in the picture was and she laughed a little and told you that was the guy you were just listening to. You blinked as she clicked a button on her phone and played the song from the beginning.
When your sister brought Liz over to return her hair dye, you were there too. Mom and dad were away whenever she brought Liz, so you were always in the room, getting babysat. They mostly ignored you and let you read or play games, but sometimes they'd include you in their conversations and you'd feel your heart beat fast when they treated you like you were one of them. Sometimes they talked about weird things you didn't understand, but other times they showed you cool drawings they made and taught you guitar chords that you never got the hang of. One of your friends from school, Jessie, said that her brother and his friends always made fun of her whenever she was around, so she always hid in her room. Your cool older sister's friends were never mean to you. Your cool older sister never laughed at you.
One day you went to her room and you looked at that photo of that singer boy you thought was a girl and you opened her drawer and found some lipstick. She walked in while you were putting it on and you knew mom and dad would get really mad if they saw you so you started to try to run away, but she stopped you and said she wasn't mad and you could do what you were doing if you wanted to, she wouldn't tell anybody. She didn't really care that you were a boy. You were still scared, though, and you didn't really know how to put on lipstick anyways, so she helped you wash it off, no hard feelings.
That night, she turned on the little TV and VCR she had on the floor in the corner and secretly showed you an R-rated horror movie. It was the first time you saw a naked woman. The sight of her caused your blood to run cold. Her image would end up sticking with you for years longer than any other part of the movie would, but more immediately, you were too busy being scared of blood and violence and sudden loud noises to think too hard about her. You squeezed your eyes shut and hugged your cool older sister tight and she teased you a little but stopped when she saw your face. She hugged you back. She said she was sorry.
You didn't really talk about that movie any of the other times that you hung out, but she showed you a couple other films that you think you liked more and she told you about how the special effects were done, or how this or that scene came together in the writing room. She knew a lot more about movies than you did, not to mention music. She also talked to you about more bands, played you more songs that you liked almost as much as the first one she ever showed you. There was so much that she knew that you had no idea about.
You tried telling Jessie about the movies your sister showed you, how they had blood and death but they weren't all scary, they were interesting and cool, and she said that her mom said that movies with blood in them were bad for kids and the people that liked them were weirdos. You said your mom thought so, too, and then you couldn't come up with anything else that you could say that could make you look good to her. The two of you started looking for rocks in the sandbox and stacking them on top of each other.
One Saturday night you woke up to a faint sound from the living room: your cool older sister talking in a way you never heard her talk before. You heard mom and dad's voices, too. They sounded less like people and more like the dogs you'd sometimes hear barking down the street at midnight. They said a lot of words you didn't know. You heard your name once or twice. You didn't want to be, but you were awake for most of that night. You finally lulled yourself back to sleep after imagining that you could wake up the next morning and ask her to play more music for you.
When you got up Sunday morning your cool older sister wouldn't let you in her room so your dad took you out to play basketball in the park. He called you his son a lot that day, more than you think he'd ever done before. He went easy on you because he knew you didn't play sports a lot. Your heart swelled when you managed to throw the ball through the hoop, but it didn't glow as brightly as it did when you were with your sister and Liz. You didn't think about that because you were too busy listening to your dad proudly teach you how to pass the ball right. You had fun. In the evening, you sat next to your sister's door and eavesdropped as she played guitar. You thought about asking to come in. You sat for a little while longer until you heard mom coming up the stairs, and then you ran away to your room. You slept restlessly that night. In your dream, you heard a door creaking.
On Monday morning, you learned that your cool older sister decided to sleep over at her best friend's last night. That's what mom told you, hesitantly, when you asked where she was during breakfast. You waited for her to come back that night and then the night after that, and then the night after that. Mom and dad pulled you aside one day and told you that your sister had some very bad friends that were convincing her to do some very bad things, and you shouldn't try to be so much like her. They didn't tell you the details, but they did make sure to tell you they were glad, they were proud, that you were a good, normal boy, and nothing would ever change that.
Mom took you to school and you had to focus on math when class started. You bounced your hand on your leg to the rhythm of the song, taptap tap tap tap tap ta-tap tap, the whole time, hopefully quiet enough that nobody would hear. During lunch break, you didn't say anything at all until Jessie asked you what was wrong with you. You told her that you were pretty sure your sister ran away, and she seemed a bit disappointed that that was all that was going on. She said she wished her brother would run away and leave her alone once in a while, and you tried to say no, this is different, but she didn't seem to really care, so you gave up. When you came home, you ate dinner, and your parents didn't say anything more about your sister so you didn't ask. You told mom thank you for the food and you said you had homework so you went to your room.
You hoped you could see her again. You snuck into her room and you looked at her posters. You looked for her face in those posters. Maybe you could find her in that skeleton printed out there, or that singer taped to the wall. You looked around her bookshelf for something to read, but nothing on it caught your interest until you reached up as high as you could and found a diary. Maybe you would find her there. Your heart pounded as you cracked it open.
dad said i could fuck up my own life all i wanted as long as i stop trying to turn his only son into a faggot too
You couldn't understand all the words. You put the diary back on the top shelf. You felt a little dizzy so you decided not to reach that high anymore.
You watched nights without your cool older sister turn into weeks and spent a lot of time sitting in your room. You didn't say a word to anyone your age. Jessie stopped talking to you and started talking to some girls that never included you when you wanted to play with them. You wished you knew where Liz lived. You wanted to talk to people six years older than you. You wanted someone to show you the things you were scared to look for on your own.
After mom and dad fell asleep, you would sneak out of your bedroom and hide in your cool older sister's room until the morning. Nobody walked in there, at least not when anybody was looking. You watched her movies, except for the one with the naked woman, on her TV, the volume at 1%, your body nestled inches away from the screen. You threw a duvet over yourself and the TV so that the sound and the light wouldn't escape. You would read books from her shelves sometimes. You always picked whatever was on or close to the bottom shelf. You wanted to listen to music with her again. You slept on her bed.
You started drawing pictures, mostly copying the stuff you'd seen her sketch. You drew angels with dark wings, and skinny figures dressed in black. You drew dragons and samurai and beautiful girls in frilly dresses. You also drew what you saw on her posters, but you never figured out how to get close to your cool older sister's drawing skills. You imagined her with you, teaching you how to draw as nicely as she did, but you couldn't figure out what to imagine her saying.
She didn't leave her phone or her earbuds behind. You looked through all her drawers over and over again, but you never found them. You guessed it made sense that she'd take them with her. If you were her you'd do the same thing. You still searched, though, more desperately each time.
In one of her drawers, the one she kept pencils and paper in, you found a cigarette tucked all the way in the back. In another one, you saw a pocket knife you didn't remember her buying. You tried to open it, but your nails were too short and your hands were too weak and you didn't want to hurt yourself and get in trouble.
In one of her drawers, where she kept her socks but also her underwear, you found a Playboy magazine. The woman on the cover had long, blonde hair and wasn't wearing anything from the waist up. You could see... You could see... You thought about the horror movie and you quickly put the magazine away and you never looked in there again.
At school, your grades were fine. You were good at math and better at English. You still sat next to Jessie, but you both pretended that the other didn't exist until she and her friends approached you during recess one Wednesday. The whole group of them cornered you and you were almost eager, hoping that maybe they would ask you to join them, be one of them, until Jessie asked you if you liked her. You did like her, but not the way that she meant it, so you didn't know how to answer the question. Instead, you asked her if she liked you. Every one of her friends said EWWWW, almost in unison, and just as suddenly as they'd approached you, they ran away. You wondered if there was a right answer to that question that you didn't know about, or if it was all a trick. You wished you were with your sister and Liz, and then you wondered if they liked each other the way Jessie meant it, and then you decided not to think about it anymore. You stacked rocks on top of each other for the rest of recess.
When mom asked you why you weren't hanging out with Jessie anymore, dad scoffed and said it was because you were becoming a man, obviously, but you didn't smile so he softened his tone and said, well, the reason Jessie wasn't hanging out with you anymore was probably because all the other girls would be jealous if they saw you two together. He called you a little ladies' man and tousled your hair. You didn't agree, and you were pretty sure he didn't mean it, but you smiled anyway.
You were getting better at drawing. You'd put little doodles in the margins of your notebooks of the characters from the comics off of your cool older sister's shelf. You'd gotten the hang of drawing a face turned slightly, but not entirely, to the side. You were slowly but surely mastering the art of drawing cartoon skulls and ninjas with wings. You wouldn't show these drawings to anyone, and you'd often throw them out if you got the impression that someone might possibly see what you drew if you didn't get rid of the evidence as soon as you could. There wasn't anyone that you wanted to see your drawings except for her.
It was a Friday night and mom made spaghetti. Nobody acknowledged the empty seat at the table. Nobody had acknowledged it even once. Your dad asked you if you wanted to watch the game with him, and you said yes please, and you cheered when he cheered, but you didn't really pay any attention to the scores. You did your homework and went to bed in your room until you were sure mom and dad were asleep, and you snuck into your sister's room. You sat on her bed for what felt like half an hour but was probably only half a minute, and then you gently lifted her bedsheets and slid yourself underneath them. You lay still for a while and you think you fell asleep.
You heard the door to her room open while you were sleeping there, or maybe laying there half awake and imagining you were asleep. You lay as still as you could and peered through half-opened eyelids, hoping mom and dad wouldn't force you to your own bed. You saw your cool older sister in the doorway. Her hair was shorter. She quietly opened her drawers and rustled in them. She looked at you and stopped. She whispered, asking you if you were awake.
You stayed quiet.
She kept gathering her things, more quietly this time. She was trying not to make noise, but you could still hear her, so all that effort really did was make her take longer. You didn't mind that at all. She stood still for a moment and walked towards you slowly. She leaned over you and kissed you on your forehead and opened her mouth but then closed it again. She rested her head beside yours for a moment, and you wished that she would stay next to you all night. Then she got up and gently closed the door. You stayed still for a little longer and then you touched the bedsheet where she had put her head. It was cold and wet. You forgot the rest of the night. When you woke up you looked in her drawers. Almost everything was gone. You found her earbuds.
You didn't mention what happened that night to mom or dad. You hid the earbuds close to you whenever you could. You didn't listen to anything with them most of the time, keeping them out of sight, unless your parents were away from home, in which case you used the internet to find the songs she showed you. You could find most of them by just looking up the words in the chorus, but you couldn't figure out what to look up to find the song she showed you first. You wanted to ask her. You wondered why you didn't before.
You kept sneaking into her room every night for a month, but she never appeared in the doorway again.
You made it through elementary school. You made new friends in high school. You moved out for university. You kept drawing. You kept watching movies. You frequented bookstores and music stores. You invited your friends over for meals. You went out on walks. Earlier today, your friend was talking about 90s bands. She mentioned a Placebo song, and as she described it, you realized it was the song your sister first showed you. You tried to hide that that was all you could think about for the rest of the day.
You're listening to it again now, after years and years. You wonder if she still thinks about you. Sometimes you get the feeling that she might be just around the corner whenever you're outside. You wonder if she can feel it when you think about her. You wonder how she's doing.
Her earbuds, old and tinny now, but still miraculously functional, buzz in your ears as the singer from her wall pleads: Come hoooooome. Come hoooooome. Come hoooooome. Come home.