Who would've thought—the very next day, I'd barely walked through the front door.
I pushed open my bedroom door, and what I saw made my blood boil.
"Mrs. Thornton, where should I put this trash?"
Harrison kicked at the medals I'd won since first grade—science fairs, math competitions, all of it. My stamp collection, ten years of careful work, lay scattered across the floor.
"Who told you you could be here? Get out!"
My voice startled him. He pressed his lips together and turned to my mom with that timid look. "Mrs. Thornton. Maybe I should just go back to school? The other students will talk for a few days and then forget about it. If it's really that bad, I can drop out. I was useless to begin with. If I hadn't lost both hands, I wouldn't have—"
Mom came rushing from the kitchen, still wearing her apron, ribs simmering behind her. She lifted the soup ladle and cracked it against the back of my head. Once. Twice. Three times.
"Weren't you talking tough about running away? How do you have the nerve to come back?" She jabbed the ladle toward me. "I'm telling you—because you've caused Harrison all this trouble, he's living in your room now. All your stuff is getting moved out."
I followed her pointing finger. My bedding. The Lego sets I'd spent years carefully assembling. All of it had been dumped in the storage room next to the bathroom.
"Why? This is my home. I'm your son. He's a stranger—what right does he have?"
A burning pain exploded across my left cheek. Dad had slapped me hard enough to make my ears ring.
"Because you were selfish and got Harrison mocked by other students. The school gave us an ultimatum: fix this problem, or your mom and I are both fired."
Blood pooled in my mouth. I clenched my teeth.
"Fine. He stays. I go."
I grabbed what little I had left and moved into a six-person graduate dorm. Desperate to escape my parents' control, I ran around campus begging to switch advisors. But administration told me Harrison and I were tied together—I could only stay in my parents' research group. If I wanted out, I'd have to drop out entirely.
I'd just finished filling out the withdrawal form when I got the call: Grandma Abbott had suffered a heart attack. She was in the hospital.
My parents were always busy when I was young. Grandma was the one who raised me.
At her bedside, she stroked my head with trembling fingers. "It's karma, Marcus. All karma. Promise me—don't fight with your dad and mom anymore, okay? That boy doesn't have hands. It's truly pitiful. Your parents are kind people. That's why they're helping him."
I stiffened, ready to refuse.
Grandma ripped the heart monitor off her chest. Yanked out the IV.
"If you don't agree, I won't live."
Uncle Warren and the aunts surrounded me, crying, pointing, calling me unfilial.
"Fine. Fine. I promise." My voice came out hollow. "But only this once."
From that day on, Harrison and I kept our distance. I ignored my parents' attempts to make nice. He took everything that should have been mine like it was his birthright—my room, my parents, every family gathering.
The day Grandma was discharged, I skipped class to pick her up. When I arrived, she was sitting in a wheelchair, stroking Harrison's forehead. The same way she used to stroke mine.
"This poor child. How could something like that happen?"
Her words made Mom dab at her eyes again and again.
"It was just a coincidence, Mom. Don't worry. Jianguo and I will make it up to him properly."
Make it up to him? Why?
I searched everywhere for answers. Every record I could access. Still nothing explained why my parents treated him like their own flesh and blood.
Unless—had they caused him to lose both arms?
I dug into Harrison's old medical records.
