One pink, one black.(Short story)

HOLLY MCGRATH WAS fourteen years old the summer that her half brother Jackson began spending all his time in their parents' car. The car was a salmon-colored '78 Monte Carlo with steel gray leather seats that stuck to their thighs like a bandaid. For the most part, it sat roasting in the same spot in the driveway, as perennial as the patches of fringed sagebrush that reached across the yard. Holly and Jackson lived so near their schools, the Lordsburg Library where their mother worked part time, and Smiths' Food & Drug that they rarely found themselves strapped into the back, jostled left and right until the engine sputtered to a stop. But the summer after Jackson's second grade year, he would shuffle out there every weekday morning, kicking up red dust and pebbles and stay there until it was time for dinner. He always held a book or two under his arm, although he never read them, and a bottle of water in his hand their mother made him take, from which he rarely drank. Whenever anyone walked by, they would see him just sitting there, his tennis shoes flush against the back of the driver's seat, barely reaching, his fingers interlaced and resting upon his head, his books stacked neatly upon his lap. Droplets of sweat formed and swelled upon his forehead and upper lip; when they became too heavy, they'd stream down the lines of his face and neck, dampening his T-shirt. Sometimes when Holly was trying to get his attention, she would stand there long enough to notice this, but he never looked up at her until she knocked or called his name.

Holly was finding it difficult to tolerate Jackson's aberrant behavior. The heat, her mother said, played a large role in her short-temperedness. In southwestern New Mexico in mid-July, "tempers'll flare like the high-noon sun," she told her. "Just be patient."

Ellen McGrath wasn't worried about her son's behavior. When she asked him why he was spending so much time in the car, he'd shrugged and mumbled, "Not much else to do." He wasn't hurting himself or anyone else, she reasoned. But to keep him from becoming dehydrated, she insisted on the water bottle and that he keep the windows rolled down, although he'd occasionally disobey her, claiming he'd forgotten. Sometimes, when the temperature crept toward a hundred degrees, she'd tell him to come inside and made sure he'd changed clothes and eaten something before he went back out.

"Don't you think it's strange?" Holly asked her mother. "He just sits there. He's not doing anything."

"Neither are you," she said, motioning toward Holly's limp body sprawled upon the couch. "At least Jackson's gotten out of the house."

Holly rolled her eyes so far up that the backs of her eyes stung.

Most of Lordsburg didn't know that Jackson and Holly were only half siblings. Holly's biological father left shortly after she was born; she had adopted Jackson's father as her own. If their mother didn't reference at least every other month "Holly's rat bastard biological father," she might never know that she and Jackson didn't share a father. The two were as close to identical as a girl and boy six years apart could be. Like their mother's, their skin was as delicate and their pallor as rare in their town as a snowflake. Holly and Jackson were two of several handfuls of white children in their schools; the majority was Hispanic. Their hair and eyes were simple brown, their faces thin. When embarrassed, they both flushed a deep warn pink, the rush of pulsating blood in their faces easily visible through their skin, and their cheeks appeared to swell. They each had a sprinkling of freckles across their shoulders and, they were told by their mother's Avon-lady friend, beautiful long eyelashes. Last year, shortly after they saw a cartoon version of Little Red Riding Hood on cable, Holly began to tease him: "Oh, Jackson! What long eyelashes you have!" And he'd giggle and say, "The better to bat you with!" while running after her, flapping his arms like a rabid bat.