“Roderick, stop! Don’t get in that car! Come back here. I'll buy you a new game. No, I'll buy you a hundred new games. Please don't go.”

Sweat trickles down my brow like a waterfall as my little brother turns to face me. His expression is sickly, and his demeanor is tight and angry.

Please don’t do it. Please, no. But he does it anyway. He flips me the bird and slams the door to his mom's rusty beater in my face.

It was I who pushed him to this. It was me and my vicious cruelty that caused him to snap.

Roderick was a good kid, without a shred of hate in his DNA. He liked video games, and Pokémon, and all the innocent things that twelve-year-old boys were supposed to like. He was everything to me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Damn it, why was I such an ass to him?

“Come back!” I flail my arms. They cross back and forth above my head, stirring up an atmosphere of frantic desperation.

His mom’s car ignores my pleas as it speeds down the driveway. Meredith smugly smiles as she turns the corner and peels away, taking Roderick with her. It is too late to save him. He is dead. My little brother is dead.

All I can do is fall to the cold hard pavement and weep. He is gone. Once again, I have failed to save him.

“Don’t worry,” Dad comforts me as I pound my head against the concrete, “he’ll be back on Monday, it’s only a custody weekend. You guys can make up when he comes home.”

I want to laugh at his ignorance. I want to cry at my own weakness. I want to go back in a time machine and take it all back – because I know what happens next. There is only one ending to this story, and it is not a happy one. I look my Dad directly in the eye and break the news to him.

“He’s not coming back,” I grieve, “he’s not ever coming back!”

----

My alarm clock blares a grating tune, jarring me awake from my ever-reoccurring nightmare.

I take a deep breath and roll my covers to the foot of my bed. The linens are dry, as are my smiley-face pajama pants. Thank God!

There is nothing more embarrassing than wetting your bed, especially as a 20-year-old shut-in. The occurrence happens to me with such frequency that my dad has started threatening me with the prospect of having to wear adult diapers. I am such a joke of a human being. It isn't even funny how pathetic I am.

I go to the bathroom and relieve myself the proper way.

I shuffle back into my room and toss on a t-shirt. I haven't done my laundry in weeks. It's just too much of a drag. A bit of a musty smell doesn't really bother me, and I think that my dad and his new fiancé have gotten used to it as well. At least I think they have. Dad hasn't said anything about it for a while.

“Good morning,” Annie, dad’s fiancé, welcomes me into the kitchen.

“Morning,” I groggily croak back. I walk over and plop a series of frozen chocolate chip waffles into our brand-new toaster.

She puts down her tablet and looks up at me. “How did you sleep last night?” She asks.

“Badly, as usual,” I shrug. “Where’s my dad?”

“He left early today.”

Crap.

Whenever dad leaves early for work, that usually only means one thing.

“My screams kept you and dad up again, didn’t they?” I ask but already know the answer. Of course they did. It is written all over her face.

“They might have kept us up a little,” she halfheartedly laughs, “but I’ve gotten used to them.”

No you haven't. Trying to ignore her thinly veiled fib, I pop my waffles out of the toaster and plate them up with whip cream and chocolate syrup. They smell and look divine. The highlight of my morning.

“Here Annie,” I plop a plate of them down in front of her and take my place at the table.

“I look forward to this every day,” she smiles at me, “Derek’s famous ‘sugar rush’ waffles.”

Annie and I are waffle buddies. I know it sounds strange, but if you tried to understand our situation then you wouldn’t be thinking that way right now. My new stepmom and I are kindred spirits. She lost her daughter at a young age, and I lost my brother. Our morning waffle hour is a chance to share those experiences with each other. It is kind of like a therapy session – a very sticky and sugary one.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

I sigh at her question. I don't really want to talk about my meds. I hate how dependent I have become on them.

"I have been taking them, but it doesn’t always seem to do anything. There are times where I still have really bad panic attacks even after taking my pills.”

“I used to have that problem as well,” she tries to reassure me.

“What did you do to deal with it?”

“Well,” she scratches at her chin and looks directly into my eyes, “I confronted my memories head-on. The worst ones too, those are the triggers that you have to come to terms with, or you will never get over your anxiety.”

Confronting my painful memories sounds like a tall order to me. Just thinking about the accident makes my blood tingle. I will never forget the night when the police came to our door and broke the news to us. My dad threw up right on the officer’s shoes, while I – I…oh my God.

“Derek!” As I fall, Annie shoots up from her seat and makes a beeline to the bathroom.

The world spins around me in blurry shades of color as my head flops against the cold floor. An abnormal arrhythmia sputters in my chest. It feels like I may die at any moment. I may literally have a heart attack. I laughed when the police said that my brother was dead. I thought that my own brother's death was funny! Kill me. Kill me, please.

“Hurry,” I see Annie drop to my side, “I brought your pills, hurry up and take them.”

There is a tremor in my hand as I grab the pill bottle and try to shake out my dosage. Capsules fall all over the floor, unwilling to land in my hand. Finally, two of them are within my grasp. Using a bottle of water that Annie hands me, I scarf them down and lie down on the hard kitchen tiles. Annie stays by my side as images of that night flash before my eyes. The police. The crime scene photos. All of it.

“It’s okay,” Annie holds my hand tightly. “You’ll be okay.”

My internal grievances flood out, one after another. “I was a horrible brother to him. I broke his stuff, stole his toys, and tormented him at every opportunity. He hated me. My own little brother hated me, and I don’t blame him for it.”

“Calm down Derek, that’s not who you are. You’re a good kid – a caring kid. Don’t only focus on the negatives, okay?”

I open up my eyes and allow myself to sit up. Annie has a way with words. She has a way of calming me down.

I love that my Dad and Annie are getting married, but she is wrong about me: dead wrong. I am an evil person. I know it, and my brother knew it as well. If he is in heaven, which I am sure he is, then he has certainly warned God about me.

“Did you hit your head when you fell?” Annie asks, her soft and gentle hand steadies my back and gives me strength.

“Almost,” I respond. I had hit it pretty hard against our antique tiled floor, but I am not going to worry her with that information.

“You know,” she tells me, “now might not be the right time to suggest this, but have you ever considered going into Roderick’s room? It might bring you some peace. I know you and your dad have been avoiding it, but maybe it’s time.”

Her crazy idea is liable to cause me another panic attack. I can't go in there. Can I?

I look at Annie’s baby bump and then back up at her concerned gaze. This is the first time that I realize how selfish I am being. I am putting the health of my future stepmom and my baby sister at risk, all because I can’t get over an accident that happened two and a half years prior. Eventually, I need to seek closure. I'm never going to get over my brother's death unless I take some baby steps towards letting him go.

“You know what,” I say, “that’s a good idea. I think I will go to Roderick's room. In fact, I'll go right now, before I talk myself out of it.”

Without skipping a beat, and with experimental anti-anxiety meds coursing through my veins, I walk upstairs and head down the main hallway. I take a deep breath as I walk past my room and continue onwards, all the way to his door. This is going to be painful for me. I know that I have to face my past, but my mind is still trying to get me to back away from this challenge.

A handmade paper sign that says “Roderick S.” greets me as I approach the door. Roderick dotted the “i” in his name with a smiley face and then surrounded his artwork with stickers of his favorite superheroes and anime characters. Just looking at his artwork makes me miss him even more. Is going into his room actually going to help me, or is it only going to make my anxiety worse?

There’s only one way to find out. My heart skips a beat as I grab his creaky glass doorknob and give it a firm turn. With a squeak the door opens, revealing a time capsule from that day.

His presence is noticeable in every corner of the room, from the wall art he had made in his middle school art class, to all of his anime plushies that litter the floor. It feels like he may pop in at any moment and wonder what I am doing staring at his stuff. There is no doubt that he would accuse me of being up to no good if he saw where I was standing. In the old days, I probably would have stolen and trashed his possessions if I had been given access to his room. Now, I feel like a curator in a museum dedicated to his life. Every single item in the room is a treasure to me.

I carefully tiptoe across the room and head towards my brother's gaming consoles. Roderick’s favorite game is still sitting there, broken in two, just the way I left it. My vandalism was the impetus of the horrible night that I constantly relive in my dreams. I feel sick looking at my wicked handicraft.

Back then, I never understood my little brother’s love of video games. Besides Madd Football, video gaming had always seemed like a waste of time and energy to me. Yet, Roderick loved gaming, and he was really good at it too. Just before his death, he had been invited to a couple of amateur gaming tournaments, and he was on track to become a pro gamer one day – if he hadn’t been killed. The amazing thing is that Roderick wasn't a stereotypical video gaming shut-in either, he was also a straight-A student and had lots of friends at school.

My heart feels like it is going to explode. My little brother was so much better than me. Why did he have to die, while a wretched person like me got to keep on living?

My legs start to quake and rattle. It's happening again, I am on the verge of another breakdown.

In my moment of weakness, I stumble backward onto Roderick’s half-made bed. His familiar scent lofts through the air as I collide with his mattress. I'm not sure I can handle this.

I have to get out of this room, I panic.

As I scramble to get off of his bed and out of his room, something crunches under my body. A dreadful fear takes hold of me. Have I cracked another one of Roderick’s games? Was it under his covers?

I throw back the sheets. Fortunately, there is no game disc. All I crushed was a crumpled-up piece of pink paper. I grab the paper in my hand and run out of the room, slamming the door shut behind me. Never again, I tell myself, I will never go in there again.