Being Gemini Brooks

By DL Edison

Teenage Angst Has Never Been So Good.

Christopher Brooks is fifteen-years-old and he's looking for his identity. He's torn. His struggle is between the poetry and art he loves and "being practical." He's a true Gemini. He lives with his gorgeous, manic depressive mother, Lauren Brooks, who likes to move nearly as often as her mood changes. And he naively admires her Adderall eating, raging alcoholic cop boyfriend, The Razor.

After his latest move to a new neighborhood, Chris meets the endearing and gregarious (and white lie teller), Holly Gunn. Holly quenches Chris' dry, mid-summer thirst for friendship when they start skateboarding, hanging out at the local mini-mart, rockin' out and reading at the library together.

Holly helps Chris plot a vision quest to Downtown Seattle so he can get to see his crush, the effervescent and goofy smile inducing, fourteen-year-old, Lilly Rider, and her brother, his best friend Lee Rider. They all love to rock and their favorite band, Thunder Crunch Church, is playing at The Paramount Theater. Chris knows he has to walk on icy eggshells to be able to go to the show, because manic Lauren is rapidly approaching a bi-polar peak that will soon give way to murderously angry, obsidian depression. And when Lauren is depressed, nobody gets to have fun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DL Edison
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463399590

DL Edison

America’s Best, Least Known AuthorD.L Edison

Book preview

Chapter One

Are you serious Lauren, we’re moving again, really." Christopher Brooks fumed.  He was just short of shouting at his mother and the hard glare she gave him let him know so.  He was thoroughly vexed and far less than approving of the idea of moving.  He backed his volume down but held a displeased look on his handsome young face.

His usual bright, engaging blue eyes darkened by the foreboding mental cloud that formed at the thought of moving into another new house.  Moving again would mean: new friends, new classmates, a new neighborhood to navigate.  It would mean a big pain in the ass is headed Christopher Brooks’ way.  Again.

Lauren was finishing a phone call when Chris walked in and overheard the last bit of it.

Moving sucks Lauren, and damn it I’m still unpacking boxes from our last move. he said pouting so much he could’ve tripped over his bottom lip.

Chris had this same conversation with his mother, Lauren, more than a few times before.  He’s fifteen-years-old and in those fifteen years, he’s lived with Lauren almost three years —total.

Of the near three years he lived with her, the first eighteen months don’t count because little Chris Brooks was a newborn baby.  He was a babbling wet noodle with no memory of his first year and a half, for all he knew he could have been raised by a maternal baboon with a penchant for human offspring.

Fast forward a dozen years when Chris was reunited with his mother, a year and a half ago, and all three years were accounted for in the saga.

The twelve years of Chris’s life, between his first and thirteenth, were bliss.  Absolute nirvana.  From the time he was a one-year-old baby, he was raised by and lived with his maternal Grandmother, Amelia Brooks.

In the years he lived with his Grandmother, he stayed in the same house, on the same block, only went to one elementary school, and just one middle-school.

The kids in his neighborhood went to the same school as he did, they were the same kids that he hung out with after school and during summer breaks.

The years he spent with his Grandmother were consistent, steady, filled with love and security, zero drama.

The last twenty months spent living with his mother Lauren were, to say the very least, exceptionally erratic and unstable, and blasphemously dysfunctional.

In the past two years, Chris Brooks has been enrolled in three different school districts and attended four different schools.

For nearly two years his heads been spinning like a dreidel trying to remember teacher’s names, classmate’s names, hell, the name of the school he was enrolled in escaped him more than once in the past couple of years.

He left his closest friends when Lauren decided she wanted him back in her life and moved him from the North end of Seattle, all the way down to Renton.  Renton was as far South of Seattle Metro as you could get and still be in Seattle Metro.

While living with his Grandmother and growing up in Edmonds, Washington, Chris’s life was idyllic.  He knew: every short-cut in town, every killer house to hit on Halloween, the good ones that gave out full size candy bars.  And he knew every mean dog in his neighborhood which to keep a distance from.

When he first moved with Lauren to Renton he got lost and had no idea of his address.  Positively demoralized, he found his way back to school to ask the school receptionist for his address.

He walked in with his head hanging low, he was embarrassed because he couldn’t remember his new address and felt like a jerk because he didn’t write it down.

He looked up expecting to find Mrs. L.B. Mellman, the school secretary, in her place were the two best looking girls in his new school who, after a good ribbing of: are you lost little boy? and what’s the matter, can’t find your mommy, the girls gave him his address.

The barbs the girls slurred weren’t comic genius, just salty enough to cause Chris to walk out hanging his head even lower.

After years of playing and loving soccer, he barely kicked a ball since he’s been reconnected with his bio-mom.  He never calls her mom.  He calls his mother by her name, Lauren, sometimes Laurie.  What he calls her is always up to her because her mood swings dictate her name.  Lauren Brooks was diagnosed as Bipolar, manic-depressive when she was twenty-two years old.

She refused to take any medication that would help her control her mood, because, as she put it; I don’t wanna minimize my creative genius!

When Lauren Brooks is in a manic upswing and the world is perfectly correct, she likes to go by the name Laurie.  When she’s depressed, low in spirit and venomously mean, it’s Lauren, it’s always Lauren when she’s mad at the world and depressed.  The time in-between his mother’s mood swings, if he was unsure, Chris stuck to using Lauren.  Chris played things safe.

Laurie can be fun to be around from time to time but Lauren — when depressed— can be an unholy, petulant bitch. 

One particularly memorable event that occurred when she was in a manic upswing, happened when little Christopher was in the third grade.  He had been eating white arts and crafts glue since kindergarten.

It wasn’t unusual for little kindergarteners to eat glue, it was unusual to keep up the habit well into third grade.  Laurie, while in a rampant manic state, got the news from her mother that Chris was a habitual glue eater and it had become a tremendous problem for the school because he was eating so much glue, third-grade art projects weren’t getting completed.

And parents of other students were causing a fuss because their refrigerators were bare of any and all third grader construction paper art.  Think of all the denied works of genius.

Grandmother Amelia had a conference with Chris’s third-grade teacher and it was there she received the distressing news of Chris’s rapacious, sticky paste mastication.  Greatly distressed, she passed the news on to Lauren, who would occasionally take her call.

"Are you serious mom, my little Chris is really eating so much glue that it’s become such a problem that they called you in to talk?"  Lauren grilled her mother with excitement rather than concern in her voice.

 Yes honey, I’m quite worried about him.  His teacher told me when a child continually engages the same negative behavior, like eating glue, it could be a sign of emotional distress in the youngster, Amelia said with deepening concern.

Oh mom, I’m sure he’s fine, just quirky, I actually find it kind of endearing, Lauren said whimsically.  Self-serving, greedy slot machine reels started spinning in her head.

"I wonder if I can get him on that television show, Unnatural Obsessions and Addictions, you know that show don’t you mom?  It’s about all these weird people and the strange things they do, like eat plasterboard and sniff gasoline.  I bet we can get Chris on that show and get some money. Whadda ya think?" She said, absent of any concern for her boy.

We’ll do no such thing, her mother Amelia commanded sternly.

Grandmother Amelia was a strong woman.  She had an indomitable spirit and let it shine out from her soul.  It shone through her Michelangelo-esque perfectly sculpted, high, light brown cheek-bones. 

Spirit jettisoned from her hypnotic, welcoming green eyes.  She was a beautiful woman inside and out.  She was not a woman that welcomed charity or relied on un-earned money.

She sufficiently spoiled her children and worked hard to earn money to do so.

She had a background story that would easily have allowed her to receive welfare money from the government because she raised her son and daughter by herself after her husband died young.

She was a picturesque vision of motherly love in motion.  She walked the walk and left it at that.  She saw her share of heartache in her lifetime, but doggedly, she persevered through life with grace

Grandmother Amelia’s life had not been easy.  Physical and deep emotional loss, barbaric psychological mistreatment, physical abuse and inhumane racially motivated assaults were all familiar bed fellows for her and she’d not let herself forget but she didn’t dwell either.  She persevered, grew and excelled after every traumatic and demoralizing event in her life.

Grandma Amelia was a survivor, she had immense presence of self-confidence that would intimidated most men.  She was her own best advocate for emotional support and she encouraged Chris to do the same.

She knew herself well and knew how to pick herself up by the boot straps.  She vehemently instilled this wonderful trait in her grandson.

Amelia was a skilled survivor too, she was steadfast in her ability to quickly assess people and trouble, and strategize a successful, speedy exit.

For the twelve years she raised him, Chris was the epicenter of her life, the primary source of all shining stars in her galaxy.

She decisively knew her daughter as well as her manic-depressive illness, and knew Lauren’s interest in her young son’s glue habit would quickly wain as her mania gave way to depression.

After dozens of phone calls from Lauren over a week and a half, her interest in finding fame and fortune through Chris slowed until it stopped completely.  Ultimately, Grandmother Amelia took Chris to a child psychologist who helped the boy resolve the abandonment and insecurity issues he carried within him.

His fears were deep and vastly cavernous, but after much work with the counselor on his part, and tremendous support from Amelia, the little guy got the glue monkey off his back.

It seemed he had much distress from not having his dad or any male role model at all in his life.  By the beginning of fourth grade little Chris was clean and sober, off glue for months.

If Lauren had it her way, Chris Brooks would still be eating glue and would have gone on to be the latest pre-pubescent, fifteen minutes of fame, reality TV star freak.  And she would have road his coat-tails all the way to the bank.  But even riding coat tails took too much time and energy for Lauren.  She was impossibly impatient.

***

Doesn’t Whidbey Island sound wonderful Chris? You could go fishing. Lauren cooed with no interest at all in his reply.

"No, no it doesn’t sound wonderful at all, we just

moved.  I don’t even know the name of the school district out there, and I don’t fish," Chris sharply snapped, squinting his eyes and shaking his head in disgust as he left the room.

He walked down the short hallway to his bedroom, his sole retreat from all things Lauren Brooks.

***

Marcus, Uncle Marcus, is Lauren’s older brother and he was a perpetual watchdog over her.  Lauren was born when he was nine years old, and