Trip thought to himself about the question Celestia just asked him. He went back in his mind, to when he was asked a very similar question. How did he answer it then? He opened his mouth.
Well, gee, where do I begin?
Well, first off, my parent’s decision to get married was possibly one of the worst they could have made. My mom’s family has all these health problems. Cancer’s the big one, but things like bad eyesight, asthma, all the little stuff is in there, too. My dad’s side, though, is the one with all the mental problems. ADD, alcoholism, autism, you name it. I probably have a relative with it. On my dad’s side, that is.
So, yeah. That was a great combination they had going. And then they had me. Which was another bad idea in itself.
I was always pretty behind. I was the last kid in my class to learn how to read, I almost just didn’t get math. I had two friends, and apparently, that was enough. And none of this was helped by mom, you know, passing.
My dad was definitely hit hardest, I think. Failing child, new baby, dying wife. But thank god he was rich, or else he might have actually had to deal with all of that on his own, and had a complete mental break before it was all over.
My other doctors said I had something like shell shock from being there when she... passed. I don’t remember if she was at the hospital at this point, or if she was at home. It was late. Later than I usually ever stayed up. She said that staying up late was something big boys do. She kept on telling me that she loved me. You know that’s not something that’s going to calm a kid who just barely grasps the concept of death. She kept on saying, I love you, I love your father, and I love Renee. Like, if nothing else stuck, that had to.
Then she stopped talking. I grabbed her hand. I tried to keep talking to her. You know how terrifying it is to feel someone’s hand go cold? I held so tight to her hand that I might have broken her hand, or at least left a bruise. I really think I could have. As if I could keep her there.
But yeah, I got over it after a while. What else can you do? That’s why I don’t think I had PTSD or anything. I mean, yeah, it was heartbreaking and everything, but I was too young to have any kind of permanent scars. I had to move on. I had school to fail.
So there I was, child of the year. And then Renee started coming up, and she was so much better than the original model. She advanced in her classes exactly as quickly as she was supposed to. She even learned how to play flute in third grade. Who learns how to play flute in third grade? In third grade, I was just learning how to eat paste.
But no, I was never jealous of her. I was truly amazed by her. How couldn’t you be, right? I’m there, reading eighth grade level books, and she’s in second grade, reading that same book almost as fast as I am, sometimes even faster! Just... if that’s not something special, what is, you know?
I guess you could say I was protective of her. For the three years we went we were at the same school, I spent every lunch and recess with her. She thought it was cute, or endearing or something, a lot of other people thought it was creepy. I was the Big Brother. That nickname stuck with me for a long time. Big Brother. Sometimes Brother. It was pretty funny when we had to read 1984 for English class. ‘Wait, this book is about Trip?’. Heh. I was the unstoppable force. No boy could get to her, no girl would dare talk about her behind her back. I’m sure I intimidated some teachers even.
But you know what you can’t protect your sister from?
The fact she got it, too, really pissed me off. We looked at the ancestry on my mom’s side, it was supposed to skip every other generation. But it’s like it stumbled over my mom or something and accidentally got some of itself on Ren.
So, there, we had a girl whose condition just never got better, and her dad, who never really got over his wife. Yeah, my dad was just sort of sitting on his grief, not really doing anything about it. And then when the very real possibility of losing his daughter came along, he couldn’t take it anymore. He started ‘taking to the bottle’, as some called it.
Every time we got a letter, or bill, or phone call from the hospital, he’d have to take the news with a beer in his hand. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was always a pretty heavy drinker, but now, he just... he was trying to medicate himself, really. Take three bottles to stop feeling. And it worked. That’s what really pissed me off.
We never got good news about Ren. We always got calls about how her condition was only getting worse, about how the surgery that might have been able to helper was no longer possible due to some growth in that area, or something. And he never got upset about any of it. He would listen to the message on the machine, take a drink, and call some friends over to watch the game. Or cartoons. He loved his fucking- oh, sorry, he loved his cartoons.
But even after a while, his friends started getting creeped out by him. No one didn’t know about Ren at that point, and everyone knew he was just awful at coping. So once his friends stopped coming over, he tried ‘bonding’ with me. Ugh.
Hanging out with him was awful, and part of it was just because of the smell. He always smelled of some sort of alcohol, most often his stupid imported beers. And his constant gas problems didn’t help, either. The whole house, the entire house smelled like him after a while. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted out.
I joined track, cause their meetings usually lasted pretty late, and I learned, if he was alone for long enough, he’d be gone by the time I got home, and be back by the time I went to sleep.
Track was really good for me. I felt like I was getting something done. Running, putting everything behind me was really therapeutic, I think. I was really good, too. I wasn’t too good at long distance, but I could sprint really well.
And visiting hours for the hospital were only about halfway done by the time practice was over. So run, visit Ren, go home. That was my schedule for a good couple of months. But then... ugh. There was one night, I remember so clearly. I almost never forgave him for it.
Well, my dad didn’t always go out. Sometimes he got drunk at home. And one night when he was all but passed out on the couch, we got this really long call from the hospital, basically saying that Ren had a 40% chance of survival. And I looked at him, and I said, my exact words were, ‘Well, what do you think about that, dad?’.
And he looks back at me, and he shrugs, he fucking shrugs it off, and says ‘It’ll be fine.’. How can you even say that? Your kid is dying from a fuck- sorry, sorry. But your kid is dying of a brain tumor and you don’t even act concerned? That’s... there’s just no excuse for that.
I tried staying away from home as much as possible after that. Just seeing him made me angry. My school had wrestling practice starting up right around that time, luckily for me. And wrestling practice started just over an hour and a half after track practice ended. It was so perfect. So then, my schedule became run, see Ren, fight, go home, sleep. There were times where I wouldn’t see my dad’s actual face for weeks on end. It was perfect.
Ren... she kept getting worse. Dad would stop listening to the messages the hospital left for us after a while. That became my job. And then I had to go visit her, right after hearing about how badly her body was treating her. And I had to look at her, smile, and say how healthy she looked. Well, I mean, you can’t just go up to a dying girl and say ‘Hey, you look awful! I wonder how long you have now?’. No, I’m not an asshole. Sorry, sorry.
She even got me watching this show. Something kiddy, about ponies. Whatever, I didn’t care. It was just more time where she was happy and looking at a screen, and not how scared I was for her. I held her hand the entire time she’d watch it. I tried not to hold on too tight, but it just ended up happening after a while. She got bruises after a while. It just sucked, like, everything I did hurt her somehow.
It was right after she started suffering from ‘rapid weight loss’ that they kicked me out of track. I got light headed whenever I ran for too long, and I passed out like twice during a race. And then I got kicked out of wrestling. They said I lost too much weight. ‘I could barely lift a grape, let alone hold someone down’ were coach’s exact words. He was a fan of stupid metaphors.
So I started applying for jobs. I got one at McDonalds, ‘cause it was easy and I could take a late shift. I worked the fryer. They tried putting me on the register, but I was too slow and the job was too stressful for me. No, really. People yelled at me all the time when I was on it, for the whole two days I was on it. It was so stressful my hair started falling out. Seriously. I’d take off the hat and there would be little clumps of hair, just in my hat.
No, but when I was on fryer it happened a lot less.
Hold on, I’m getting to it.
Yeah, it happened when I got laid off because someone was spitting in the fries or something, and management heard one thing about someone finding a hair in their burger, and they thought that someone was ritually pulling their hair and putting it in people’s burgers. Which makes no sense if you think about it, cause that would hurt after a while.
But yeah. After that, I just kinda gave up. I mean, once you get fired from McDonald’s, where do you go from there?
I slept a lot. Not much else I could do. I stayed with Ren longer. I stayed in my room, as far away from my dad as I could. I answered the phone when it rang and had long talks with telemarketers and short talks with doctors.
We got a call from a doctor saying that Ren was scheduled for a really risky surgery. And in he basically said that if it wasn’t successful, she had almost no chance of surviving. Cheery words, right? Well, dad... I expected dad to have some sort of reaction. You know, ‘I may be a drunk f- sorry, but even I know this is bad.’ But not even that. I told him, I was almost in tears at this point, and he said, you know what he said? He said ‘It’ll probably be fine.’ Who says that? Who says that about their daughter dying?
It just pissed me off to no end. Like, I just felt as if nothing could get to him. Like, he had to know how I felt. I was losing the most important person in my life a second time, and he could have probably said something similar, but he was feeling nowhere the amount of hurt that I was. It just wasn’t fair.
So I tried to make him feel it. It was really stupid, I know, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. I never was.
I waited 'til he was definitely asleep. Or when I thought he was. I ran the bath 'til it was almost full, got in, a lot of the water came out, but you know, I didn’t care at that point. I wasn’t gonna have to clean it up.
No, my dad lets his beard grow and I’m baby faced. So I had to get a knife from the kitchen. I just... applied pressure, closed my eyes, and tried to go to sleep. I blacked out, and I had the most peaceful sleep I had had in months at that point. But of course, heh, nothing really works out how I want it to, anyway.
I woke up in an ambulance, to doctors applying pressure to my arms, with a mask on. I was wearing the mask. Yeah. My first thought was, ‘I wonder if I’ll be put in the same room as Ren?’. But they don’t put ER injury patients and long term cancer patients in the same wing even, I don’t think.
Then I had to go through a lot of therapy. Most of it group therapy. You meet some of the most terrifying kids in Suicidal Teen Group Therapy. And no one talks in those sessions, either. Actually, either you talk non stop, or you don’t talk, cause you think you have nothing important to say. I really didn’t have anything important to say, though. I didn’t have problems like the rest of these kids, I was just angry at my dad.
Yeah, I guess.
But I think the individual therapy sessions actually did really help. I had two main ones, a Dr. Miner, or Valerie, as she let her patients call her. She’s the one that figured out I have bipolar personality disorder. and a Dr. Grant, who I had for maybe two sessions, but supplied me with most of the medication I started on.
Currently, I’m on this new experimental stuff, I only have to take it every two to three days. And it works just fine for me. I’m pretty mellowed out most of the time.
Oh, yeah. I was in there for... five days, I wanna say? But when I got out, the first thing that I did was visit Renee. She was still alive, I knew that much.
Yeah, amazingly. The first thing ever to go right with her. After that, her recovery felt like nothing. She was home before the end of the year, in time for a late Christmas, where amazingly, dad wasn’t drowning himself with egg nog or Christmas Ale. His Christmas present to us was joining AA.
Then he talked to me in private about how he was the one that called the ambulance. Apparently, he never actually slept when he got drunk. Well, no, he’d sleep, but he had insomnia or something. He just stayed up drunk in his bed. He heard the water running and then noticed I left the knife drawer open. He busted the door down and called the ambulance. He also told me that Renee didn’t know about it and that she didn’t have to if I didn’t want her to.
No, I never did. Why ruin something good? No need to make her worry about things that didn’t matter.
Well, maybe when she gets older. I just- oh, no, I didn’t even notice. We can pick up here around next time? Yeah, my dad will handle the check.
No, I got my license last week! It makes everything so much easier. Yeah. Alright. Well, I’ll see you next week.
Trip cleared his thoughts and closed his mouth before any noise could come out. He looked up at the Princess. “Not really.” he said. “My life’s pretty run of the mill.”
We just met, no need to spill my life story right now. He thought.
She looked surprised at this. “Are you sure? You seemed like you were about to say something.”
“No, I was just... remembering. Trying to see if there was anything particularly painful or anything. Couldn’t really think of anything out of the ordinary.”
“Hmm.” she thought for a moment. “Well, the voice did say there were a number of ways, and that pain was just one of the most surefire ways.”
“Yeah. I guess I’m just unlucky.”
“Well, until we figure out the reason for you being here, you’re welcome to stay as guests in the Royal Castle. We’ve already prepared a room for you two.”
“Wait,” said Trip, hastily. “‘Til we figure out the reason? Why is that important?”
“Oh!” she gasped. “I almost forgot to tell you the most important part! Recognizing the pain of banishing Luna was what allowed me to wake up back in the streets of Canterlot.”
“What? You mean, you needed some sort of... ultimatum?”
“Yes,” she smiled. “I suppose you could call it that.”
Trip lowered his head. “Oh.”
“We’ll work on it tomorrow. Right now, you both must be very tired. I’ll have one of the guards show you to the room prepared for you.”
Trip laughed slightly. “Separate beds, right?” he said, jokingly.
The Princess stared back at them blankly. “Um, yes...” she said, long and drawn out. The door opened behind them. Trip and Rose looked back, and saw a guard, sticking his head through the crack in the door, nodding. “Yes,” continued the Princess. “You will definitely be sleeping in two separate beds tonight. We have planned that out accordingly, and ahead of time.”
Trip rolled his eyes.