Nightrise

for a moment. He was still gazing at the ceiling. "I don't see it makes much difference," he said at last. "Wherever we go, it'll only be the same…or worse."
    Jamie took a sip from the Coke bottle. The liquid was warm and flat. It was like drinking syrup. He turned his head and examined his brother, lying there on the bed. Scott had unbuttoned his shirt. It hung loose at the sides, exposing his stomach and chest. The shirts looked good on the stage but they were cheap, black nylon and made Scott and Jamie sweat. Scott's hands were loosely curled by his sides. At that moment he didn't look fourteen. He could have been twenty-four.
    Jamie often had to remind himself that the two of them were exactly the same age. They were twins.
    That much at least was certain. And yet he couldn't help thinking of Scott as his older brother. It wasn't just the physical difference between them. For as long as he could remember, Scott had looked after him. Somehow it had never been the other way around. When Jamie had his nightmares, lying in some run-down hotel or trailer in the middle of nowhere, Scott would be there to comfort him. When he was hungry, Scott would find food. When Don White or his girlfriend, Marcie, turned nasty, Scott would put himself between them and his brother.
    That was how it had always been. Other kids had parents. Other kids went to school and hung out with their friends. They had TVs and computer games and went to summer camp. But Jamie and Scott had never had any of it. It was as if real life went on somewhere else, and they had been dumped outside.
    Sometimes Jamie thought back to life before Uncle Don had come and introduced him and Scott to The Circus of the Mind.
    After all, it hadn't been that long ago. But the days added up into weeks and then months, and now it was as if a single, long road had been smashed through all his other memories and all that was left were shabby theatres and circus tents, hotels, motels, trailers, and camper vans. Hours spent on the dusty highways crisscrossing Nevada, always on the move, often in the middle of the night, chasing the next dollar…wherever it might be.
    He wondered how he had managed to survive the last three years without going mad. But he knew the answer. It was stretched out on the bed in front of him. Scott had been the one constant in his life, his only true friend and protector. They had always been together. They always would be. After all, it was only when the adults had tried to separate them that The Accident had happened, the beginning of this whole bad dream in which they were now trapped. Jamie examined his brother. Scott seemed to have fallen asleep. His bare chest was rising and falling slowly, and there was a sheen of sweat on his skin.
    He thought back to what Scott had told him, that night in the big tent where they were performing —just outside Las Vegas. It had been the end of the first week. The first public showing of the telepathic twins.
    "Don't worry, Jamie. We're going to get though this. Five more years and we'll be sixteen. They can't keep us then. They can't make us do anything we don't want to do."

    "What will we do?"
    "We'll find something. Maybe we'll go to California. We can go to Los Angeles."
    "We could work in TV."
    "No. They'd turn us into freaks." Scott smiled. "Maybe we could set up some sort of business…you and me."
    "At least we'd know what the competition was thinking."
    "That's right." Scott warmed to the subject. "We could be like Bill Gates. Make billions of dollars and then retire. You wait and see. Once we're sixteen, we'll be unstoppable."
    They still had two more years. But Jamie was aware of a growing anxiety. It seemed to him that with every day that passed, the dream was fading. Scott was becoming more silent, more remote. He could lie still for hours at a time, not quite asleep but not awake either. It was as if something was being slowly drained out of him, and Jamie was afraid.
    Scott was the strong one. Scott knew what to do. Jamie could go on performing. He could put up with Uncle Don and the casual brutality of his life. There was just one thing that scared him.
    He knew he couldn't do it on his own.

    ***
    At the far end of the corridor, in a corner office with views in two directions, Don White was sitting behind a desk that he couldn't possibly hope to reach. His stomach was too large. He was. an immensely fat man with flesh that seemed to fold over itself as if searching for somewhere else