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beer next to the gravestone marked, “Laura May Moore, Beloved Mother.” Then finally answer, “Got shit to do.”
    “Then why the fuck did you call me?”
    I shrug. “Don’t need you anymore. But you can tell Noah all about Two-4-One . Tell him how great you look in front of the camera, and don’t forget to mention how much you made last month. I think he’ll appreciate hearing how lucrative fucking for a living can be.”
    “Max…”
    Walking away, I raise my hand in the air. “It’s been great, Noah. We’ll do this again next month. Mom will be so proud.”
    ***
    When you’re born into the sort of family I was, you’re pretty much fucked before you even realize the meaning of the word. Every time I think of our past, I relive that shit all over again. Dad was a sick piece-of-shit pedo who taught my brother and me the fine arts of fucking at the ripe ole age of seven. Incest kiddie porn put food on our table and paid for our house. I guess people paid a fuck of a lot for illegal shit. Mom was a manic depressive wife driven batshit crazy by her abusive husband. She put thirteen bullets into his head before blowing off her own in front of me and my brother. That’s what’s in our portfolio. The thick folder labeled: Noah and Maddox Moore. People in the foster system learn your story pretty fucking quick when you come with heavy shit like that. Potential foster parents, the good ones anyway, hoping for a good little, parentless kid they can foster and raise to be an upstanding member of society, were always warned about our history. Mine specifically because I’m the troubled twin. They were told about the fights I got into at school. They were told about my supposed disregard for authority. They were told about the frequent run-ins with the law. They were told about my tendency to run away and the time I spent in juvie for repeatedly bashing a kid’s head against the wall at school for calling my brother a fudge packer. They were even warned of my alcohol and drug use and my violent fits of rage. The good ones wisely opted to keep looking, steering clear of me. But not Noah. People generally prefer Noah because Noah is the better twin. He came out of the shit show that was our family relatively unscathed. Noah toes the line while I bulldoze it. He’s the one they chose. The Ridleys. Jan and Alan. They’re an interracial couple who seemed like decent enough people, not the quintessence of suburban living, but they were the closest thing to normal Noah had ever had. Jan’s a lawyer, and Alan is a chef. The best part about them is that they’d genuinely wanted Noah from the beginning. Me? Not so much. They only took me in because Noah begged them.
    I didn’t last a month with the Ridleys before they kicked me out. They caught me fucking their oldest daughter on their bed. Apparently that was a big no-no. That one really pissed Noah off. He accused me of fucking up shit on purpose because I didn’t want anything good to happen to me. That wasn’t it. I genuinely didn’t give a fuck about anything. Except for him. I still don’t. Mom had asked me to look out for him before she put a hole into her head. That’s exactly what I did. Noah was happy. He was loved for the most part, and cared for by these people. He had all the elements to thrive. To become something other than a fucking drain on society. He had so much potential. He had what I didn’t want. A future. And I was the only thing holding him back. I was a reminder of the cesspool we came from. A reminder of the fucked-up things Dad made us do. I was something he didn’t need. So I eliminated myself from his life as much as I could. We saw each other in school—when I bothered to go, and did the monthly cemetery visits to Mom’s grave. But for the most part, I made sure to stay away from him.
    Six months after Noah was fostered just before our sixteenth birthday, I ended up as some afterthought in a piece-of-shit housing project on the other