Dreams Left Behind at the Broken Window

Dual male leads | Fake brothers | Younger top | Small-town fiction | Obsessive brother-loving top* That summer after the exam to enter junior high, I met my brother for the first time. He looked completely bewildered as my mom grabbed him by the collar. He was throwing up and yelling. I put down my pen and quietly watched him, soaked through and looking miserable. My mom warned me not to play by the river, explaining that this kid had fallen in and she'd fished him out. That afternoon, a man named Wei Xiangming came over. He thanked my mom and took my brother home. Our families began spending time together often. My brother was older than me, but incredibly childish. He thought I followed him around every day because I admired him, when really I just wanted to see him make a fool of himself. When I started seventh grade, we moved in together. It seemed perfectly natural to me. I didn't even resent my mom for changing my surname. Wei Yanxu had no mom, and I had no dad. Together, we made a whole family. Wasn't that nice? But all of a sudden, Wei Yanxu started pushing me away. He told me to get lost and smashed a hole in my bedroom window. I sat silently at my desk doing homework. When I looked up through the broken window, I saw him crouching in the yard and crying. I didn't know why my mom and Wei Xiangming never got married. In our second year living together, she started going to the hospital often, sometimes by herself and sometimes with Wei Xiangming taking her. Eventually, she was admitted to the hospital for good. It turned out she knew she was sick and didn't want to burden Wei Xiangming. Wei Xiangming was a good man. He got trapped in a mire while trying to earn money, but it was a swamp that devoured people. He went down the wrong path and sank deeper and deeper. I thought my brother had been right to object in the beginning. This family, pieced together from broken parts, had fallen apart completely.