A Broken Kind of Life Read Online Free Page A

recruiting because the debate team was important to Juliette, and Juliette was important to Aaron. That night, the topic they pulled from the list was euthanasia. Juliette was on pro and Aaron was left with con. It didn’t matter how they personally felt about the topic; they still needed to put together a concise, effective strategy for debating the issue. Juliette explained to the assembled students that voluntary, active euthanasia was about people deciding how they wanted to live and die. The government should not be able to legislate a person’s free will if they weren’t injuring another party. Denying a person the choice of ending his own pain and suffering was unfair and cruel. These were valid points, and Aaron knew arguing them would not win him any favor. His explanation of the cons of euthanasia was on a different level. By actively taking the life of a person, especially one who is in inexorable pain, one could not know if the consent given was voluntary. A person with substantial wealth could be murdered with no legal recourse. Even assuming the absence of foul play, a mistaken diagnosis could end someone’s life needlessly.
    By the end of the debate, Aaron and Juliette had been furiously hurling facts and arguments at each other with such voracity that other students discussed the possibility of intervening. That’s just how Aaron and Juliette were, passionate and competitive. Friends since grade school, they knew exactly how to push each other’s buttons and what their next line of defense would be; they made a hell of a debate pair.
    The dream skipped around—the walk, the van, the screaming, the pain, the blood.
    Aaron shot bolt upright in bed, the scream caught in his throat. His bedroom was dark, which confused him further, and then he heard the doorbell ring. The men were there . They’d never been caught, and they were there. The men who had hurt him, had killed Juliette, they were there to finish the job. The men would kill his family like they had killed Juliette. Without thinking, without stopping to consider that his attackers would hardly ring the bell, he vaulted out of bed and practically fell down the stairs. The sight at the front door stopped him in his tracks. Intellectually, on some level, he realized it was just Allen and his date, but Allen wore his letterman’s jacket, just like Aaron had been wearing that night. His date wore a sweater and jeans, her auburn hair falling straight down around her delicate face, reminding him of Juliette.
    The flashback hit without any warning.
    Juliette screaming.
    Juliette begging for her mother.
    Juliette begging Aaron to make them stop.
    Juliette covered in blood.
    The man’s breath on the back of his neck.
    The knife slicing his face.
    The blade cutting across his throat.
    “Mom!” Anthony screamed as Aaron fell to his knees on the living room carpet. Their mother, terrified and completely bewildered, knelt next to her eldest son.
    “Mom, don’t let me go! Please, they’ll hurt me, Mom! Please…,” Aaron pleaded, trying to force the images, the memories from his mind.
    Allen’s date, who had no idea what was happening, began to get scared, backing slowly toward the door. Allen looked over at her and then at his brother on the floor. If Aaron had been seeing his brother at all as he knelt on the floor trying to keep from sobbing, he would have seen that Allen’s face, now ruddy and flushed, was livid. Their lives had been so screwed up for so long, and Aaron was ruining the first real sense of normalcy, the first real date Allen had ever had. Aaron knew both Allen and Anthony must catch hell at school for their freak brother, and Allen had finally found a girl to look past that.
    “Shut up, Aaron!” Allen roared, obviously humiliated by his brother’s psychotic meltdown in the middle of the living room.
    His hands were gripped into tight fists at his sides, and despite all the love and respect he surely felt for Aaron, Allen seemed