The little crisps disappeared between my fingers when I rubbed them together. If he were old enough, I would have laughed and said, “It looks like you’re growing blond pubic hair on your head.” But instead, I covered his face with my hands and pulled out the burnt ends. At the time, neither of us had expected his hair to touch the flame, to curl up immediately, to change color, as if he had gotten a badly bleached body-wave. He crouched down on the ground, closed his eyes, and leaned in close. I told him to stand back while I lit the match and touched it to the wick. We set the candle on our living room coffee table. “Stop it Jehhhh-nee,” he said, stepping back, “or I’ll enable my force shield to turn your bones into dirt.”
“Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it,” I said, backing him into a corner with the coffee end of the candle pointed at his mouth. “No,” my brother said, furrowing his eyebrows, turning away. We found one that I liked: white with Columbian coffee beans clustered around the bottom. On one of them, we searched my room for candles-the kind that smell like cinnamon, or mint, or are dressed up pretty with seashells, and are exchanged as Christmas presents between two friends who, in fact, aren’t very good friends at all.
