It started on a rainy night on a weekend, like any other. Things were different then; I was a young man of fourteen, cusping on manhood. My older brother was already a year my senior and counting the weeks until he’d best me by two. It was three weeks until he’d be sixteen, and he was more than excited about getting his driver’s license. His plan was to use our parents’ vintage 1970 Ford Maverick to pick up girls, and he’d boasted about it to me more than once.

    “None of your girlfriends are going to pay attention to you now, Kyuhyun. They’ll only want to use you to talk to your cooler older brother!” He teased me, smirking over to where I sat.

My brother was a bit of an .

    “Why are you looking at fourteen year old girls, you ?” I shouted back, making his milky pale skin turn crimson at the revelation.

    “Ugh, god, it was a joke, you weirdo!”

Into his bedroom he flew, like a bird escaping the rain-storm to its nest. He slammed the door behind him, locking out my poisonous truths.

The thunderstorm was getting worse, and worse, and the television gave us a warning we may be under a tornado watch. I could see our mother chewing at her long fingernails in the kitchen. She was nervous. She was always nervous when it came to weather-warnings; she had what she called ‘rain premonitions.’ I called it like I saw it; anxiety and paranoia, but what did I know? I was just a kid. I couldn’t possibly understand how much worse these things could get.

The rain was coming down so hard that we had reports of two inches of water outside already, and travel was not advised. Visibility was impossible on the roads, and traffic was backed up. Some areas nearby were evacuated by the local authorities, but we couldn’t leave—not yet. We had to wait for our fat