Angelhead by Greg Bottoms

the things he did meant, why my family, including myself, seemed to act as if none of this were real—all the time. But in school I tried to pretend that he wasn’t my brother, that I didn’t even know him.
    I attended a high school, like most public high schools, full of troubled kids: heads, loners, future dropouts. It was impossible to tell who would go off, who would go crazy, who would grow out of it. The kid selling dope now could become a corporate lawyer, a missionary, a cop, or a writer within the decade. The one in the chess club, or the Baptist Choir, might waltz in with a shotgun slung over his hip (that same year, a football player at a neighboring high school went to school with his father’s .30/30 hunting rifle and shot his girlfriend and himself in the entranceway).
    One of my best friends, Sammy, a kid I loved and still have dreams about, was shot in the face and killed at the age of thirteen by a girl whose younger sister he was making out with, or so the story went. (His father, at the wake, squeezed my hand and prayed into my face until I cried and said “please.”) The girl who shot him called herself  “Purple Haze.” She used her father’s pistol, which he kept loaded in a drawer by his bed. She was charged with involuntary manslaughter and given probation. Ray, a kid no one talked to, whose girlfriend of four months had recently broken up with him, hanged himself in a tool shed while his father sat in the house twenty feet away watching TV. Lawrence got drunk and flipped his car onto his best friend, Steve, who had been leaning out the window, throwing beer cans, when the car failed to make the turn. I didn’t go to the funeral because I had the flu. It was a closed casket and his mother lost her mind and cursed God in front of the minister and the large crowd. By thirteen I was obsessed with death and gloom, the seeming randomness of the world.
    My brother, in this context, wasn’t as alarming as he might have been. He was odd, depressed, irritable, and volatile, but who wasn’t?

    But then something snapped inside his head. That seems the only way to describe it: a snap, a breaking, a coming undone. He stopped caring about the gaze of others; it was as if he had lost the ability for pretense, and it was as sudden as a gunshot.
    In the spring of 1986 he stopped trying to mask his delusions, or he suddenly became incapable of doing so, and now he didn’t try to control himself in public. He'd just turned twenty and, like my father had done, was struggling to finish high school. He started carrying his Bible everywhere he went, one in which he had scribbled notes in every margin.
    Ours was a small Southern town—white colonial homes, churches. Community mattered. Everyone was friendly, even if only for appearances’ sake. My mother and father knew the principal, the guidance counselor. These people began to feel sorry for them, concerned, in that administrative way, about Michael’s tenuous—and dwindling—ability to function in the world. They would call my parents for conferences. My parents would often cancel, make up some excuse, their shame over their son having become nearly crippling. My own embarrassment over my brother’s odd religion was at first debilitating, then simply numbing.
    Michael wanted to know the Savior, to memorize the Word. He would actually use this language—Savior, Word, Redemption. God was his only chance. Knowing the Bible was his only way to save himself from what he felt—the anxiety, the voices, the insomnia, his head full of thoughts not even his.
    He became the talk of the town, the bad boy who'd lost his mind, because of the Bible toting and random quoting of scripture. He would stop kids on the street, in the school parking lot, in hallways to remind them of their sins and quote scripture. He was a kind of village idiot, our small, all-white, suburban school’s one truly great