The clothes had to have been too big.

Rango repeated that same sentence in silence, in the form of both an observation, and a plea, dozens of times during the drive home. The pounding of words against his skull made his disguise all the harder to keep. He couldn’t remember what he said to Skunk that so easily convinced him to drive him miles out of the way. Over and over, his head resting on leather torn sometime before he was born, Rango said the same thing.

The clothes were too big.

“Construction?”

Rango looked over. Skunk’s head was straight, eyes focused on the road. Headlights seared against the cover of darkness. Skunk asked the question again, sounding even groggier.

“None,” Rango replied. The clothes flashed in his head. Red, his brother loved the color red when they were kids.

The boom used to startle Rango when he first donned the disguise. Signing up for a night shift, is how he told Alicia. By now, the deep voice had become first nature. During school, Rango needed to work twice as hard to make sure his real voice came through. If there was even a difference anymore.

“It’s too late for the crew working the water main break.”

Skunk nodded. The car came to a red light. It was the type that ensnared drivers in an eternity. He sat back, his thin face threatening to slide in between the holes of his own seat, and turned to Rango.

“Back there. You good?” Skunk’s eyes searched and worked to meet Rango’s.

“Fuck you mean, I’m good?” Before Skunk could answer, Rango gave him some options. “I’m clean. I’m cool.”

The clothes had to have been too big.

A harsh laugh from the driver seemed to summon a green light. Chugging, the car clambered uphill. Rango spied Skunk out from the corner of his eye. Traces of a neck tattoo peeked out from under his shirt.

“We know you’re clean, bozo. It’s a goddamn superpower. Work twice as hard as the rest of us and you make it look easy.” A pause allowed Rango to settle in his seat just a little bit more. Besides, his stop was coming up. The fucking clothes had to have been too big. There’s no way his brother could just be dead and gone. His stop was coming up. Rango needed to keep an eye out of people who could zero in on him.

Skunk turned the wheel. The car wheezed as it rounded another bend.

“Then why ask if I’m cool?”

“Your eyes, man. They looked like they could melt the earth when we pulled up all those bones.”

Rango shook his head. It wasn’t hard to act sick and disgusted at a pair of human remains.

“You know the guy? Cass seemed to.”

Skunk shrugged his shoulders. “All I know is that it was some snitch. But Cass been real uptight about it, ya know? Makes me think shit ain’t over.”

Again, for the umpteenth time since Rango started his night shifts, he prayed shit wasn’t over.

The walk home wasn’t much of a walk. Strained, Rango clutched every fiber in his being to prevent himself from breaking out into a run. Skunk was a vet of the game. He might not have bought the reason for dropping him off so far away from his house.

Red shirts. Torn jeans. Black shoes with the flaps hanging off the ends. Rango tried to picture his brother in all of those types of clothes. But it wasn’t what he wore that made his brother stand out. Or stood out. No, stand, his brother stands out, the present tense was fine because those couldn’t have been his clothes.

It didn’t help that his brother loved the color red.

Red pencils. Red pens. Every journal or notebook he had with song lyrics of art half-baked were protected by a red spine. It was the same color, too, as the shirt tangled up in the trash bag. His memory didn’t contain too many memories or moments of red birthday cakes or scarlet wrapped Christmas presents. Half the time, their dad didn’t know if he’d have a job during the holidays, though.

Rango stood in the room, alone in a house, devoid of life, with hope following out the door. A hand wavered over the plastic bins containing old clothes. But even seeing through, Rango could tell they looked about the same size as the ones Cass disposed of.

A rat’s fur, the man sneered.

His dad wasn’t home. It’d be easy for Rango to let out a scream. Deep in his lungs, vocalizing a rage pent up after a month’s long search was tempting. The dead ends. Long nights out and even longer days spent struggling to stay awake in class. Still, Rango never let the image of his brother escape his mind.

Curled, feeble, crying in the corner of his own room, Rango helped him stand without another word. He was young, but not too young to fail to understand what mess his brother had found. Rango bent down, clothes still caked with mud and reached for one of the red spined notebooks.

Songs about knights, stories about cities that never existed, and daisies, his brother loved rhyming other words with daisy. Rango knew it was late, knew he was well past the time where it was safest to wash off his disguise, but he couldn’t help himself. Page after page, book after book, for a few hours, it felt like his brother was never feeble and crying in the corner of the room.

It felt like how Rango dreamed the last month would end: them and their dad, walking away free from Cass, once and for all.

Daisy and tais-ee, daisy and lazy, daisy and a-mazing, all drummed throughout his head in school the next day. Through history, with facts Rango already knew, the lyrics played in his head. During the media lab session, where Rango already knew how to turn on Excel, the beat sounded against his ears.

Art was the best class of the day while he played with this memory. On a sculpture he had been working on for weeks, he carved “daisy,” as well as a plethora of words that his brother had used for rhymes.

Crazy.

Lazy.

Bae-si.

The last one was iffy.

He wasn’t even sure if his brother would have approved of the impromptu design. It saddened Rango.

The bell rang. For a second, a tangle of blonde hair pushed the lyrics to the back of his mind. Alicia didn’t turn around. Rango knew he should have called her last night. At the very least, a text message would have sufficed.

He hurried toward Alicia. The pair had lunch. Fat chance she’d sit with him. Besides, lunch was a great time for Rango to chase down more leads on his own on the school computers.

Keeping up with Alicia was hard. Books in hands, Rango shoved past the oncoming student body. Harder than normal, the crowd was thicker. Odd, Rango though, since he was taller than nearly everyone.

“Hey! Alicia, wait!” He called out to her as they neared the steps. She turned around, and greeted Rango with half a smile. Twice as much as I deserve, Rango thought. His mouth spread out into something resembling a grimace and he finally caught up with her.

“Sorry about last night.” They were in the middle of a lunch line that smelled like tater tots and mystery meat. The apology came out of one side of his mouth, since he was chewing the other.

“Yeah, you are?” Alicia barely smiled. It wasn’t a joke. Ahead of them awaited more students than Rango would have liked.

He coughed into his hand. “No, I really am.”

“But it doesn’t take long to send a message.”

“Not the one from me.”

This time, Alicia did smirk. A sweaty waft struck Rango’s nostrils. In the silence, he kept thinking of dumb things his brother would want to rhyme about if he was in school. But the lyrics and the songs only then reminded Rango of the grandiose ideals his brother wrote.

“Yeah, just what I thought.”

Rango whipped his head down. That was the problem. He had to whip his head down from the clouds. The line had pushed ahead. Alicia, too, only her back was facing Rango.

“Look, no, I’m really sorry.” He reminded himself to whisper this next part. “I just found out something about my brother.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not. It won’t happen again.”

A sigh. By now, an older man and woman, white smocks drooping from their bodies, splashed red and brown sludge onto their trays.

“No, really, Rango. It’s fine. It doesn’t have to happen again.”

A pair of eyes began to stare. Then another. Rango tapped Alicia on the shoulder. She still wasn’t looking at him, eyes intently on the lunch ladies and men behind the counter.

“Really, I won’t forget again. I just got back really late last night, even for me.” Flashes of men with guns and switchblades played in their head. Some flashes he wouldn’t be able to confide with Alicia.

“You don’t have to message me again.”

The last station was their favorite: dessert. Brownies individually wrapped stacked much higher than any teacher would admit. Alicia usually grabbed two. Rango opened his mouth, insisting that yes, he would message her again, that he would do a better job talking to his girlfriend from now on.

Alicia waved away the sweets.

Rango raised two fingers to a woman with a black apron. “Wait,” he called out. But Alicia walked on through the door. Her back threatened to disappear in the sea of smaller students their age.

Brownies stuffed on his tray, Rango hurried after Alicia. He could only hear the red sludge stirring back and forth on his plate. Alicia turned right, the opposite way from their table. Nearly two steps at a time, he followed, the white floor shining. Someone must have mopped it.

“You forgot your dessert.”

The blonde hair whipped around. “Take the hint!”

Not her hand, but the thick handful of hair smacked Rango in the face. It wasn’t much heavier than a feather. Yet the fact betrayed how he felt. The warm goo from the lunch ladies spread down his chest. Rango didn’t look down. He didn’t hear the tray clatter onto the floor. He definitely didn’t dare turn around and gaze upon the staring eyes, much more than the pair in the lunch line.

The only eyes he noticed were Alicia’s, puffy and red, a dam of tears threatening to stream through.

Rango took this hint and left.

Sitting in the middle of his brother’s room, Rango didn’t feel like crying. Even though school was only just beginning to let out, he had torn through his brother’s books for nearly an hour. Again, he couldn’t find his dad, but again, it made getting ready for the night much easier.

Alicia. According to his brother’s songs, making a woman shed tears could be considered a sin of the highest order. Making a girl cry, Rango thought, might be worse.

The long pants served as an unexpected comfort. The other mobsters hadn’t come close to seeing his true age. When he first fell in with Cass’s gang, the pants felt stiff and the coat hung loose. Now, though, it was the jeans he wore to school that caused his legs to itch a little worse.

He thought about tying in some red to his disguise. Some kind of ode to his brother. But the lyrics he played in his head over and over served an even better purpose. A private concert, just his brother in the middle of the stage, carefully strumming his guitar. He doubted he attempted the intense chords of his idols.

Songs Rango never heard played over in his head told him two things about his brother.

He was the snitch.

He definitely wasn’t dead.

Rango looked down at his watch. He was just in time to meet Skunk. A renewed optimism and an even stronger anger pulsed through his veins.

Before leaving, his hands dangled over his phone. It would take some time before he would ever forget Alicia’s number.

The short message? Unsent.

“You gonna call Cass tonight?” Slam. Rango didn’t wait for Skunk to turn around. He nodded to the shriveled fellow. A small head nodded back.

“Not my turn on patrol, but yeah.”

“You two close?” Rango sat back, careful not to smudge the make-up under his eyes.

“Close enough.”

Rango doubted so. Skunk drove off, exactly the speed limit. Rhymes of heart and stabbed were paced at a faster clip in Rango’s head.

“Tell him his snitch ain’t dead.”

Skunk knew better than to scoff. Rango slumped further down in the seat, teeth clenched. As if the words were magic, the car gained speed.

“Yeah?”

What did he just say? Sometimes, Rango thought Skunk was twice as dumb as advertised. Others, he just knew it was the truth.

“He wasn’t by himself during the fire. He was with a woman.”

Knowing his brother a little better now, Rango bet he aimed to protect that woman with all his life.

Now, Rango did too.