The first braid he ever gave me looked terrible.
I loved it more than anything.
When puberty arrived, Gus came into my room carrying a drugstore bag filled with pads, deodorant, and mascara. His face was bright red.
“I bought… stuff,” he muttered.
“You watched tutorials, didn’t you?”
He stared at the ceiling. “Those girls talk incredibly fast.”
That was Gus.
We never had much money, but somehow he made sure I never felt poor in the ways that mattered. When children stared at my wheelchair, he made jokes until I stopped feeling embarrassed. When I cried because I would never dance at prom or stand comfortably in a crowded room, he sat beside me and repeated the same sentence.
“You’re not less than anyone else. You hear me? You are not less.”
By my twenties, most of my life happened inside one bedroom, so Gus turned that bedroom into my world. He built shelves within my reach, welded together a tablet stand, and installed a planter beneath my window because I had become obsessed with cooking shows.
