Paper Trail- Shut it Down
When we moved up the street from my grandparents, my brother and I had rooms in the basement. Mom and Grandpa had put up walls with electricity and they even textured and painted them.
The ceiling was left unfinished, so there were gaps along the top of the wall that separated my room from my brother’s.
It drove me batty for a long time, because he’d stay up much later than me listening to his crappy music too loud and leaving his lights on that illuminated my entire room.
Eventually, I adjusted.
My brother exploited the cracks, and he would send over folded notes requesting services. I can’t honestly remember us communicating about anything else across the wall.
Often the requests were more like demands.
I think I was 13 when Mom found my brother’s stash of notes that I had responded to and sent back, and requests of my own.
She demeaned us.
She belittled us.
She raged at us, and she told us to end it.
Every mistake we ever made was on blast except for this one.
This one nobody could know about.
It felt so lonely. Without sex, my brother hated me. Without sex, I didn’t have another source of dopamine and oxytocin. I felt so isolated.
Burn After Reading
It wasn’t very long before more notes came over the wall, always with an instruction to destroy the note, and a description of what would happen if I didn’t.
Survivor Literacy 
What do you think?