Yeah, I have no earthly clue where this came from. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: These still aren't my kids, I'm still just babysitting.

Neither Seen Nor Heard

Fourth grade. It's different from third because the bullies are taller, and the stakes are higher with Sammy down the hall.

Still, I can't help but mess with them. These smug little bastards who don't know how much my family's done for them. The brats who think it's okay to act like idjits, sand in my backpack, gum in Sam's hair.

Third grade, I coulda took the jerks out. But taking out jerks gets you three days suspension and like I said, Sammy's down the hall. I got to be here to watch out for him, 'cause the dweeb won't skip school, he might miss a sight word or something.

Fourth grade we hit up six different schools, with a couple skipped weeks in between on shorter hunts.

School One, I play Jock. I don't wanna brag, but – aw, heck, of course I do. I got the muscles for it. I'm the toughest kid in this dinky class. I tell everybody I was this big football star at my old school, and a few of the girls believe it. I guess I know enough about sports to pull it off, since the TV stays on all night in the motel. I quote the announcers and get humored by the teachers, giggled at by the girls, called on it by the braver boys.

Last day there, I punch out the ones who got it coming.

School Two, I play the Science Geek. And okay, this one is embarrassing. 'Cause I got to ask Sammy how a science geek is supposed to talk and there's something totally humiliating about getting tutored by your Kindergartener brother, but it's worth it when the boys at school believe me when I tell them I whipped up some itching powder in my laboratory and they better watch their butts.

School Three. Dark and Mysterious. I'm good at this one 'cause I watch Dad do it all the time. He slips into this identity and fades into the wall any time he wants to listen and watch without being heard or seen. School Two sucked eggs and the last hunt we went on wasn't no picnic, either. It ended with Dad hurt and Sammy flipping out and me trying to sew everybody back together and it keeps popping into my head at the oddest times, like I'm kicking the ball in gym, or I'm on the swingset, and all of a sudden I got this image in my head of Dad's blood-soaked jacket and Sammy's snotty face all red where he wiped his nose and got Dad's blood on him and even though I've seen this a zillion times in my head, I get sick to my stomach every time and I don't want to talk to anybody, or be seen, or be heard.

So, Dark and Mysterious. I fade into my desk, camoflage myself against the cinderblock wall. Even the teachers don't call on me.

School Four.

School Four is bad. School Four is where Sammy gets hurt, climbing the stupid monkey bars, like a stupid monkey, and dropping down into another kid's arms 'cause they say they'll catch him, and Sammy knows how to add and subtract and even multiply a little and he can spell bigger words than I can and he knows all this random stuff like who the sixteenth president was and where steel mills originated but he doesn't know crap about people, so when the big kids say they'll catch him, he believes them and lets go …

And there is this awful few minutes where I'm flinging elbows into faces trying to get to him, and running off the playground holding him because nobody seems to be doing anything –

And then there's the motel and Dad and a hospital and "Bills we can't pay, Sam, you have to be more careful," and, "Dean, where were you, you're supposed to watch him," and, "What am I going to do with you boys? You've got to learn you can't act like the other kids" and then there's Sammy's big, wet eyes and a terrible silence in the place of where there should been endless questions and bad knock knock jokes and fourteen hundred random facts about the fire ant –

And then I have to kick a bunch of asses, 'cause Dad's one thing, but those kids said they'd catch him and he believed them, because me and Dad always catch him –

And then I get suspended and Sammy actually stays home with me because his arm is in a cast and his heart is broken and he cares more about the second thing than the first.

School Five, I tell them I'm a werewolf.

I mean, who better to act like a werewolf than me, right? I know all about the stupid, ugly things. I know about the full moon and the silver and everything, and I keep throwing out random facts about their sense of smell and the texture of their coat, and when the full moon rolls around, I howl every time the teacher calls on me, and the next thing I know they got this school-shrink in my face and they're talking about special ed.

School Six. I'm Cool Dean. Grinning at the girls. Glaring at the guys. Always with the sunglasses, except when the teacher makes me take them off under threat of lunch detention. And the funny thing is, everybody likes Cool Dean. The guys want to be friends with him and the girls want to hold hands with him and the teachers want to look the other way instead of putting checkmarks next to his name when he talks in class, because, Boys will be boys, and, He's just expressing his unique personality, and I don't even know who they're talking about because I don't know the first thing about Cool Dean, because nobody does, because he doesn't exist, he's just made up, like the names on Dad's credit cards, and I think it's really weird that the Dean everybody likes the most is the one who's barely there.

This is the loneliest fake-Dean yet.

It isn't till after school each day, when I'm walking home with Sam in tow, his arm newly freed from his cast and his curiosity returned but his heart still a little bit broken, that I turn back into just plain ol' Dean. The real Dean. Sam's brother. John's boy. One of Uncle Bobby's two favorite nephews.

"Hey, Sammy," I say, suddenly desperate to talk to somebody who knows me.

But he's not listening. He's on his knees in the gravel, watching ants drag a crumb up an anthill. Which is about how I feel when I watch the other fourth-graders, the ones who don't know there's bad stuff out there besides lunch detention. It's like they got this one tiny piece of the world, this one little hill, and they spend their whole lives building it and they don't even know that some monster or demon or fire could come along and crush it any second. And when something almost crushes it, they don't even want to know who saved it.

"Sammy, " I repeat.

"Shh, Dean," he says. "Be quiet. You'll startle them." Placing his hands protectively around the ant hill, intent on keeping safe a community that will never thank him. Now both our hearts are a little bit broken.

"Nah," I promise, resisting the urge to step, to kick, to destroy. "Don't worry, Sammy. They don't even know we're here."

He looks relieved at this. I can't imagine why. I tug him to his feet and we walk away down the road, careful to leave the little community safe in our wake, clueless of our passing.