The violin boy, the bullies, and the leaf-phobic younger brother

texture · UNDATED (childhood, pre-Subsidized)

• When: UNDATED (Day's boyhood, B.S. era); the leaf-brother memory surfaces as an "emergent sober memory" during his Nov YDAU hospital visits to Gately
• What: Day was "just a boy with a violin and a dream," taking special roundabout routes to school to avoid the boys who seized his violin case and played keep-away with it over his head. He shared a bedroom with a younger, "developmentally challenged" brother — enormous wet loose lips, ant-thick eyeglasses — who had a crippling phobic fear of ordinary tree-leaves; Day (a sober memory he is "sucker-punched" by, telling it to the mute Gately in hospital) used to emotionally torment the brother by threatening to touch him with a leaf. Day holds his cheek and jaw as he talks like cutout photos of Jack Benny.