I\u2019ve never gotten into an argument with my brother. Yes, we\u2019ve fought, but he\u2019s never argued back. I\u2019m always right and he knows better.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s going to hate you when he grows up.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I\u2019d always hear from my grandmother, my parents, everybody, about Anthony. According to everyone, I was mean. So mean in fact, that they were sure that he\u2019d resent me for the rest of his life because of the way I mistreated him growing up.<\/p>\n
Anthony was a good boy. He washed the dishes, swept the floor. Because he wanted to. I was the older sister, I was the only girl and yet he always did the chores around the house. Because of this, everyone thought there was something wrong with me. I thought there was something wrong with him. I mean, Anthony liked to share<\/i> for goodness\u2019 sake.<\/p>\n
I rarely touched a broom, but when I did I would use it to push around his long line of Hot Wheels parked along the hallway. I\u2019d threaten to throw them in the garbage along with the rest of the trash. Occasionally a few went missing. There were many rules he had to follow if he wanted to live in peace. He couldn\u2019t talk to me in front of my friends, he wasn\u2019t allowed to watch the same shows as me and since he liked sharing so much, everything that was his was also mine. He was absolutely not allowed to touch my things.<\/p>\n
Our age gap made it so that we didn\u2019t have much in common. While I watched Lizzie McGuire, he sang along to Thomas the Tank Engine. He was the wittle baby that everyone thought was so kind and giving and wished I was more like. I saw him as the annoying copycat that wanted to do everything like me and yet still the only one they ever believed during domestic disputes. That all changed when sweet-cheeked Matthew dethroned him seven years later and I was, and would always be from then on, the only girl in the family, \u201cLa Reina\u201d as my grandfather called me, solidifying what I\u2019d always known about Anthony\u2019s role of plain old Jan. I was fabulous Marcia Marcia Marcia and that would never change.<\/p>\n
As Anthony entered junior high, all of a sudden I was able to see the effects of being the middle child. He stopped searching for my approval as he found his own inner circle to appreciate him and he stopped caring about what our parents thought, though there wasn\u2019t much concern to begin with at that point. They were too busy reining me away from boys and Matthew was just entering school. Anthony was supposed to be somewhere in the middle, stable, predictable. Instead he was getting reprimanded for disrupting the class with calls ringing every evening about his missing homework assignments.<\/p>\n
I watched him from afar, concerned but not enough. I was 17 and had my own priorities. It was not my responsibility to watch over him. He had my aloof father and half-crazy mother. He\u2019d probably always wanted a normal older brother, but he was unlucky enough to have me.<\/p>\n
I was always so absorbed with my own drama that I never gave him much thought or attention. It wasn\u2019t until I got older that I started appreciating my family more and became curious about who Anthony was. I started seeing myself in him, the same distrust of our parents in his eyes as he eventually realized their incompetence. I saw rigid defiance arise from overconfidence, the meek boy that would hide behind my mother\u2019s leg at parties completely gone. He was me in his pride, his know-it-all attitude and disrespect for authority. And also in the way he treated his younger brother.<\/p>\n
In Matthew I recognized the dejected weight of a young boy\u2019s crouched head as he hoped for recognition from a revered sibling. Because of this, I knew I had to apologize to Anthony about bulling him when we were younger so that he could know what I\u2019d done, and what he was doing, was wrong. He needed to know that I regretted it and I was sorry. After a long talk, he accepted my apology and our relationship changed dramatically. We started talking often, from random things like viral videos and books, to lengthy discussions about the universe. Rather quickly our relationship turned into something we\u2019ve never in a million years could have predicted. All I had to do was ask nicely and Anthony allowed me inside his mind, and for the first time ever, I started sharing back.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s 17 now and I think my brother is\u2014gasp!\u2014cool. He\u2019s tall and lean, fashionable (way more than me, I think) and I\u2019m always asking him for recommendations on music and new artists. I introduce him to different food, even though he makes fun of my vegetarian diet, and he deciphers the new high school lingo for me. He even introduced me to the ridiculous world of fancy photo filters. One day while scrolling through Instagram, I see that he commented on a picture I posted of him. I was surprised because he\u2019d been clear that we weren\u2019t allowed to be linked through social media, but I opened his profile and scrolled through once realizing I had access to his pictures and videos. I looked through his uploads and nearly every photo was a hazy selfie. Almost every picture depicted him with thick gray smoke rising from his mouth and nose, surrounded by people I\u2019ve never met, taken inside dark houses I\u2019ve never been.<\/p>\n
I was partly in denial. I knew of the hookah and the weed, but my throat still throbbed. This guy walked, talked, acted like a stranger. I looked through more and more trying to find someone recognizable, tapping on every clip in the hope of identifying the kid I\u2019ve lived with my entire life. Instead I found someone who doesn\u2019t come home every night, who takes unguarded loose change from dresser counters, someone who is nowhere near graduating high school in time.<\/p>\n
I saw him that morning texting in the living room, the phone that rarely left his hands attached to a long charger wrapping around from the back of the couch. I sat next to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know me?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike if I were to die right now and you were at my funeral, would you know the people that\u2019d be there? Do you think that you\u2019d find any surprises about me?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019d know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCould I say the same thing about you?\u201d<\/p>\n
He stared at the TV. I couldn\u2019t look at him either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t even know you, Anthony. You\u2019re my brother, but I don\u2019t even know you.\u201d<\/p>\n
He shrugged.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I know.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it as if it was dreadfully obvious we were incapable of understanding each other. And it hurt. I understood that what I did know about him was no lie, but it was just what he wanted me to see, what I wanted to see. Now I had become the one looking up, trying my hardest to be seen and recognized by him as someone trustworthy. I wanted to get to know him and I was reaching as far as I could, but maybe it was too late to gain his respect. Maybe he didn\u2019t think I deserved it. After everything, if I were him, I\u2019d probably hate me too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve never gotten into an argument with my brother. Yes, we\u2019ve fought, but he\u2019s never argued back. I\u2019m always right and he knows better. \u201cHe\u2019s going to hate you when he grows up.\u201d That\u2019s what I\u2019d always hear from my grandmother, my parents, everybody, about Anthony. According to everyone, I was mean. So mean in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":701,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions\/701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}