I could write lots and lots of stuff about my brother.
There’s the time that he set some dried grass on fire during a drought.
How about the time he stuck a candy coated chocolate up his nose after returning from trick or treating?
Or maybe the time he found one of my dad’s adult themed magazines and took it on the school bus?
There’s also all kinds of things that are too disturbing to mention. So, I won’t. But feel free to write and tell me which tale you’d like for me to tell.
But nothing gets really interesting until we moved from one state to another - when the family is all back together and then it all falls apart.
My brother was about 10 when we moved from one state to another. We moved because of my father’s job. The plant in our town had been shut down and he was forced to move to another one. It took us about a year and a half to be able to sell the house and join him.
For the first time in our lives we lived in a real neighborhood. We didn’t live SO far out that we couldn’t get cable and there were lots of kids nearby to play with.
So, how does my brother try to make friends the first day that we’re there??? He tells the other boys in the neighborhood that I’m in the shower and they try to climb up on the roof of the garage to see in the bathroom window. Awesome.
Neither my brother nor I wanted to move. We begged not to. And after many years, I wonder how our lives would have been different if we had stayed. Because what happens in the next few years changes so many things about who we are.
You know how when you look back in retrospect you’re always like, “How did I not SEE that when it was right in front of my face?” That’s how I feel about my parent’s marriage. You notice when we first move to the new state that they seem close, but over time things change in such small increments that you don’t notice it at the time. Such is the case of my parent’s marriage.
Right before my senior year of high school they announce that they’re getting divorced. And of course, being a teenager, I can only think about me. It’s not that I didn’t care about what the rest of my family was going through, I was just too busy dealing with my own stuff to even begin to deal with theirs.
At first it sucks. My dad moves out during a weekend that my mom takes us to see family. So, now it’s kind of like before only weirder.
Then it really sucks because my brother starts acting out – a LOT. For example, (and this is my mother’s last straw) one morning I was getting ready for school. We only had one full bathroom and I was curling my hair. My brother needed in to brush his teeth. I told him to come in and I would slide over and continue curling my hair. He came in to brush his teeth and before I know it, he puts toothpaste in my hair. Being a teenage girl, I am EXTREMELY upset and start crying and tell my mother what happened. To which, she starts yelling saying that she can no longer take his attitude/outbursts/etc. Later, after school, my father came to get my brother to take him to live with him in the apartment. How this sucked for me is that I had to go pick him up for school every morning because the apartment was out of district. So, we all kind of got punished here.
My brother gets even worse at school (I had no idea that was even possible). But now instead of just sucking at school he starts skipping class and getting in trouble to the point where he gets suspended and eventually expelled. I’m pretty sure that was not a proud moment for my parents. My brother would never return to high school.
At this point my mom and I have moved out of the house and my father is back in the house. Since my mother has moved me out of district, I can’t ride the bus. I can still attend the same school because of something called “Senior Rights”, but I need to make my own way there. So, I get the little truck that my dad had been driving. Since he was going through some midlife crisis and had bought a sports car, then I got to drive the truck. This was all great and fine until one day when I was leaving school.
My brother was sitting in the truck. I wasn’t planning on driving him anywhere, so I asked what he was doing. He said that I was driving him home. I said no. I told him to go and get on the bus to take him home. He refused, so I told him that I was driving to where I lived and then he could call dad to come and get him because I wasn’t driving him home.
When we got to the apartment I went upstairs to my room. When I came downstairs my brother told me that he had called our dad and told him that I didn’t want to bring him home because I didn’t want to see him. (LIE!) I panicked and went upstairs and called my mother at work. I told her what was happening. While I was on the phone with my mother, my father showed up and took the truck away. I never got the truck back. From then on I had to get rides from people to bring me home every day.
My brother is devious. It’s taken me quite a while to figure out how to deal with him and anticipate his end game.
Please feel free to write in to say which tale you’d like for me to tell next:
How about when he punched my best friend in the jaw and then her jaw locked – minutes before her sister was showing up to take her home?
Trapped me and the neighbor in the half bath downstairs bathroom because he was chasing us around with a belt?
Let someone who was stalking me into the house while I was asleep?
All interesting tales……I’m sure that I’ll get around to all of them eventually.
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