I don’t quite know where to start with my older brother. He was always the best, my role model, my hero. I had other siblings, of course, quite a few, seeing as my family is rather large, but he always stood out. He was that kind of individual. You know…the individual kind.
He rather liked me, as well. He had other younger brothers, but he chose me to be his first mate. He would pull me over to a crowd of his friends, his right arm around my shoulder, poke me in the chest, and he would say, “This is him, guys! This is my li’il bro!” It made me feel so proud.
We would go outside when it rained and sit under the huge willow tree, despite the fact that it got sort of muddy under there, and we would talk. He was very smart, my brother—the doctor said he had an IQ over 200. We usually wouldn’t talk about very intelligent things like politics and mathematics and science, though. All we really talked about was girls.
He loved to talk about girls. They were his favorite things to discuss. He told me he liked discussing them with me, especially, because I really seemed to understand them. All the other boys my age thought I was effeminate because of that, but not my brother; he said I would be the first to get a girlfriend out of all of them. Hell, he’d said, I might even have more than one. Maybe that’s what made him stand out, what made him better than the rest, even in my own family.
When I was ten and he was sixteen, I noticed his presence becoming increasingly scarce. My mother told me it was because he had a car, and when you first got a car, you wanted to take it anywhere and everywhere. Yes, I had agreed, but why wouldn’t he take me?
She said something about girls and went back to cooking.
I sort of hated girls at that moment. It was kind of understandable, seeing as I was only ten, but the phrase is a little harsh.
One day, as the warm summer rains subsided and the clouds gave way to the blinding sun, I was playing outside when I noticed a huge bullfrog hopping about. It’d tried to get away, but my brother had taught me too well how to catch them, and I triumphantly held the wriggling frog in my hands within the half hour. My brother, of course, would have caught it faster.
My first impulse was to show my brother, but he had told me he was going out with his girlfriend and to protect mom and dad and all of our siblings from “the bad guys” while he was gone. Of course I would. It was my honor and obligation as his first mate.
My second impulse was to show my mother, but she abhorred things like that, so I decided against that idea. I chose to go to my father, but then I remembered he was on a business trip. I went down my list of siblings. None of my sisters would want to see the horrible thing, and my younger brothers were too immature to truly respect the feat I had accomplished all by myself, without any help from my brother and his dumb car.
So I sat under the large, twisted willow tree and waited for my brother to come home.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited still. I sat under the willow, the huge bullfrog wriggling and wriggling before it finally gave in and died in my hands. I guessed that it was sick. My brother had told me that if you touch a reptile too long, the oils in your skin will kill the thing, so it was best to let it go quickly and have a normal life and meet girls.
Reptile girls, of course.
Finally, as the sun was setting in the sky, my oldest sister poked her head out of the screen door on our back porch and yelled that it was time for dinner. I told her that I was waiting for my brother, and that I refused to have a meal without him. After all, what if he hadn’t eaten anything all day? I wasn’t about to let him eat alone, of course—he was my brother. She sighed and told me that I wouldn’t be eating later. I accepted that and watched her head withdraw from the quickly chilling air.
Yet again, I was alone in the rapidly growing darkness, with only a stiff, dead bullfrog for company. I began to very carefully set out a speech for when he returned. I wouldn’t give him a shred of mercy. I was very upset.
Finally, at what I can only guess was eleven o’clock, my brother pulled up in his beaten-up, faded red car. I completely forgot about how long I’d been sitting in the cold, damp mud. I forgot about my anger, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my carefully set out speech. All I wanted to do was show him the bullfrog. I wanted for him to mess up my hair and give me his crooked-toothed grin and say, “Nice work, tiger.” I wanted him to be proud of me.
I eagerly made my way up the soft, slippery hill, shouting my brother’s name over and over, all while waving the dead bullfrog proudly. Maybe I’d lie and tell him that it threatened our family. No. I wouldn’t do that. He was my brother. I wasn’t about to lie to him.
As I drew closer to him, I noticed more details about his appearance. He was leaned against the car, his hand to his forehead, and his dark brown hair was mussed, as if he hadn’t brushed it for a while. I thought that was terribly disappointing, considering the amount of time he’d wasted in the bathroom trying to make it look nice for his girlfriend. He was holding something in his hand. I couldn’t quite see it, considering how dark it was.
Finally, I was within a foot of him. He looked at me with tired, sad eyes. I had never seen him like this. He always looked so proud, and so confidant, like he knew that no one could take him down; even if they wanted to, they’d have to get through me, anyway. He’d made that clear, saying that if he had a bodyguard like me, he was set for life. I wondered what had made him gone from so strong a man to the shadow that stood before me now. I looked at the object in his hand. It was an empty bottle. When I pointed to it and asked where he had gotten it, he just shook his head. He told me not to tell mom or dad. He made me promise, to swear on my first lost tooth, the one I kept in a box under my clothes in my top drawer because I was convinced it had magical powers that would someday help me. I swore and asked no further questions. He smiled finally, the crooked-toothed smile I had been waiting for, and said, “So, what’cha got there?”
This scenario happened every Friday. I always asked for whatever was left in the bottle, but my brother refused. Sometimes he told me it was Windex and would kill me. Other times he said it was rat poison, and still other times he would name a poisonous substance I’d never heard of. He always told me it would kill me, and he didn’t want me dead; I was his favorite little brother. What I didn’t understand, however, was why he’d chosen to protect my life but was destroying his own.
One day, I woke up to the sound of my mother and father shouting simultaneously. This didn’t bother me; my younger brothers and sisters were constantly getting into things they shouldn’t. However, this type of “trouble shouting” sounded significantly different from the kind of shouting I heard when someone broke something or ate something before dinner.
I walked downstairs, rubbing my eyes and yawning, demanding to know what the big issue was. They only ignored me. I stuck my head into the living room. My older brother was there, slumped in the large, red armchair that my youngest sister sprayed with bleach by accident a few weeks earlier. My parents stood over him, my father with his arms crossed on his chest, my mother gesturing frantically, but they were both screaming and shouting at him.  My brother slumped lower in the chair and mumbled his response, but obviously it wasn’t a good enough answer to whatever their question was, because they kept yelling and yelling. My mother wanted to know why he would do that to himself. My father was just completely incredulous, and he said so repeatedly. They were both thoroughly furious. Finally, my brother stood and shouted that maybe he didn’t have to live here, maybe he could go out on his own, because he knew that they’d miss him. My father shouted that he wouldn’t last a second. At that point, my mother burst into tears, and I ran upstairs.
A few days passed, and the tense atmosphere in our house thickened like a fog. It seemed to clog people’s thoughts and actions. More and more my older brother was missing, and more and more he returned with the same funny smell about him, clutching the same brown, translucent bottle, with the same tired, defeated look in his once-proud eyes. This went on for about a month.
Finally, I worked up the courage to ask my older sister what was going on. I wanted to know what had happened to my brother, and why everyone was acting this way. It was scary.
She just looked at me with those sad, brown eyes that mirrored my brother’s after he came home in his beaten-up red car. She told me that it was sort of hard to understand, and to keep me quiet, she added that even she didn’t understand, even though I knew she did. Since I could get no answer from her, I decided to confront my brother himself.
He was in his room staring at the ceiling when I had walked in, his music blaring so hard, the speakers were crackling with the impact of the sound. When he noticed my arrival, he immediately turned it off and sat up, his elbows on his knees. He asked me what the problem was.
I told him that I wanted for my brother to come back, and then we’d talk. Then I turned on my heel and began to walk out. I was almost to the door when I felt his hand on my shoulder. It grasped me firmly, but not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to send the message that I wasn’t going anywhere. I turned around and my brother fell to his knees, burying his face in my chest and sobbing. I’d never seen my brother cry, not once. Not when he broke his leg. Not when a bee stung him on the elbow. Not when he got on one of those huge roller coasters that I was always insisting he go on first, “just to try it out.” But now he sobbed and sobbed, and I stood there with my arms dangling at my sides, unsure of what he wanted me to do. Finally, I pat him on the head and told him, “It’s OK, tiger. It’s OK.”