To Love and Hate a Brother

I think we were the closest, Will, when we were growing up. The others ignored us, too young to join in with their already established games and considered ‘babies’ by parents and siblings alike.

I know that you would never have admitted this to our parents when we were very young. I was nuisance, I knew that, and you told me often enough when you were told to take me out with you. It was embarrassing; I was older than you, with no friends of my own but don’t think that I haven’t forgotten the day that you left me sitting on the park bench while you and your friends played ‘war’.
‘You’ll get dirty Jacquie, sit there and don’t move.’
I didn’t.

I adored you at nine, at ten, and at eleven, but when I was twelve I hated you. Dragged off to high school to suffer at the plait-pulling hands of Janey Willis. I didn’t forgive you for years, not until you were in ninth grade and you brought home Martin Tucker’s older brother. I fell in love.

Did you know? Did you ever guess that he was my first love? No, I suppose you didn’t. I was invisible to you then. Your eyes forgot that you had a sister; your mind was full of baseball cards and your body full of the raging hormones that were beginning to be directed at Janey Willis’s seventeen year old sister. I knew.
Stevey Tucker. He made me go marshmallow and I wrote thousands of ‘Love is…’ notes that I kept in my jewellery box. He had shoulder length curly hair and freckles on his nose and I watched him over the pot roast. He had a special place in my Secret Diary and I kept it in the back of my drawer along the greasy cloth that he once used to wipe his bike seat.

But then you spoiled my love, by breaking his nose with a misplaced fist. He never came again and I heard years later that he had married Janey Willis.
Why did you never tell me that he said I was pretty?

(Written by Kate)