Mallory and I have always been different. She was the one that jumped in front of the video camera for home videos so she could sing and dance while I just stared into the camera or ignored its presence completely. She was the one who wrote neatly and could form sentences from a young age but struggled with reading whereas I couldn’t write until sometime later, but I was always better at sounding words out. She danced and sang in her spare time, I ran – I quit, she didn’t. Mallory was a social butterfly and I was a misanthrope. She was normal - liked Chinese food, didn’t complain, got average grades, and didn’t have any trouble liking things everyone else liked. She was a member of the student council who talked to anyone in need and was a shoe-in for prom queen. I, on the other hand, was the annoying prick who liked to find something wrong with anything everyone else liked - I hated Chinese food, I complained frequently, and I did better than her in school (probably the only thing making me better than her in any way). I thought participating in school-related organizations was stupid and did my best to avoid attracting any attention at all, which was difficult to do when my name and my sister’s legacy were on the tips of everyone’s tongue. Mal was a healthy person with her emotions in the right place and I was the one that made a point of making myself miserable. It was like a reflex.
Maybe I should add the disclaimer somewhere that while I sound like a complete and total ass, I really don’t hate my sister. In fact, she’s one of those people I can really stand, so when she makes her cute little attempts to get me “out of my shell”, I go along with her. I have no discernible shell to speak of but if it makes her happy for me to walk around the mall with her and her friends or show my support at council-thrown events, I guess I’ll do it. Helping her is probably the only thing I can do that prevents me from becoming some raging sociopath.
“It’ll be fun; I promise,” she told me as she fixed her hair in the foyer mirror before pushing me out the door. She always said that and, somehow, she was always wrong. “And I know I always say that and you never have fun, but this will be different.” That was another thing she always said and, once again, she was always wrong. It was never different.
Her constant friends were generally the sort of people that made people like me lose all faith in humanity. They had more cellphone cases than they actually had phones, bought million-gigabyte MP3s when their music taste was never enough to fill past the two-gigabyte mark, spoke venom about people I’d have thought were their friends, and probably didn’t know anything about the world beyond their little bubbles. They were the people who got everything handed to them with as little effort as possible and were utterly dismayed when they lose network service in a particular area.
I walked with Mallory down the street as she talked to me charmingly about her day and what exciting things were going to be going on. She asked me questions and knew exactly how to get me to talk. She was infinitely better than the people she hung out with and that’s the reason I’d come up with to explain why they all regarded her as the centre of their well-spun social lives. Her company seemed to make everything a little better and our half-hour walk to some kid’s house felt no longer than a walk down the street.
It was supposed to be a birthday party at this kid Richard’s house. He was a local hotshot: head of the football and soccer teams, turned down several scholarships for universities I’d sell a kidney for, and on top of that his parents were horribly rich – horribly as in they ran out of places to toss their money. My sneakers were scuffed by years of durability and I groaned: I’d probably spend most of the night feeling bad about tracking mud onto their heated tile floors or leaving a handprint on their hand-polished marble countertops imported straight from fucking Iceland. Mal looked over at me with a look I could easily attribute as being sincerely her, a look I grew up with. Her smile looked like the aftermath of a laugh but her blue eyes were panicked with the sudden realization that not only was she wrong about everything being fun and different, but I was not going to make any superfluous effort to bond with any of the pretentious, supercilious pricks at this social event.
And the brother of the year award goes to...
The house is about as swanky as I’d have imagined it to be judging by its appearance, if not more. It was huge – though it looked small with the amount of people within it – and comprised of expensive-looking things. I felt as if I was walking through a really crowded, delicate shop filled with overpriced antiquities: I just wanted to get out like I had never stepped in to begin with; I wanted to cause as little damage as possible so there would be less of a price to pay afterwards. It wasn’t as hectic as I may have envisioned it to be, though. Litter wasn’t scattered everywhere, save for a cup or two hither and thither, and people weren’t shoving each other everywhere. I think I caught a glimpse of a pretty nice birthday cake securely on a table.
As Mallory walked around and between people, sending greets here and there as she made a beeline for the birthday boy, they instinctively parted like the Red Sea. I don’t know why it was so easy for her to manipulate her surroundings to get things she wanted without uttering a word but it held me at a fine line between envy and awe. Instead of following her, though, I settled for manoeuvring myself less gracefully around until I found the cooler where I picked up a can of pop – man, I just live it up at parties – before perching myself on the edge of some furniture and staring idly at my phone, pretending I had gotten a text when, in reality, I was just analyzing the photo of my dog that was my default wallpaper. I did whatever it took to avoid awkward situations that I isolated myself from the mere prospect of one looming on the horizon. I did not do well with awkward.
I looked over my shoulder as casually as possible; despite the minor fact my cover was blown. The voice belonged to a girl of average height who was comfortably pretty – the sort of pretty that wasn’t verging on Helen of Troy and most certainly wouldn’t be starting any wars but, contrariwise, could be admired and appreciated all the same.
“Thanks,” I replied, eloquent as ever. “I raised him myself.”
She smirked – which was good because I wasn’t telling a joke so if she’d laughed I would have assumed she was either delusional or simply had a horrible sense of humour – and ambled over to perch next to me, a comfortable distance away. Everything about her was pretty comfortable from the tone of her voice to her choice in conversational topics and prompts. Above that, though, she was interesting in that she had a mind of her own. She wasn’t driven by the media and was able to understand a few of the pop culture references I made to things not exactly on MTV today. I guess that was an endearing trait, since I ended up talking to her much of the night and it was only about a half hour in that I realized we’d never exchanged names.
“Nick,” I told her as soon as our conversation finally reached a pause.
“Olive, my family moved here about a week ago from REGION/CITY. Dad likes to hop around from city to city as work permits.”
“Doesn’t it ever get tedious coming up with new routines and stuff?” I asked her, forever intrigued by frequent movers.
“I’ve learned to stop making routines and just stop expecting things,” she grinned at me as if she’d just opened up a box of chocolates she was proud to have stolen and was really excited to share them with me. The more we talked, the more I learned about her. FACTS ABOUT OLIVE WILL GO HERE. Not once did I look back at my phone. Eventually I realized the mobs around us had eventually picked up and left one by one like a fine-tooth comb through messy hair and maybe two-thirds of the people who were there when I’d first come in were still left. I could see Mallory sticking herself as high in the air as her little legs would let her be in her search for me. I raised an arm to signal her over and when she came it really was inevitable that she’d introduce herself to Oliver and also somehow trade numbers with the girl after a five minute conversation with her. I, on the other hand, had spent ages in conversation and I’d never even noticed I didn’t have her number or anything. Don’t worry; I rectified the situation before we went our separate ways.
Surprisingly enough, I led the conversation with Mallory all the way back home.
