He was fourteen and scrawny.  The musky evidence of his fathers trapping clung to his wear-weary Wranglers like a hinted aura.  I was seventeen and gaining heavenly crowns and english credits by tutoring him in the J.D.S.S. library.

Getting him to read was like pulling teeth or, as he might have said, skinning a tough old muskrat.  He would rather spend his time lassoing the flies that had settled to die in the east stairwell window with a piece of my hair than read about Piggy's glasses in Lord of the Flies.  And Shakespeare?  Not a chance.  Twelfth Night might as well have been in Latin.  So we'd play Scrabble with a two letter word exception.  We'd watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and write "book reports" about them.  I'd get annoyed when he pulled my hair and he'd pretend he didn't know me whenever we passed in the hallways apart from our tutoring time.

If someone had shown me a snapshot of the future I would probably have spit a mouthful of cafeteria fries all over it.  Not in a million years...

But here we are.  More than a decade later.  And now he's my brother.  And I really like him.

Even though he's still kind of a dork.