About three days after my conversation with my now ex-boyfriend, I actually heard someone refer to my brother as “Lollipop.” Ben was just walking and there were a couple of juniors talking at the car next to them. Two guys and two girls I knew were on the cheerleading squad. One of the guys noticed my brother and yelled out something to the effect that he should join the cheerleading squad. Because his giant head and little body would make it easy to flip him around, end over end. The four of them laughed and my brother just sort of laughed it off. One of the cheerleaders yelled something about how Ben shouldn’t listen to the guy, he was a jerk. But she was laughing too.
I felt the rage that had been stoking and smoking inside of me for days finally burst into flames. Ben and his buddy had already walked away. But I marched across the parking lot and gave the guy a piece of my mind. I honestly don’t remember everything that I said. But I tore into the guy. I told him that if he ever talked about someone in my family like that again, that he would regret it. The guy looked shocked and apologized about thirty times, saying he didn’t mean anything and that he and Ben were friendly. I didn’t care, by the time I left, all four of them were totally silent. I didn’t really feel a lot better.
And anyway, it mostly backfired. A day later, after the whole school buzzed about my blow-up, Ben came into my room after school. “Hey,” he said, “Rachel, can we talk about something?”
“Yeah, what?” I asked. I was laying on my bed, working on some homework. I sat up as Ben walked into the room. This was sort of rare, Ben and I rarely had ‘conversations.’
“So…” Ben said, pausing for a long minute and then looking up at me, “Did you yelled at Jesse and Frank and their girlfriends because they called me ‘Lollipop’?” he asked, his cheeks getting red. I sighed deeply.
“I know, I am so sorry. What they said was totally inappropriate. And I didn’t even know about it until just the other day. If I had known…”
“I am not upset about that,” Ben said quickly, his cheeks getting redder, “Sometimes, people make fun of my big head and stuff. They’ve done it for years. They don’t mean anything by it,” Ben said. I was taken aback. My mouth sort of opened and then closed again.
“Oh,” I said, confused.
“Yeah,” Ben said, his eyes dropping.
“Well I…” I began, but I didn’t know what to say. Ben knew and didn’t care? Or was he just so worn down by it all that… “So why are you here, if you say you don’t care?”
“Don’t do that again,” Ben said, “Don’t yell at any one for me. It is embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?” I said, ever more confused than before. Ben wasn’t angry at guys at school for mocking him. He was angry at me! For what? Looking out for him?
“I know you were just trying to help,” Ben said quickly, “But… it really isn’t a big deal. Everyone gets made of for something. This is my thing. And making a big deal about it will just make it worse. So… you know, don’t help me.”
“Sorry,” I said, and, I admit now, that sorry was a little sullen and hostile. But Jesus, for the first time in my life I was helping my brother instead of teasing him about something and he acts like a… jerk about it. There was a long pause and Ben shuffled uncomfortably.
“Did you really call Crystal Coakley a ‘shitface’?” Ben asked, smiling a little now. I looked up and him and smiled.
“I don’t know… maybe?” I said, smiling a little now too.
“You know that she tripped during cross country last year and landed in a big pile of dog shit right?” Ben asked. My eyes opened wide and my mouth opened. I let out a little laugh.
“Uh, no. Oh god, I hope I did call her that!” I said, laughing. Ben laughed as well.
“Yeah, she was like… super pissed because you brought that little nickname back in full force. I apologized to her, but I thought it was pretty funny too,” Ben said.
“Maybe I should apologize too,” I said.
“Eh,” Ben said, “She will get over it. She kind of deserves it anyway.”
“See, that’s all I meant!” I said. And Ben laughed now. I paused for a minute, “Hey Ben, I am really sorry. I wasn’t trying to make your life harder. It was trying to do the opposite,” I said, meaning it this time. Ben nodded.
“I know, that’s why I am not angry,” he said simply.
“You’re just my little brother, I care about you,” I said. Ben laughed.
“Since when?” he asked and now I laughed.
“You aren’t as bad as you used to be,” I said, realizing that I was telling the truth. I’d been looking to protect my little baby brother. But the was in high school then. Not a child anymore (at least, not from my 17-year-old perspective). I look back at that conversation now as the first “adult” conversation I ever had with my brother. We interacted… differently after that. I stopped teasing him (mostly) and I found that I could talk to him almost as an equal. He came in with an issue. We discussed it and resolved it. That is a small thing, but some siblings never, ever reach that stage. And I learned that I didn’t just love my little brother because I had to, I liked him too.
And a strange side effect of that realization was that, even though I felt better about my relationship with my brother, I felt worse about the whole “Lollipop” situation. Before, I guess, I’d been at least as angry about my own pride as my brother’s feelings. How dare someone tease MY brother. Now, I was thinking of my brother as a complete person. And I didn’t like that he faced this sort of stuff on a daily basis. And, what was worse, there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wasn’t allowed to even speak about it. I could just stew in it. And that’s basically what I did for that last year of high school any time I thought about my brother.
Even when I went to away to college, I kept worrying about Ben. And, as I started to take psych courses and think through my thought processes, I began to piece together why I was so upset about the “Lollipop” situation and Ben’s experiences at school. I thought about my brother and considered his sort of strange features. I knew the way that people reacted to them. And I felt guilty. We had the same father. We had the same mother. I’d somehow put their unique features together in a way that other people found attractive. My brother had somehow managed to put those features together in a way that made people laugh. And I had no right to be ‘the hottest girl in school’ (even if that was an exaggeration) and Ben had no reason to be… ugly. And I felt bad, I’d won some sort of lottery and he lost. There was no justice in that. It was entirely outside of our control.
I was relieved, I think. Our situation could have easily been reversed and I could have been ugly and he could have been handsome. And, like anyone else, I didn’t want to be ugly. I didn’t want people to treat me they way they treated Ben. I liked that people found me appealing. And so, I was happy. But I didn’t like that I felt happy. It seemed shallow and it felt like I was looking down on my brother, the same way that other people did. And so I felt guilty. And the guilt made me angry. Because it wasn’t fair to me and it wasn’t fair to Ben.
Distance at college didn’t make it any better. In fact, it sort of made it worse. I remember at one point my junior year (that is, my brother’s senior year, when he was 18) my mom and I were talking, and she let me know that Ben was seeing someone. I was so happy about that. I don’t know, I guess I had worried that maybe he would never find anyone. I mean, I knew unattractive people got married and had kids and everything… but I worried for some reason.
The relief I felt dissipated quickly. My mom sent me the girl’s picture. She was… not attractive. I guess that would’ve been fine, if she was nice. But over the next few weeks, my mom described the contours of their relationship. This girl, Amber, she would tell my brother she was on her way over, and then make him wait at home for hours to show up. She was apparently strangely possessive, jealous of anytime that he spent with anyone else, including the family. She was dismissive of gifts and events that my brother planned. Finally, my mom said that this new girlfriend berated my brother in public, even in front of the family. It was a relief, three months later, when she broke up with him to go back to her old boyfriend (even if he was heartbroken about it).