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That encounter was the beginning, though. It held little of any great importance, but it was the turning point in our lives. Jordan and I lived in the same house. That was a fact of life. It was what Mom and George wanted. Their bedroom was also upstairs but on the opposite end of the house from my room. I had a shared bathroom with Jordan, his room, and then their private bathroom to keep me isolated from whatever sounds their creaky bed made at night. If Jordan was scarred in those early months, I had few fucks to give.
Even in those months, so early on, I had too many things to learn and change. The new need to lock the unused bathroom door that belonged to Jordan came gradually. I’d had a bathroom all to myself my entire life. Suddenly, when I took longer in front of the mirror after showering, the meathead that was my soon-to-be older stepbrother began intruding.
“Shit, sorry,” he grunted the first time and slammed the door shut. Through it, he continued. “It was quiet in there for so long. I thought you were done.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” I snapped back at him and locked him out. It wasn’t like I had much to shave on my face, but the sooner I started practicing, the better. I didn’t appreciate getting caught by a guy who had to shave every other day to keep his face clean and smooth.
The opposite was true, too. I had to learn to knock on my own bathroom door. The first time I walked in on Jordan in the bathroom, he wore a towel around his waist. It was as innocent as a locker room encounter, but my heart thumped so hard in my chest when I saw the definition of his torso that I thought I was going to die.
The first time our parents took us to George’s lakehouse was another circle of hell for my wild hormones and confused body. It turned out that when Jordan was near any body of water large enough to have little waves on a breeze, he was incapable of keeping his torso covered. I didn’t understand the correlation, but Jordan was a mean swimmer and could dive for over a minute without so much as panting when his head emerged. He was a tower of cool confidence, almost nearby when I did the things other people labeled as me being fussy. I respectfully disagreed.
Jordan and I were sent to the lake one morning when George and Mom coyly suggested we spend some quality time together. I was reluctant to take off my white T-shirt with a Rick and Morty print across the chest. Jordan hadn’t even put one on that morning. He just got out of bed, probably already in his swim shorts, and slipped into his flip-flops.
I carried an entire backpack with me. The lake was a short walk through the forest away from the house, in a flat field of windswept grass. An old wooden pier was still white and light blue, although the paint was peeling in too many places to fool anyone that it was being looked after. Inside my backpack was a big towel so I didn’t lie on the peeling paint. I brought a bottle of water because I wasn’t mad enough to drink whatever lived in that lake. I had a healthy snack and a smuggled snack, which I preferred. I had a book I’d hoped to get into for the past six months and I had my portable gaming console.
“You don’t need to wear your underwear when your swim shorts have the net,” Jordan said when we sat at the edge of the pier, feet dangling above the surface of the lake.
He never talked to me. Not really. He lectured, advised, and criticized. But he didn’t talk. “Oh yeah? Should I take them off for you, Jordan?” I had learned that shocking him was the quickest way to silence him. I also learned that he would never, ever suspect a shred of truth in such words. There were times when I wished he would call my bluff. “Yeah, take them off for me, Asher,” he would say in some fantasy and I would either have to do it or lose.
All his muscles bunched like he was going to flatten me with the pier, but he simply slipped off the edge and dove under the water’s surface, barely making a splash despite his bulk. He was a tall, broad guy with a face more round than oval and a sort of deceptive beauty that made you think he was friendly. You had to get to know him in order to dislike him. But it didn’t take long to learn almost everything about Jordan. He was athletic and that was the extent of his personality. He had grown up with his dad, spending all his free days at the lake house, acting more like a fish than a boy. He was often left to his own devices when George had clients request urgent work. The fact that he had survived spending a few nights alone in a big, empty house in the forest had given him a false sense of self-sufficiency. He was probably wrong. I’d read survivalist comics. I was sure Jordan wouldn’t last a night if you left him in an unknown part of the forest with nothing but a knife.
I thought not. He shut up and swam underwater, but he never broached the topic of my underwear again.
Small resentments piled up. Jordan had his pick of the best skates and sticks for practice. Mom and George agreed that his equipment was more important than mine because Jordan’s hockey future was coming sooner.
I couldn’t wait for him to leave for college. It was still nearly three years away, but I eagerly awaited that day. It was one of the rare times when I genuinely wished him all the success in the world; a full hockey scholarship in Detroit, the first pick of a car Mom and George agreed to buy him on departure, and the finest hockey equipment money could buy. I wished him all the comforts on his way out of my life, even if I had three years left on this unfair sentence.
And suffer, I did. Day after day, I learned the same lesson all over again. He would never notice me. No matter how much of a relief it was, because he shouldn’t see me as anything other than his stepbrother, I couldn’t help myself. In truth, I longed for it. Jordan Mitchell was too self-centered to notice I existed, let alone that I was more than just his little stepbrother.
The time he sheared all the hair off his head and walked into the house like a prison ruffian simultaneously did two conflicting things to me. It broke my heart that he no longer had the thick locks I associated with him. And it turned me on so much that I had to leave the dinner table and bite the pillow to muffle the sounds from my throat.
The time he pulled a muscle in his thigh and had to wear a tight compression sleeve for a week, I walked on needles because every encounter with him made me imagine how far up that sleeve went. And whenever I pictured it, my face turned red.
The time Jordan announced he was taking Kate Carmichael to prom, I simmered in envy. I wished them success in smuggling some booze to the party. I hoped they would puke on the dance floor and forever be remembered for that embarrassing night. It didn’t happen and I choked on bitter tears when I heard him hum to himself in his bedroom just after one in the morning that night. Happy.
The summer that followed his graduation and acceptance to Northwood, together with his best friend and the winner of the competition for the smuggest fuck in town, Beckett Partridge, had me torn to pieces. It was the longest summer of my life. I’d spent over three years living with Jordan and our entire history could be summed up as two acquaintances who didn’t get along very well and had little chance of becoming friends.
As if I would ever be content with being just friends.
That summer, I knew I was doomed. I had been doomed by my mother, her husband, and his child. I had been doomed to live and exist so near the physical perfection that Jordan was, to watch him grow more handsome and to always know what it felt like to be a ghost. Sure, I sometimes made odd sounds when I slammed the doors, but I was otherwise invisible. And harmless. I made as much impact as a draft from an open window.
At the end of our last summer, I was about to turn seventeen, and Jordan had turned nineteen the month before. All he ever talked about was Northwood. He never shut up about Beckett Partridge and his famous uncle, Nate, when he spoke of college. They agreed to be roommates in the team house at Northwood. It was the best place he could imagine. There were arcade games in the basement when they visited and the older guys were welcoming, willing to joke and teach them college life hacks. He spoke about it so often that the images lived freely in my head.
I hated how happy he was to leave our house. He’d been forced into my life when nobody asked me if I wanted it. The immense size of his existence was rammed into my space, overshadowed my daily life, and he was just going to leave now. He did nothing to lessen the vacuum. Why would he? He had never bothered to notice how much of him there was. His things were scattered throughout the house when mine had to be contained to my room. His schedule kept both Mom and George busy driving him around before they’d bought him a car, so my own schedule had to fit into it. His success was so great that I stood no chance of impressing Mom and George with mine. Who cared if my coach praised my talent when Jordan was going to be an Arctic Titan?
Jordan took his life in my house for granted. He never thought twice about making his absence any less selfish. To him, it was going to be a new chapter in life. But the ripping of that bandage was going to tear a lot of unhealed wounds and Jordan wouldn’t be around for that.
It’s hard to admit it, but by the end of that summer, I hated him. I wished he had never come to live with us. I wished my mother had never married George, even though George tried to be everything a father should be to a boy.
The night before Jordan loaded his car with his things and drove off, we had dinner together. Beckett called him just after we ate and were supposed to play Risk. It had never become a family tradition because we had failed to become a family despite George’s best attempts, but we had had a few good evenings playing that game.
George had a look of fearful pride on his oblong face, the two-day stubble sprinkled with a few paler hairs, his tanned skin a sign of both summer rest and the perpetual fieldwork. He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair and leaned back in his chair to pretend he felt as casual as he appeared.
“I guess I’ll just go to my room,” I said, holding back a sigh. Jordan couldn’t honor his father with an evening of board games. Why the hell should I?
George gave a hearty nod and Mom patted my shoulder.
I listened to Jordan on the phone from the bathroom after I had brushed my teeth. “…can meet some girls. Why not? We have the whole evening and the next day to get settled. When’s the first practice? Right, Monday evening.” It went on and on.
