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I am in love with my older brother.
And before you get all weird, I’ll say that, yes, he’s my older brother but not biologically. The same blood running through my veins is not the same running through his. The blood in my veins is from a sixteen-year-old girl in Mississippi who messed around with a much older man she had no business with and had herself shipped off to a convent until she gave birth to me which I learned much later in life.
She overdosed not too long after that.
I wince at the harsh reality of that. But my repressed mommy issues and my potential daddy ones—given that I don’t even know a name—are not the point of this story. The point is the Calloway family adopted me when I was two years old, meaning I spent approximately two years in foster care.
Aren’t babies supposed to get adopted instantly? What was wrong with me that I wasn’t picked right away?
Well for one, I had colic and trouble eating and sleeping and doing anything cute that would make a couple think “that’s who we want to add to our family.”
Secondly, I wasn’t blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Or brown-haired. Well, okay, my hair was dark brown, I guess, but so was my skin, and in Mississippi, there weren’t too many people out there looking to adopt a baby that looked like me.
But the Calloway family traveled all the way from Connecticut to meet me, and as my mom says, she fell in love with me instantly.
For the record, by then my colic was gone.
They had two children already and were struggling to conceive a third which is where I come into the picture. James was their oldest, thirteen, and moody as hell. Then there was Monica; she was ten, and quite frankly, God’s gift to my parents—besides me, of course. She was outgoing and charming but well behaved with stellar grades and on the fast track to Ivy Leagues. The good kid to James’ bad one as she liked to say.
James wasn’t bad per se, he was just going through that classic teenager stage where he hated everyone and everything except getting into trouble with his friends. But I’ll rephrase that, he hated everyone but me.
In the beginning, they told me how he’d be the first to my crib when I cried. He’d pick me up and bounce me around the room and try to get me back to sleep. Sometimes it worked and he’d sit next to my bed for the rest of the night in case I woke up again.
He helped feed me and allegedly was a pretty decent babysitter. I mean I’m eighteen now and still alive, so it’s safe to say he didn’t do a terrible job.
As I got older, I followed him around like a shadow, and he never minded it. Of course, there were nights he wanted to go out with his friends and I threw a whole ass tantrum over not being able to go with him. But he always promised to make it up to me the next day.
He always delivered.
When I was six years old, he went to his prom and I was devastated that I didn’t get to put on a pretty dress like his girlfriend, Luna, who I hated because I wanted to be the only girl in his life. But the next day, he told me to put on my prettiest dress and he set up a makeshift prom in our living room. With a cake and punch and everything. I was even crowned Prom Queen.
I was seven when he left for college and I cried myself to sleep every night for three months. Even though he called and texted and emailed, it wasn’t enough. I missed him so deeply. I missed him in a way that I assume was similar to missing a parent. Looking back, I wonder if him leaving stirred up feelings of being left by my birth parents.
Remember, I am a black girl with a white family; I knew I was adopted early on.
James never moved back in after college, except for that first summer. I was eleven then and it didn’t seem like he had the same amount of time as before. He was always working and didn’t have time for me and my Barbies like he did before. I even tried to sit next to him while he did work and write in my journal to seem more grown up. He would just chuckle before getting on the phone barking about numbers.
So now you can see how being around James all my life has created a bit of a complex, right?
I was fourteen when my older brother also became my first crush. He came home from New York for the weekend with way more facial hair, biceps and tattoos, and for the first time, I saw him as a man. He scooped me up in his arms like he always did and squeezed me and feeling all of those muscles and hard abs pressed against me made me feel like I was going to faint.
I knew it was wrong and taboo, but I knew nothing would come from it. So, I felt safe, only living out this fantasy in my dark and twisted mind. But sometimes, late at night when the air was still and the house was quiet, I’d explore my body. Pretending it was his touch, his fingers, his mouth on me.
Somewhere in that same deep and twisted space, I imagined that one day, we’d cross that line. And in those moments, I damned my soul to hell for eternity because I knew given the chance, I’d take it.
