My brother�s birthday is tomorrow. He�s turning 16. I can�t believe that the kid who seemingly just yesterday was running around the house without pants and refusing to wear shirts that didn�t have stripes (� la Bert and Ernie) is going to be old enough to start learning how to drive and will be considered a �consenting adult�. It�s true that I haven�t seen him since the summer of 2000, since I moved away a few months later and he still lives with his father on the island. I invited him to come out here for part of his summer vacation, but he never followed up with me. I know that he�d much rather hang out with his friends than spend time in some strange state with his older sister and her boyfriend whom he has never met. I do miss the kid, despite his being more than a little on the weird side. In a lot of ways, I have never understood him, and it goes beyond just his being 6 years younger and a boy. He�s always been so very eccentric, which I know he gets from his parentage. Our mother is off her rocker, which is why he has limited contact with her and I have none, and his father is a native Vineyarder who was born to a pair of pretty wacky parents himself. Milo was ostracized when he was little for being so very different from everyone else and refusing to conform to what they wanted him to be. This is not to say that I was forced to conform, I was just more conventional by nature than he was. Thankfully for him, he got out of the island�s public school system before the time came for him to hit high school. He applied to the charter school and loves it, though had he gone to the local high school, life would have greatly improved for him anyways. People stop treating you like shit once you get to ninth grade and they let you be who you are, largely in part because they are too busy figuring out who they are.

I attended the local high school and had an easy time of it, despite being mercilessly antagonized throughout my elementary and middle school years. I was picked on because I was smart, mostly. People fear intelligence a lot of the time. I find even that adults sneer at the use of a word that is not commonly used in the sitcom du jour. When the charter school opened, we public school kids made fun of it. We knew students who went there and it seemed as though it was just like preschool all over again, only with a smattering of French and Biology thrown in there for fun. Kids who went there said that they had lots of surplus time and were encouraged to sit around and talk about their feelings on comfy couches, while we toiled in too old desk/chair combos in rooms with insufficient heat or air conditioning, having to ask for a hall pass to so much as go to the bathroom. As I recall, there was only one teacher, and he was a substitute, who told us never to ask to go to the bathroom, and instead just to take the pass and go, so long as it was one at a time.

I know that Milo does better at the charter school than he ever would have in the regional. I shudder to think of what would have happened to him had he been forced to continue attending school with the people who gave him such a hard time. I still have dreams about the girl who was most vicious to me and it surprises me that I don�t have nightmares about the boy who always made me his prime target. Of course the lack of dreaming about Matt L. may have something to do with the fact that in being paired up with him by the teacher, I managed to exact a sweet sort of intellectual revenge on him. I never went so far as to punch him square in the chest, knocking the wind out of him as he did with me, I opted instead for pulling his chair out from under him time after time as he was sitting down and seeing to it that he spelled things incorrectly on every test.

I often feel like a bad sister, but I know that it�s not my being a bad sister but our general incompatibility as people. We get along well, but we are such different people that we cannot relate on the same plane.