LOTF: Before and After

Sam & Eric Brooks

Most people couldn't tell the difference between Samuel and Eric Brooks if their lives depended on it, but in the twins' eyes, they couldn't possibly have been more different. Sure, they were alike in many respects, in the ways most identical twins are. But anyone who really got to know the boys would've been able to differentiate between them the moment they said a word.

Sam was born a mere six minutes before his brother. And though most would assume that neither twin would receive the perks of being an eldest sibling, Sam was consistently taking advantage of this. It would always come down to that six minutes when it came time to decide who would ride shotgun, who would get the last piece of chocolate, who got the comfy spot on the family sofa. And poor Eric never had a leg to stand on, and in their younger years, he would often resort to throwing temper tantrums over it. He was a pretty sore loser after all.

While Sam might've been the oldest Brooks twin, he certainly wasn't the boldest. That six extra minutes in the womb must've been used very efficiently by the younger twin in terms of his emotional development. Sam was always much shyer than his brother, and this was how most people who came to knew them learned to tell them apart. Sam would never talk to strangers, while Eric talked to anyone who would listen. In public spaces like church, the grocery store, school, and after school care, Eric made all the friends who adopted Sam into the group by association. Eric was a natural socialite, and it took years of dragging his brother along with him before Sam learned how to make friends on his own dime.

What Eric's social skills did for his social circle, it also did for his romantic one. While he was still rather young by this point (seven or eight at the oldest), he was an early bloomer when it came to girls. Eric always had at least one new crush every week, while his brother wouldn't have told anyone if he did like somebody, which was much rarer.

The boys' father was an army man, and he was adamant about enrolling the twins in military school before they hit middle school. The boys were enrolled at Bainbridge Military Academy in their third grade year. A mother like Kelly Brooks might've been a little more reluctant to send her only children to military boarding school so young, but she knew this was important to her husband and it was always part of the plan.

Daniel Brooks spent most of the time he did with his sons training them for military school in their early elementary years. They ran drills in the backyard, dabbled in different sports and exercises, did swimming and mountain biking in the summer, and the two even did Outward Bound in North Carolina in the summer between first and second grade.

The boys had a lot of practical skills by the time they started at the academy, but they were lacking a little in the maturity department. The two argued and bickered all the time. Everything one twin wanted, the other wanted just for that reason alone. But in spite of the little spats they got into with each other throughout the day, they were rather close. They did everything together, and wouldn't have had it any other way. They were best friends as much as they were brothers. Sam and Eric were inseparable, and people hardly ever saw one twin without the other, which probably didn't help those who struggled to tell them apart.

The twins both enjoyed military school, and one made lots of friends because the other did. They stuck close to the good kids; the ones whose values aligned with their own because that's how their father taught them to find good friends. Simon and Dylan were two of the twins' closest friends. And when they started working with Ralph Langley after their eighty person squadron was split into two forty person ones, he became a close friend of theirs too.

Sam did better than Eric in the academic realm, but Eric outperformed his brother in gym class and in military training. Although this difference in their school and military performance wasn't especially significant. But still, it was enough to set them apart. And as identical twins, they grew up looking for ways to separated one from the other. It was how they found their identities outside of each other; identities that only those who were close to them really got to know.