One Shots 3.0 [boyxboy]

That Boy is Trouble

When I was a kid, I thought the sun shone out of my brother and his friends. He was two years older than me and good at everything; school, sports, girls. I was a scrawny little shit who spent most of my free time scribbling on any blank pieces of paper I could find and doing odd jobs around the house for pocket money so I could buy myself a sketchpad.

Mason thought I was weird as hell and even though I know he loved me in the way an older brother has to love his kid sibling, I don't think he liked me very much and he certainly never volunteered to spend any time with me. We were different in almost every regard; the cartoons and TV shows we liked, the books we read, our personality types. He was a classic extrovert and I was your typical introvert.

When I was nine and Mason was eleven he joined a local basketball team and met Danny. They instantly became best friends and Danny began to spend a lot of time around our house in the evenings and on weekends. I never really interacted with them; I knew Mason wasn't crazy about hanging out with me and I was pretty shy anyway, content enough to sit quietly in the living room messing with my sketchpad while they played video games in his room.

Danny got a kick out of me though. The first time he came over, he sat on the couch next to me and introduced himself and I mumbled a response without really meeting his eyes. He asked what I was doing and I let him see without showing him. Mason rolled his eyes and grumbled, 'Dylan's just my kid brother, he's weird, ignore him. Let's go play Street Fighter.'

Danny said, 'Yeah, sure, just give me a sec,' and examined my immature line sketches of goblins and ogres and elves. 'These are cool,' he told me. He stood up and moved around the couch to follow Mason upstairs, saying, 'Your brother's really good at drawing.' This was the first time anybody outside of my parents had given me any feedback and it wasn't quite the same coming from them. I felt a swell of pride and confidence and resolved to improve and get better so I could further impress him.

It became kind of a ritual. Whenever Danny came over he'd come and sit on the couch with me for a couple of minutes to see what I was working on, tell me whether he liked it or what alterations he thought I should make, before disappearing upstairs with Mason for four hours of intense video gaming. I didn't do a whole lot of art in elementary school and I sure as shit wasn't in any extra curriculars so apart from my parents and the occasional, 'Isn't that lovely?' from my grandma it was the only constructive criticism I got and I treated it very seriously. I think Danny thought that was funny.

After a couple of years of being all-American teens together something started to change in Danny. He dropped out of most of his sports teams and started picking up music instead, teaching himself to play guitar and piano and bass. He grew out his dark hair so it was constantly falling into his eyes and started wearing skinny jeans and dark colours. Mason followed suit. He kept up the sports, but he and Danny had looked alike before and they still looked alike now, two years later. I'm not sure what Danny's parents thought of it, but mine teased them both relentlessly, made fun of their haircuts, and accused them of trying to look more like me.

I'd been rocking this aesthetic from birth and I think it rankled with Mason a little bit that they thought he was copying me.

They both started listening to more alternative music and even though at eleven I didn't exactly have the most rounded taste I'd already been listening to Green Day and Death Cab and Bikini Kill for a year or two, and my brief conversations with Danny went from being solely about my art to about what albums I was listening to and whether he'd heard of the band and did I recommend them. Reluctantly, Mason fell in on this too and even occasionally forgot himself and joined in on the conversation, talking to me like a friend rather than just his weird younger brother.

When I was thirteen I started attending the same high school as Mason and Danny, and when Mason turned sixteen he started driving me in in the mornings instead of making me continue taking the bus. Sometimes we picked up Danny on the way, sometimes it was just the two of us. We never spoke very much but we took turns picking the music and kind of bonded silently over that.