Brother Blackpill

I don’t know when I started hating my brother.

It had been going on for years, probably, before I even knew why, back from when I was five and he was three, and I was already growing fat, and he was already growing too beautiful for a baby in Graywater, Missouri.

I remember my aunt saying she’d never seen such a beautiful baby, every time she came to our house. I remember Mom not putting him down even when she had to. I remember the reason Dad hushed me when I hurt my leg and cried:

“Shhh. You’ll wake the baby!”

He wasn’t a baby anymore, for fuck’s sake. He was three.

But I was okay with all that, because they’d told me he was my baby brother, and I should always look after him. I believed them. I swear I did.

Even when he blew out the candles on my birthday cake when I was six and everyone found it adorable. Even when they bought that stupid little magnet and put his first-grade photo on the fridge.

It’s still there, looking at me every time I get out of bed for a night-raid in the kitchen.

My photo never got up there.

Maybe they forgot.

Maybe it was the curls. The eyes.

I don’t have blond curls. My eyes aren’t blue.

So I don’t blame them. Not them, not my aunt, not the neighbors, not the teachers, not the kids at school. They just couldn’t help it. They were all responding to the same undeniable fact: Jimmy was more beautiful than our family could have ever expected. More beautiful than Graywater had ever seen.

Painfully beautiful to have around as a younger brother.

You look in the mirror and you see a monster. You look to your left at the table and see an angel. Every day. Weekends, holidays, Thanksgiving. He’s even nicer then, and that only makes it worse.

Not that I was ugly, or anything. I’m a three on the PSL, maybe even a three and a half, which isn’t as bad as it sounds because the real PSL is one to eight, not one to ten, if you want to know.

No. I’m the definition of LTN, which means low-tier-normie, which in turn means that I could have a life if I wasn’t fat. Most people do, happy in their ignorance, not even knowing about the scale and the slang and the acronyms.

It’s just that while an LTN by himself is barely noticeable, an LTN next to a True Adam is just about unfuckable.

And for me, True Adam wasn’t the “theoretical, near-mythical ceiling of male attractiveness and facial symmetry that goes beyond standard high rankings,” as AI puts it. He was right there. Walking, breathing, sleeping in the next bed, going around the house in nothing but his briefs day and night.

My brother, Jimmy, his photo still on my phone, filling the background.

It’s just a candid shot from last summer, at the beach. He’s laughing at something Dad had said, and he looks even more unreal in his swim shorts, not only because he’s ripped as fuck, but also because he’s 6′2".

I’m 5′8". 198 pounds, fighting to stay below 200.

He doesn’t look real.

Facial symmetry: perfect. Canthal tilt: positive. Eye contrast: striking. Skin: translucent, and I don’t really know what that means, but I heard it somewhere and it sounds just right for Jimmy. And he’d looked eighteen since he was fifteen. He’d even gotten that, which meant things started happening early in Jimmy’s life.

Things that haven’t happened in mine yet, and I’m twenty-one.

So it’s not that I blame him for something he did. I don’t even blame him for existing. If we weren’t brothers and we ran into each other I’d simply stare and envy him a little and that would be it.

I wouldn’t really mind.

I’d stare though, and I don’t even like dudes. That’s how unreal he was.

Is, not was. He’s not dead. He’s just left.

I know because I posted his photo on a “rate me” forum some time ago, and everyone said it was fake, edited, AI, whatever.

So I had to post another. And another.

“Chad.”

“Slayer.”

“Megaslayer.”

“Gigaslayer.”

It went on and on, until someone wrote “Chico,” and that got 23 likes, and it couldn’t go any further because Chico is Chico and no one beats Chico, and you can google Chico Lachowski if you want to know why.

My little bro was Chico!

And I felt... what?

Pride. Hatred. Envy.

All of it.

None of it.

I don’t know.

I just know I couldn’t stop posting. Scrolling. Wanting.

Not him.

To be him.

By then I’d found out that my problem could take on many names: lookism, halo effect, beauty premium, cognitive bias. It’s not intentional. It’s just the way our brains are wired. And it turns out parents’ brains aren’t really different from the rest.

It’s what made mine yell at me when I broke a glass and laugh when Jimmy did it. It’s what made Mom give him the middle piece of the pie, with the most filling, while I kept getting the corner.

“Oh, come on, Hector,” she said, the only time I complained. “He’s growing. He needs it more.”

Like I’d stopped growing at eight.

I never complained about anything after that. Ever. Not even when he was twelve and a girl kissed him for the first time and he told me about it. She’d been trying to kiss him for months, and he just couldn’t get why she’d want to kiss him so badly.

That hurt.

You may think it shouldn’t, but when you’re fourteen and no one has kissed you yet it does, and you can think whatever you want about me.

I’m just giving you the facts.

And the fact is I didn’t let it show. I felt happy for him, and even proud maybe, because he was becoming a real heartbreaker, just like Dad used to say and by then I’d settled for being the smart one. The responsible one. Everyone said it, politely enough for me to understand they meant “he’s ugly as fuck but at least he gets good grades at school.”

Jimmy and I went for ice cream the next day, and when I finished mine he was still only halfway through his, so he offered it to me, just like “here, take it.”

That hurt worse.

Because I knew right then that I wouldn’t have done the same for him, and that made me feel like the worst person on the face of the earth.

That the middle of the pie was always going to go to Jimmy… I’d accepted that.

But that Jimmy would trade his piece with mine if I asked him… That he’d simply let me have both pieces if he knew how much I wanted them… That’s what I’ll never forgive. That he wouldn’t even flinch.

“Here, take it.”

I didn’t even have to ask. He just had to notice the unfairness. The difference.

He never did.

Not out of cruelty.

He was just above it all. The pettiness. The ugliness. The neediness. None of it touched him. Because it’s easy to forget how privileged you are when you’ve never had to think about being privileged. Because from up on a pedestal, everyone seems equal enough for you to forget where you’re standing.

Jimmy didn’t even know there was a middle piece. He just knew Mom gave it to him, and that was all it was.

Maybe I was just bad, from day one. Rotten. The one who hated his cute little brother, who only had to wag his tail to make everyone love him.

Not just foids. Everyone.

Well…

I don’t know when I started hating my brother.

But I know I started hating myself long before I started hating him.