My name is Kevin, but my friends all call me KJ. That is because our last name is Smith, and I'm not
that
Kevin Smith. You know that guy, Silent Bob? Anyway, I grew up in a predominantly white suburb in the Midwest. Our family never moved or did anything that exciting. My dad had a steady job in an office building. My mom was a typical mom. She wasn't some crazy hot MILF or anything like that. My sister...well, my sister was a problem.
My sister and I have fought our entire lives. Seriously, I cannot recall a time that Katie and I ever got along. I am almost two years younger than she is, but that meant I was only a year behind her in school initially. She got really sick several times in the sixth grade and wound up repeating, and from then on we were in the same grade. I would have felt sorry for her, but she was perpetually such an unbelievable bitch to me and my friends that we would just fight instead.
Now, when I say 'fight' I mean verbally. Katie grew early and towered over me until we were well into high school. I was short for my age and only caught up to her late in our junior year. We both have blonde hair, blue-grey eyes, vile tempers, and a knack for pissing each other off. As you can imagine, that doesn't sit well with our parents. Every summer from the sixth grade on, they packed us off to camp just to get us out of their hair for two months. Not the same summer camp, so we actually got a break from each other as well.
Katie was just insufferable our junior year of high school after she got her car. It would have been nice just to have her off of my case and independent, but our parents insisted that she had to drive me to school every day. Katie resented the hell out of me for that, and I resented the way she bossed me around when we got up to get ready for school.
I did feel fortunate that I hit a growth spurt in that junior year. I went from five and a half feet tall to six foot even over a five month span. The thing about growing quickly like that is that everything is growing at the same rate, but you just don't notice it. It's not like I woke up one day and I was suddenly taller than my sister. What you do notice are annoying things like your favorite t-shirt no longer fits, or you have to get new shoes and they hurt your feet until you break them in.
I felt uncoordinated all the time, and I was already way too shy around girls. That didn't help. It also didn't help that my sister was constantly jumping into my personal life and embarrassing me when I would work up the courage to actually talk to a girl. Worse still, my sister made friends with all the crazy-ass fine girls in my school. There was a pack of them that hung out, and they were just vicious to me and my friends. I tried to stick up for my friends, but those girls were intimidating. Naturally, I wanted to fuck every one of my sister's friends, but that was never going to happen.
We graduated the eleventh grade and got shipped off to camp again. At my summer camp, I got to be a camp counselor for the first time. I got to teach canoeing, kayaking, and basic boating skills to a bunch of younger guys. I had known a lot of them from previous summers at camp, so it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't shy about teaching them and I knew what I was doing.
Unlike previous summers, I spent the entire two months doing nothing else. I was on the water, paddling people around, carrying the canoes, kayaks, and rowboats to and from the water, or swimming every single day. By the time camp ended, I was really tan and substantially stronger in my upper body than ever before.
I don't know what Katie's camp had her doing. She got home a day before I did, and she was off with her friends when I got home. We did an outstanding job of avoiding each other for the last three weeks of summer vacation. By that time, I often stayed over at one of my friends' houses, and Katie stayed over with one of her friends more often than she was home.
At least that was what we all thought.
It turned out that Katie had a steady boyfriend who had his own apartment. She was nineteen, and so was he. He had graduated a year ahead of us, had a job, and had my sister in his bed most nights. Even had I known, I would have been fine with that—it kept her from bugging me all the time. It's not like I was some guardian of my sister's virtue.
Of course, Katie messed up and got herself busted by our parents. Somehow, I wound up in trouble for it.
It started with my parents taking me aside and interrogating me about Katie and her boyfriend, Bryan. I didn't know anything, but that didn't stop them from really pissing me off by asking a thousand questions about my sister's personal life. Finally, I just snapped at them.
"Come on!" I said, a little too loud, "Katie is an adult, now. I'm not. How could you possibly expect me to know what she does with her personal life? She has a car, and I don't. She has friends who are adults now, and I don't. What do you expect me to do, follow my sister around and report back to you?"
As soon as I said that, and saw the looks on their faces, I knew I had fucked up.
That was exactly what they expected, from then on. They brought Katie in, and laid down the rules for our senior year. We were never allowed to go out without the other one being there. If we didn't like it, we could both just stay home. Those were our only two options for the next year.
Katie lit into me right after our parents left us alone.
"What the hell did you say to them?" she demanded.
"Whoa!" I shot back, "They were asking me about you and Bryan, and I didn't know anything! I told them you are an adult, now, and they didn't like that. I told them I wasn't your keeper. I guess they decided I will be from now on. I'm not happy about this either. Do you think I want you hanging around with my friends?"
"Your friends?" she sneered it at me, really pissing me off, "I wouldn't be caught dead around those losers. Now I can't even hang out with my friends without dragging your sorry ass along."
"Well, I guess you won't have to worry about that," I spat back at her. "I wouldn't hang out with those stuck-up bitches if you paid me. I guess we'll just be staying at home every day for the next year."
I turned and stomped out after that.
I think my mother overheard some of that. She is a stay-at-home mom, and I think the prospect of having me and my sister at home and at each others' throats for every single day of the next year terrified her. She approached me that evening, trying to talk to me in a soothing voice. She was really trying to be reasonable. I was just too angry and thick-headed to hear her out. After a lifetime of hearing her soothing voice, it just got on my nerves when she tried to talk me out of being mad and stupid.
Oh, I get all that now. Years later, I realize how smart and caring my mother really is. Back when I was a teenager, though, I thought she was just clueless.
For the remaining three days of summer vacation, Katie and I stayed around the house. Three or four times a day, we would get into a screaming match. Our parents wouldn't even bother to come into the same room. From wherever they were, we would hear them holler, "Keep it down in there!"
Usually, that would be the point that we would break off our arguing and just glare at each other before we walked away. A couple of times, we were so into our screaming match that we didn't hear our parents until the second or third time they yelled at us, at which point they would start threatening us with some dire punishment. We never pushed them to see if they would actually do it.
