I’m stuffing chocolate chip cookies into the toaster in my high school cafeteria because it’s Tuesday, I’m a sophomore, and I fucking hate myself. I watch the chocolate chips bubble next to the hot, red squiggles inside this crappy tin toasting machine, and as I feel the heat rising, I wish I hadn’t worn an outfit that is almost entirely made of pleather. The humidity today has already caused my red pleather pants to stick unpleasantly to my skin, so that they make squeaking noises when I sit and peeling noises when I stand. When will I learn that pleather is no match for New Jersey humidity? When will I learn that high school is hard enough without embarrassing oneself by wearing pleather? I can feel my hair lifting up from the sides of my head on its own like a giant, inflating koosh ball as the humid day creeps on. No day will ever be a good hair day as long as I live in the godforsaken swamp-ass state of New Jersey.

I know that people are waiting for me to be done so they can toast their bagels and bread. But I just need thirty more seconds….

From the corner of my eye, I can see a lunch lady approaching, as if in slow motion. She yells at me, “No cookies in the toaster! Ahhhh!” she shrieks, as if this is the one thing that could ruin her whole life. “I tell you kids every day! No cookies in the—”

But I’m saved by an interruption. Out of nowhere, the cafeteria has erupted into applause and loud whooping. Before I even turn my head, I know what it is. A group of guys dressed in blue button-down shirts and khakis have entered the room. I can feel tremors in the building’s foundation as all the girls in our high school whip their heads around to watch, salad still hanging from their open mouths. The dudes in the room turn to watch more slowly, trying to appear disinterested. Teachers pause, their tongs frozen in mid-air at the salad bar, smiling as the entire room falls under the spell of our school a capella group, The Button-ups.

The pack of singers form a kind of flying V, slowly swooping into the cafeteria while humming low background noises, as one man emerges to take the lead. As he walks to the front of the flying V, the applause and cheers grow louder until finally, he gets down on one knee in front of a girl named Amanda. He hands her a rose as he starts to sing, “Hey where did we go, days when the rains came.” Amanda erupts into giggles, as do the girls around her. She has been sent a singing Valentine. It’s her favorite song, “Brown Eyed Girl.”

Everyone in the whole school is in love with the guy singing. Everyone except for me. The guy singing is my brother.

 

My brother, just one year older than me, was the most popular kid in our high school. He obviously wasn’t the typical kind of popular. He wasn’t a jock who broke girls’ hearts and slammed scrawny kids into their lockers. But we went to a really intense private school where it was always Opposite Day: nerdy was cool, sporty was nerdy, cool was uncool. It was a place where a good-looking kid with a great personality and a special talent could be the most popular. My brother was that kid, and his special talent was singing. He had an amazing voice, and quickly became the president of The Button-ups. For reasons I will never understand, even after having watched Pitch Perfect, a capella was a really big deal at our school.

My brother sang his way through high school, starring at our morning meetings, crushing it at school concerts, and sweeping girls off their feet with random breakout songs in the lunchroom. He floated through his four years, from freshman to senior, unscathed by sadness. He got love letters from girls and high fives from guys daily. As I spent almost every lunch break sitting alone eating illegally toasted cookies, lacking the social and a capella skills to have friends, I was really fucking jealous of those high fives. I watched in disbelief as he continued to have the life I wanted, year after year.

And it wasn’t like I didn’t do anything interesting. I dutifully showed up to band practice every day for four years and pretended to blow air into my French horn, which I had secretly never learned how to play. But the band never got the accolades that the singers got. A bunch of guys who sang “bee bop ummmm skip yeahhhh!” were somehow better than all the rest of us, including those of us who were fake-playing the French Horn.

No one even knew my first name. People referred to me as “Bergh’s sister.” Excuse me? Bergh’s sister? He is Bergh’s brother. I am Bergh! But the truth was, I was usually too excited that anyone even roughly knew who I was to be mad.

 

What none of these high school people knew is that, before anyone knew my brother could sing, I ran the whole Bergh show.

As kids, my brother and I grew up in the middle of the woods, with no access to friends apart from one another and the deer that constantly chewed my mom’s azaleas. We had a typical pattern: I would invent some nonsensical game, and my brother would have to participate in it, because we lived in the woods and there was nothing else to do. Some of my most famous games included “Belinda’s Basket,” “Buddy Burger,” and “Figure Skater.” In Belinda’s Basket, I was a fortune-teller who would read fortunes (by looking into a basket full of ribbons) for passersby (who were all imaginary) while my brother played his keyboard in the closet behind me. In Buddy Burger, I was a fast-food worker who would hand pretzels to customers through the first-floor window of our house; the customers included: my brother on his bicycle, my brother in his imaginary car, my brother on foot, my brother on a skateboard, etc. In Figure Skater, my brother and I did triple-lutz jumps on the carpet in my room and ranked each other like judges in the Olympics. I invented all of our games. I always ran the show.

But in high school, he was Bergh, and I was Bergh’s sister. And slowly he started to look at me as a weirdo in pleather, instead of our family’s fierce ringleader. As many siblings do when they hit puberty, we started to grow apart. Although he used to think my weird ideas were cool, now he didn’t. He wanted to wear button-down shirts and be preppy, not hang out with his kooky sister.

Even as I realized how polar-opposite my brother and I were becoming, I wished that we weren’t. I tried to hold on to the younger days — when we were the same, when we didn’t have to choose sides, when we weren’t in opposing cliques. But as I got older, he called me a hipster, as if it was a bad thing, and I called him a doctor, because he is one now and I couldn’t really think of an insult.

It is a sad but true fact of life that sometimes two people with the same parents who were best friends as kids can grow up to have pretty much nothing in common.

My dream is that one day my brother and I will be good friends again. I know things will never be like they were when we were little, when we lived in a time without judgment of each other, without comparison or competition, without labeling and fear of being this or that. A time when I was running everything.

Recently, my brother got married. His fiancée asked me to be a bridesmaid in the wedding, even though my brother and I have talked infrequently for the past few years. It was a nice gesture. In fact, it meant more to me than I will ever be able to say. As I watched my brother and his new bride walk down the aisle, all I could think about was how great it felt to see him happy. And it hit me—why couldn’t I have always just been happy for him? So what if we were different, so what if we had gone in opposite directions? All that mattered was that he was happy.

As we danced the night away at my brother’s wedding reception, he had the biggest smile I had ever seen. And I felt like I finally saw him. Without the cloud of comparing myself to him, or wondering if he still liked me. Without the jealousy. I saw him, and celebrated him, for who he is. No one has to be Bergh’s sister or Bergh’s brother. We can both be Bergh.

My brother’s wedding made me realize that we are past the growing-apart phase, and now all that lies ahead is to grow back together.

Are we there yet? No, but we’re taking steps in the right direction.