His Ride or Die

Jump in the Pegasus. All kinda reckless, the necklace. All kinda reckless, I flexed it.

Rae Sremmurd’s “Perplexing Pegasus” blasts through the speakers of my green, ‘05 Ford Escape. My curly haired, 11-year-old brother, Christian, is sitting shotgun next to me, belting out every word. I’m thinking to myself, “How the hell does he know this song?” But I don’t really care. So we keep driving to meet our family at Dos Reales for Taco Tuesday, nailing every line, except for the mumble rap of Lil Pump.

This is every car ride with my brother, Christian. We may share the same music taste, but that’s one of the only things we have in common.

He’s a soccer guy. I’m a football guy. He wears his Adidas joggers and Adidas EQT shoes while I wear my Levi’s and Nocona boots. His room has posters of Lionel Messi and Dom Dwyer while mine has boxes of .243 deer hunting shells and deer antlers hanging on the wall.

We come from the same family, but we could not be more different. Really, in almost every way. But somehow that hasn’t stopped either of us from being as close as Ricky Bobby and Cal Jr. from Talladega Nights (don’t worry he doesn’t know who they are…yet.)

I can’t think of a time when we aren’t laughing when we are together.

Every day after school you can find me in my unusually tall bed, attempting to take a nap. I can time down to the minute when my brother whips into the driveway on his gray, electric Razor scooter at 3:24 pm. His room’s down the hall from mine. Everyday, without fail, he stops in my doorway to ask me how my day was, what I did and if any of my friends were coming over later.

It’s the little things like a “HEY HARRY” when he walks in the door that make me cherish the few months I have left with Christian. I will be going to the University of Arkansas in the fall, and he won’t be there to greet me in the kitchen when I come down while he’s eating his scrambled eggs with bananas breakfast or lose to me in Madden. I love being around him, but for all the struggling pairs out there, don’t worry, he isn’t perfect.

He knows how to annoy and piss me off more than my worst enemy. The mildest of them all is purposely singing off key. The rest I’ll leave out for the sake of him not being grounded. But knowing these things is what brings us so close. Next year, no one is going to know which buttons to push and flip what their doing to make me laugh like Christian does.

From standing on the sideline of every football game I have played to sitting front row during my performance as Kenickie in Grease my eighth grade year, he’s always there. He’s 11, so I’m going to take a wild guess that he probably doesn’t enjoy being forced into all of these activities. But I’m not sure he knows that it still means the world when he’s there giving me constructive criticism on my games, “you should’ve caught that,” (even though he doesn’t even play football.)

Yes, we are pretty much polar opposites. Pictures of my 11-year old self look almost identical to him and we talk alike, sure, but we are 100% different. Yet being unique in our own ways has brought us closer than most. I love the kid.

P.S. Christian, don’t miss me too much next year. And keep learning rap lyrics so we can jam in the car. But listen to the clean version or else Mom and Dad won’t be too happy.