In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World

  Be Friends with the SPED Kids!

  And not just SPED kids, but anyone in your school who is physically or mentally different. By ignoring them, you’re denying yourself a chance to make a new friend. You’re also missing out on an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes, which is a cool thing to experience. Even something as simple as saying “hi” or giving someone a high five in the hallway can make a person feel special or important. Often you need to be the one to make the first move, because the person might be too shy or intimidated to reach out. Don’t be scared. You won’t regret it. And besides, what have you got to lose?

  Chapter 2

  My Hero

  I’ve always worshiped my older sister, Nicole. She’s one of my closest friends in the world, but it hasn’t always been that way. Before I was born, she was the only child—the golden-haired daughter who was used to getting all of the attention. Then I came along, and suddenly she had to compete for affection.

  There’s an old family story that my dad likes to tell. Neither of us remembers the incident, so who knows if it’s true, but supposedly when I was a year old and she was six, she was pushing me on one of those baby-proof swings, and she unlatched it and pushed me so hard that I flew right off. I wasn’t seriously injured, but it wasn’t exactly a great start to our friendship.

  As I got a little older and became more of a person (rather than an endless series of dirty diapers), she still didn’t like me very much, but I was obsessed with her. I thought she was the coolest, prettiest, most stylish, and smartest girl in the world, and I was crushed whenever she acted mean or decided that she didn’t have time for me.

  Still, for a stretch of years, we were both old enough to play the same sorts of imaginary games. When I was five and Nicole was ten, we both became infatuated with the movie A Little Princess, which is based on a book about a little girl trapped at a boarding school with a cruel headmistress. We made up a game that we called Miss Minchin, after the villain in the story. The entire game consisted of our locking ourselves in the bathroom and pretending that Miss Minchin was forcing us to scrub it from top to bottom. I’m not sure why we thought that was fun, but my mom definitely approved of it. What can I say? We were weirdos. But I was happy just being on Nicole’s radar for however long the game lasted.

  We shared a bedroom for years, and I’d often wake up from a nightmare, tiptoe over to her bed, and crawl in with her. One night, she woke up as I was trying to scurry under her covers. She sat up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m scared,” I said. “Can I sleep with you?”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “The dark.”

  I heard her sigh. “You need to get over that,” she said. “It’s stupid. Go to the bathroom. Then you can sleep with me.”

  For some reason I took this to mean that she wanted me to go and stand in the bathroom with the lights out in order to face my fear of the dark. So I did. I stood there, shadows moving around me, convinced that a big hairy monster was hiding behind the shower curtain. I closed my eyes and counted to one hundred before scooting back to our bedroom as fast as I could.

  “Okay,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder. “I’m back.”

  “Did you pee?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t have to,” I said, confused.

  “Fine, you can still sleep with me, but you’d better not wet the bed.”

  It was only then I realized she couldn’t care less about me facing my fears. She just wanted to make sure she woke up with dry sheets. But she’d unknowingly done me a favor. Standing there in the dark that night, I may have been terrified, but I had made myself stay in there, knowing that I would be rewarded if I did. The experience taught me that if I could keep my wits together through the scary moments in life, things would usually turn out just fine. I went to sleep that night feeling stronger and more confident, relaxed by the sense that everything would be just fine. And then I peed the bed. (Just kidding!)

  We moved around a lot when I was little. In fact, we never stayed in the same place for more than two years, a pattern that oddly (or not) has remained true throughout my entire life so far. My mother shared joint custody with my dad after the divorce when I was two years old, so Nicole and I spent every other weekend at his house. Dad was a ladies’ man with a groovy seventies moustache. He was popular in town, and every few months he’d land a new girlfriend. Nicole and I grew really close to each one, so we were always bummed out to arrive and find a pretty stranger sitting in the living room, smiling nervously at the prospect of meeting us. But we’d get over the disappointment fast, knowing that we were about to make a new friend.

  At Dad’s house, Nicole and I shared a bed with him when we were younger. My sleeping arrangements at Mom’s weren’t ideal either. She didn’t make a lot of money as a hairdresser at the local salon, and in one of the apartments that we lived in with her, I didn’t even have a bed—just a mattress on the floor. I felt insecure about it, because every kid I knew had an actual bed to sleep in. Nicole knew how I felt, so one day she gathered a bunch of bins and chests from all the different rooms and put them under the mattress to lift it off the floor, creating the illusion of an actual bed frame. I was so grateful, even if it was a little wobbly.

  Because of our financial issues, toys were scarce. One year for Christmas, our mom even had to take us to the local church to get presents and food for dinner. There weren’t many donations, and we each went home with a second-hand jacket. This lack of toys meant that Nicole and I had to keep relying heavily on our imaginations for fun. When we visited our father, we spent hours in the woods behind his house, exploring what all the neighborhood kids called the “murder barn,” an abandoned house where someone had supposedly been killed years and years before. It was creepy—pretty much what you’d expect from a place called the freaking murder barn—and the walls were practically crumbling. We made up stupid dares, like challenging each other to see who could spend the longest amount of time inside alone, and we always made friendly conversation with the spiders running everywhere, so they would become our buddies and not bite us. Then we’d creep through the forest together like little wood nymphs, pretending that we were on safari and on the hunt for lions and tigers. Our father, a carpenter, always had huge sheets of plywood and metal that we’d drag into the woods and use to build little forts for our games of house.

  Nicole could get bossy though, and really mean out of nowhere. One minute we’d be happily pretending to be a mother and son living alone in a forest, and the next second she’d be screaming at me for saying the wrong thing and screwing up the game.

  She’d also try and get me in trouble sometimes. I remember one day when we were playing in our room and out of nowhere she goes, “Come on, Joey, say fuck.”

  I told her, “No way. That’s a bad word,” but she persisted: “It’s okay. It’s just us here alone. Trust me, it’s funny!”

  Of course I trusted her. She was my super-awesome big sister, and so I timidly whispered the word.

  “MOM!” Nicole immediately screamed. “Joey’s swearing!”

  Mom burst into the room. “What’s going on here?”

  “Joey said the F-word.”

  “No I didn’t,” I stammered. “I said . . . um . . . fire truck.” But it was too late.

  “Stay right there, young man,” Mom said and marched off to the kitchen while Nicole smirked devilishly from her bed. Mom reappeared with a bottle of Tabasco sauce. “Stick out your tongue.”

  “No,” I wailed. “That stuff burns!”

  “Yes it does, and it serves you right. Now stick out your tongue.”

  I closed my eyes and did what she said, crying out as I felt the taste spread like a fire in my mouth. When Mom left the room, I started bawling with my head buried under my pillows.

  “Joey?” I heard Nicole whisper.

  “Go away!”

  “Here, this will help.” She rolled me over gently and hande
d me a glass of water. I took a sip and felt cool relief. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I feel awful.”

  And so I forgave her, as I always did, because for the most part, we were a team. I wouldn’t tell on her if I caught her doing things like sneaking out of the house to play when she was grounded, and in exchange I got to hang out with her and her friends when they came over. But she did have a temper and could randomly even become violent. One day when I was in the third grade, she shoved me down the stairs, totally unprovoked. It was terrifying, and I howled with fear and pain as I hit the floor. I remember looking up and seeing her at the top of the stairs, an expression of horror on her face, as if she couldn’t actually believe what she had just done. Our stepfather went ballistic, threatening to send her away to a juvenile detention center.

  From then on, Nicole never physically harmed me in any way, but she still bossed me around or, worse, outright ignored me. When she was yelling at me, it meant I was in her sphere of consciousness, so I knew that I mattered. The silent treatment really sucked because I thought it meant that she didn’t even care enough about me to bother yelling. The more she pushed me away, the more I wanted to be close to her. All I wanted was her acceptance.

  I had another ally in the house, though: my stepfather, Bob. My mom married him when I was in first grade. He’s a computer engineer and has always been kind to Nicole and me. When he first started coming around the house, I called him the Chinese man because he always brought us Chinese food. And a few years later, he brought something even better into the house: my dog. The reason we got a pet was that Bob was convinced that we needed a guard dog after his wallet went missing (never mind that it turned out he’d just left it by the grill out back). We went to a pet store at the mall (this was way before I understood the importance of rescuing dogs from shelters), and he let me choose an Australian shepherd with different shades of brown fur, like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. I named her Bailey, and she became my constant companion. I would tie her leash to my little Razor scooter and she would pull me through the neighborhood. We played a game where I’d build little forts around myself with cardboard boxes and no entrance, and she’d then tear down the walls, tail wagging furiously, to be by my side. She slept with me every night and licked my face whenever I was feeling sad.

  I really loved Bob (and still do!), not just for bringing Bailey into my life but for the attention and affection he showered on me. He moved us from the janky apartment we were living in to a big white house with a huge yard and a trampoline. It was perfect, like something straight out of a feel-good family TV show. Bob took us on vacations too, to places like Disney World and the Caribbean. He cared about all of us deeply. But when Nicole became a teenager, she fought with him and my mother constantly, the way most teenagers do. Her arguments with my mother got so bad that she ended up moving out of our house and in with my dad when I was in the eighth grade. Whenever I saw her at my dad’s house every other weekend, she always had the best clothes, listened to the coolest music, and had tons of friends around. I was jealous, because, of course, my own social life was seriously lacking.

  The year I started high school is when everything really changed with Nicole and me. She was a senior that year, so my parents arranged for her to come and pick me up every morning to drive me to school. On the first day, she screeched to a stop in front of my mom’s house and I ran out to meet her.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing me a toasted bagel with cream cheese and some orange juice. She turned up her stereo and blasted techno music the whole way to school while I munched on my breakfast. When we cruised into the parking lot together, everyone stared, and I felt like the coolest kid alive. She even walked me to my first class. I didn’t have a single friend, though, and when lunchtime came, I entered the cafeteria and nervously surveyed the crowd. It was like a high school movie cliché: every table was filled with different cliques. Jocks, nerds, emo kids, and druggies all sat huddled together like different tribes. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and there weren’t even any available seats. I cautiously approached a table of Hispanic girls, hoping they’d squeeze over to make room for me, but they just looked at me as if I was a crazy person when I asked if I could sit with them. Just then, one of my sister’s friends, Ashley, walked by, and I asked her if she’d seen Nicole anywhere.

  “Yeah, she’s way over there in the back,” she said. I craned my neck and saw Nicole and all of her popular, beautiful friends waving me toward them. I felt that all eyes were on me as I, a lowly eighth grader, crossed the cafeteria to sit with the most gorgeous group of girls in school. I adored Nicole at that moment. She could easily have ignored me, the way so many siblings do when they attend the same school. But she reached out and made my first day shine. For the rest of the year, she picked me up every morning and had breakfast waiting for me in the car. Her friends all adopted me as their pet little brother and always said hi in the hallway. I think their protection really helped me avoid a lot of bullying that first year—at least when they were around. I did get bullied in the gym locker room by upperclassmen. Before school started, I was terrified of the idea of having to shower with other people. That never ended up happening because it wasn’t required, but even when I was fully clothed, the upperclassmen took turns picking on me. Sometimes it was because my clothes reeked of my mother’s cigarette smoke (DISGUSTING—don’t ever smoke, please!), or sometimes they’d laugh about my hair, which, now that I think about it, they had every right to considering I bleached my bangs blond. (So nineties!) But it wasn’t just the bleached tips: I used gel to make my bangs stick up straight into the air. They’d ask what I used to achieve that effect, but faster than I could say, “Paul Mitchell Sculpting Gel,” they’d call me a fag and say it was probably semen from another guy. I guess they’d watched There’s Something about Mary a few too many times, but I was so clueless at the time that I didn’t even really know what the word semen meant. I’d just laugh it off, even though I could tell from their undertone that it wasn’t meant to be funny.

  Even my sister was teased by her guy friends about how feminine I looked and acted. They always asked her if I was gay. She would stick up for me and tell them I wasn’t, but one day she took me aside at school and told me I should start walking around with more boys because people were starting to talk. I didn’t have any guy friends, though, so from then on, I began to feel extremely self-conscious about the people I was seen with. Sometimes I’d lurk behind a big group of guys I didn’t know while walking down the hall just to make it seem that I was part of their gang. High school can be a scary place and I wanted to make sure I was protected (I felt like one of those tiny fishes that stick close to the side of a big shark).

  It wasn’t just the kids at school who were wondering if I was gay, though. One day after school, I walked into the kitchen to find Nicole and my mom sitting at the table. Mom asked me to sit down with them. Apparently Nicole had told her that I was being teased at school, and Mom straight out asked me: “Joey, are you gay?”

  It was clear from the tone of her voice that there would be no judgments, no matter what the answer. She wasn’t being confrontational at all, just gently supportive.

  “No,” I scoffed. “Of course not. I like girls.”

  The two of them exchanged glances as I got up and went to my room, and the subject wasn’t brought up again.

  As I grew older, Nicole always supported me in every decision I made, especially when it came to following my YouTube dreams. Today she lives in Boston, and we see each other a few times a year. We talk on the phone constantly. She’s one of my biggest cheerleaders, and I don’t think I’d be where I am today if she hadn’t had my back. I love you, Nicole, even if you did push me down the stairs like a homicidal maniac.

  Ten Reasons to Be Friends with Your Sibling(s)

  1. You never know when you’ll need someone to bring you toilet paper.

  2. They will cover for you if you break something.

  3. They wil
l help you come up with an alibi if you break curfew.

  4. You get a lifetime of inside jokes that no one else will understand.

  5. They can help you break into new social circles at school.

  6. You can trust them way more than your friends to be honest with you about your creative work.

  7. They provide entertainment when you get stuck at boring relatives’ houses.

  8. No one else will ever understand just how crazy your parents actually are.

  9. Once you’re both adults, they will always have your back, no matter what happens.

  10. There’s a chance you will need a kidney donor someday.

  A Few More Weird Games I Used to Play with Nicole

  Courthouse: I would pretend to be a judge and my sister would plead different cases in front of me. I loved using my mom’s wooden meat mallet as a gavel!

  Manhunt: This is basically hide-and-seek with our cousins, but everyone who gets found joins the seeker and it becomes a big mob tracking you down, so it’s much scarier.

  Runaway orphans: Nicole and I would pretend our parents were dead, and to avoid being placed in a foster home, we’d pack up tote bags full of snacks and bottles of water and go off to live on our own in the woods.

  And, last but not least: OMG THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!!

  How to Approach Strangers in the Cafeteria

  Don’t freak out if you don’t have a place to sit. Approach a table and ask if anyone is sitting at an empty seat. If you get rejected, move on and try again. Don’t get discouraged if people are rude. Just keep trying, and no matter what, don’t be afraid to sit by yourself. It can actually help cultivate an air of intrigue! People will think you’re the brooding, mysterious type. The main goal here is to not end up eating alone in a toilet stall. If all else fails, sit with the SPED kids. They will always welcome you!

  Why Your Own Imagination Is Better Than Your iPad