I’m worried about my kids Donny and Rachel. They’re not right in the head, they argue all the time. Oh, I know siblings argue when they’re young, but the kind of behavior they’re exhibiting may require serious medication. Possibly, if it's still an option, lobotomies.
Rachel is the older one. She’s supposed to be the more mature of the two, and she can at least act it when she’s not around her brother. Don’t get me wrong, she’s got other issues, but at least she knows how to behave in public. But get her around Donny and she loses her shit. Completely. She’s the one that gets good grades in school, and all the teachers tell me what a joy she is to have in class, but get her around her brother and she behaves in ways that makes me wonder if she’s got any brains at all.
Little Donny, on the other hand, well… when God was handing out brains, Donny thought He said blame, and Donny said he would never take any of that. Nevertheless, despite his modest IQ and limited self-awareness, he knows how to play his little sister like a violin. A very highly-strung violin. How shall I put this? Let’s just say she’s brittle. You have to mind your words around her and if things aren’t done the way she expects them to go, well, imagine the sound of a violin being played by a badger. God, the shrieking can be unbearable. But that shrill sound is music to Donny’s ears. He lives to get a rise out of her, and she never fails to take the bait. It seems there’s nothing Donny would rather do than make his sister cry. The kid has empathy issues.
Of course, Rachel’s not innocent either. As much as she says she hates Donny, she always seems to be needling him as well. And as much as she says she’s polite and sensitive to the feelings of others, she’s always making fun of his hair and his hands and his weight. And she’s always saying he likes to kiss other boys. I tried to teach her better, I don’t know where she got that from.
And there’s nothing she likes better than to be able to snitch on Donny. Rachel has a thing for authority figures and is always trying to get either my wife or me, or a teacher, to punish Donny. Because even though Rachel is older and smarter and stronger, she’ll never stand up to Donny. Whenever push comes to shove, she caves to him.
But as much as she loves to rat out her little brother, as much as she wants to see him get in trouble, she only seems to care when it’s about her. Here’s a little story that I’m reluctant to share, but it gets the point across.
The other day I had to take the cat to the vet, and the kids came along for the ride. On the way home, the two of them were unusually quiet, which worried me. Then I get a whiff of something and after a moment I realize it’s the smell of burning hair. I turn around and there’s little Donny with a lighter, holding it to the cat kennel. I yell “What the hell are you doing?” And then I realize Rachel’s in the back seat and hasn’t said a thing. She must have seen what he was doing, must have smelled the burning hair smell, but she didn’t make a peep. She lives to draw attention to Donny’s misdeeds, and yet whenever he does something really horrible, she’s more worried about him being on her side of the seat or something. It seems she'd rather point out his use of bad Grammar than the fact that he's trying to torch a cat.
So I ask her why she didn’t say anything about her brother holding a lighter to the fucking cat and she just curls up into a fetal position and starts muttering “Russ, Russ, Russ,” over and over again. This is something she does every time she thinks she’s about to be blamed for something. (Russ is a kid at her school she blames for her not getting the role of the faerie princess in the school play. Why she blames him, she has never made clear, but she’s been freaking out about it for like two years now. When I talked to her teacher on parent/teacher night, she said Russ is one of the few kids who doesn’t do whatever Rachel asks of him on the playground. Now Rachel has it in her head that Russ is helping Donny steal her stuff around the house. She’s really obsessing about it, it scares me almost as much as the cat-burning incident. Hell, they’re both so creepy.)
I know they’re the only two kids I have and I should try to think more kindly of them. But here’s the thing: my wife and I aren’t getting any younger and we’re starting to think about getting our affairs in order both for when we won’t be able to take care of ourselves and for after we’re gone. We had a will made up and my wife said we would need an executor to take care of our business and assets once we couldn’t. She asked me which kid we should put in charge and I couldn’t even consider such an idea. “Come on,” she said, “which child do you trust to take care of us?”
“Neither,” I said. “All politeness aside, one’s a moron who likes to torch felines, and the other has a paranoid obsession about a boy at her school. Neither one is qualified for such an important task.”
“You have to decide,” she said. “You only have two choices, so just choose one.”
As succinctly as I could, I said, “No. Fucking. Way.”
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