At some point during the first year I lived in the Bay Area, I got a nosebleed so bad my dad let me skip school. I was ten years old, and the blood wouldn’t stop flowing. We could get it to slow down, but never, it seemed, to cease permanently. At first, I was happy for the opportunity to stay home—I had not been adjusting to the move well—but as time wore on, my head began to pound, my throat stinging from the saltiness that would not abate. The blood dripped not just through my nostrils, but down the back of my throat, where it would clot, and I would spit it out in large chunks. The bathroom sink was stained pink, and the trashcan was overflowing with red tissues. 

Once, the cabinet would have been stocked with all sorts of nasal sprays, saline solutions, and hydrating gels. I became used to smearing sticky ointments on Q-tips and sticking them up my nose, swabbing, oftentimes in vain. By the time I reached sixth grade the following year, all of our bedrooms had humidifiers. This family was no stranger to nosebleeds, and it was a rare occurrence for us to be ill-prepared.

One such occasion had been the first day of school earlier that year. Of everyone in the family, I had been the only one unhappy with the move, unable to shake the notion that swapping palm trees for redwoods would spell my ruin. I’d been relatively outgoing in Los Angeles, amongst the same kids I had known since kindergarten in a grade of 40 people at a small private school. Socially content, certainly. But then, it’s easy to be outgoing in a contained space filled with people you have known since you were five. Up here, I was quiet. Overnight, I experienced a nearly 180-degree personality change. 

The shyness had stemmed from an anxious spiral I’d had surrounding my weight. I had determined at some point in the last few years that I was too large, and that because of this largeness, no one at my new school—or anywhere else for that matter—would want to be friends with me. This, of course, did not apply to the other kids at my old school, because, as fifth-grade me saw it, they had met me as a cute kindergartener, and my transition to an unlovable, awkward, ugly preteen had been too gradual for them to take notice. They liked me for my personality, which they had gotten to know before I’d developed a hideous exterior. It was not the most logical train of thought, but then, at age ten, my primary basis for logic probably came out of the daydreams inspired by the middle-grade fantasy books I liked to read. 

Regardless of how I arrived at the nonsensical point that I did, by the time I showed up in Northern California, I was convinced my chubbiness was the equivalent of predetermined social doom. And in a way, perhaps it was. Insecurity fueled a shyness that propped up walls. On the first day of school, I found the only empty table I saw in my assigned homeroom classroom and sat there with the reasoning that if I sat next to someone already sitting down, they might be mad at me for sitting next to them, but if I was the first to sit down at a table, they couldn’t be. Wearing my favorite shirt, a teal-green-to-royal-blue gradient sequined blouse, had not done the wonders for my confidence my mother and I had hoped it would. It took about a year for me to feel fully socially integrated. 

The day did not end much better than it had begun. I had been tasked with taking the bus home from school for the very first time. Sitting in my seat, excited for the day to be over, my nose started to bleed. I searched my backpack for the travel tissues I usually carried with me, but there were none. I sat there, powerless, as blood rushed all over me, all over my favorite shirt, all over the bus. I would have had the same luck, it felt, stopping the Pacific Ocean from washing over a sandcastle in Santa Monica, rolling it back into the sea, grain by grain. Sometimes in life, I learned, you sit there, and you wait. And you think of metaphors, and you think of how much you miss school in Santa Monica. 

When we arrived at the first stop, the bus driver walked up to me and told me I had to get off—one of the kids on the bus had a blood phobia. I was a walking biohazard, so I had to leave. 

The one fortunate coincidence of the day—it did just so happen to be my stop. But I don’t think the bus driver knew that. And as I greeted my mom, absolutely covered in blood, blue sequins stained red, I took comfort in the fact that, at least that day, no one could call me overdramatic about what an absolute shitshow it had been. As time wore on, I became known as the hypersensitive one of the family, easily upset by unkind words from my younger brothers. But that day, if I said I had returned from battle defeated, at least I looked the part. 

***

My brother Oliver got a nosebleed during the first AP test he ever took. It was European History. The proctor said that if he wanted to, he could stop and retake it at a later time. He chose to push through. He felt ready. He didn’t want to delay anything. He got a cauterized nose and a 5. I was surprised by neither. 

My mom likes to point out how different Oliver and I are. He has always excelled academically, and while I floundered anxiously about trying to raise my grades, perfect scores in math seemed to come easily to him. In high school, he was athletic, a member of the cross country team, and a recreational lifter, while I stayed adamantly away from any sports. If I’m being honest, I hated him straight out of the womb. I vaguely remember trying to be nice to him as a two-year-old and making him cry. I don’t know if we ever really got past that. 

In high school, Oliver was never the nicest to me either. I didn’t appreciate his comments about my weight or my social awkwardness, but back then, was I all that nice to him either? He was diagnosed with an eye tracking problem in third grade, and while he’d done the therapy for it, he never developed a love of words the way I did. I helped him out with a lot of essays in middle school, and he developed a reputation in the family as a subpar reader and writer. Can I really hold a younger version of him accountable for picking apart the way my body looked in high school, when the younger version of me made fun of him for his reading difficulties? 

Maybe children are just ruthless. 

In my freshman year of college, I was deputized to read and edit his college applications, as expected. I was shocked at how well-written they were. More than that, I was surprised at their thoughtfulness. 

I knew Oliver was smart. I didn’t know he was kind.

In high school, Oliver volunteered as a youth member of our county’s search and rescue program—the team that looks for missing people and, often, is tasked with bringing in the bodies. It is one of the only search and rescue departments in the country that includes minors. He’d phrased the decision to join to us as solely a sell to college admissions teams. I don’t buy it. You don’t write the kinds of words he did without caring, at least a little. In one of his essays, he discussed the experience of searching for an elderly woman who had gotten lost in the Marin Headlands, comforting a woman whose son had been found after a suicide, and finding a lost little kid. Humidifier blaring in my dorm, several thousand miles from home, I was confronted with the dual possibilities that my brother was a) adept at storytelling and b) a good person. 

Oliver and I have remained different since his matriculation to Dartmouth. He rarely responds to my texts or picks up my calls. When we do talk, it’s mostly about his anxiety about finance recruiting. He seems to be going through a phase in which he pretends he does not feel empathy. He talks poorly about his girlfriend, to the extent that one of my former friends cited my complacency in his treatment of her as a reason for our falling out. I found it difficult to be around him after some of the insensitive comments he made about the December 13 shooting. 

And yet he was also the one who comforted me after my first breakup, inviting me to go on a drive with him and providing the best reassurance I got that day as the winding roads in our hometown blurred through the car window. Apparently, he begged my parents to put money in my Roth IRA, which they point to as a sure sign of love—even if he’ll never say it out loud. Perhaps that’s why the rest of my family members emphasize that it’s a performative callousness, that he doesn’t actually think the things he says. I compare the words he wrote about himself years ago, and the way he talked about those words, and I know that they’re right, and I find it hard to care. 

Oliver is brilliant, but nothing is good enough for him. I think he looks down on me because he is so much closer to traditional metrics of success—particularly financial ones—than I am. He has said, on numerous occasions, that I am too sensitive. I parry by looking down on him because I’m not sure if he’ll ever be happy. He was convinced that he wouldn’t get into Dartmouth until he got in, upon which he instantaneously became convinced that they would rescind his offer of admission. When it became clear that he would undoubtedly be attending in the fall, he bemoaned that Dartmouth wasn’t prestigious enough anyway. He labored over IB applications, complaining daily to my mother that he was destined for unemployment. He’d been excited about one particular bank right up until they offered him a job, upon which, predictably, his belief that the internship offer was a great one disappeared. 

His attitude toward himself leaks into the people around him. Last year, he’d mocked my inability to secure a summer internship right up until I got one, upon which he started lamenting all the reasons why working in New York was a terrible idea. I snapped at him that he was never satisfied—not with me, and not with himself. To me, it was exactly the same as what high school had been—he’d made fun of me for being fat, then he’d made fun of me for all my attempts to lose weight. To him, this was a faulty comparison. 

Despite these differences, he’s my brother through and through. For a while, silver nitrate solved at least one of Oliver’s problems. They returned, however, in dramatic fashion, on the day of his high school graduation. I squinted from my seat in the audience, trying to see if I could make out my brother in the crowd, let alone the trickle of blood that he’d texted the family group chat was coming down his face. 

He got lucky that our school’s robes were also red. At least he matched. 

Sitting in the audience, watching my brother occupy a place I had once stood years prior, I was filled with a sense of distorted dèjà vu. Oliver and I had such different high school experiences. We were destined for such different futures. And yet every time his nose bleeds, it’s a reminder that he’s always family.

***

I caught the flu on the way back from a long weekend trip to Chicago. It was the sickest I had been in years. Shaking with fever and coughing beneath my mask on the Uber ride back to campus, I recognized that familiar briny taste in my mouth before I felt the dripping from my nose and knew that my problems had been compounded. I asked my friend Lily, sitting in the backseat, for a napkin or a tissue, and then took a photo of me, weary and puffy-eyed, holding my bloody hand up to my face, and sent it to my brother.

curse these genetics bro

He didn’t respond, but then, did I expect him to? 

Lily and I said goodbye to our friend Kate and hauled our suitcases to Sears. She lives right across the hall from me, so she was able to witness me, immediately upon entering my room, double over in an involuntary coughing fit so bad that the napkin fell out of my nose. Blood spattered onto the floor like one of the Pollocks we had seen in the Chicago Art Institute a few days prior. 

“Shit!” 

I left the suitcase at the door, still unable to stop coughing, scrambling through my room in disarray, trying to find where I had left the paper towels, exhausted and unable to rest just yet, shaking with another wave of fever chills. 

“Just go stop the blood in the bathroom,” Rose told me, “and I’ll clean up the rest.”

And when I got back from the bathroom, still quite ill but at least a little cleaner, the blood on my floor had been replaced with an arsenal of NyQuil, there were cough drops on my desk, and a freshly brewed cup of non-caffeinated tea in my friend’s outstretched hand. 

All this to say—I hope my brother’s got people taking care of him too.