Like most siblings with a five-year age gap, my brother and I got off to a rough start. When he was two and I freaked out because he stole my genius idea of Beanie Baby bungee jumping off the balcony, which had more of the effect of Beanie Baby suicide, I locked myself in my room crying for hours.
When he was 11 and had a laughing fit when a monkey shat on my head in an indoor zoo, I slapped him.
But over the last couple of years, my brother Bryce has come to be my best friend. He's the only person to whom, when he tells me I'm ""so pretty,"" I can reply, ""I know."" He's also the only man in my life who will say, ""Yeah, you do kind of look pregnant in that dress,"" when prompted.
Bryce and I conducted our high school selves very differently. I pretended to be shy so I wouldn't have to talk to most people. Bryce, on the other hand, thrives in the spotlight. He's a bona fide theater kid—the kind of guy who's asked to sing solos at all school assemblies and who's never experienced rejection in his life.
Ironically, his attraction to the spotlight brought us to the bumblefuck town of DeKalb, about an hour out of Chicago. There he participated in the regional a cappella competition with his high school group over spring break at the local high school.
DeKalb, I learned, is famous for barbed wire, a fact the high school was sure to showcase every chance it got. Their central display case flaunted plaques with samples of all the different kinds of barbed wire that originated in the town. Their mascot was, wait for it, the barbs.
I tried to imagine football and basketball games at DeKalb High. They probably found their most anorexic students, dressed them in rust-colored jumpsuits and glued a bunch of prickly objects to their bodies. This made me sad, mostly because I knew I'd never be skinny enough to look like barbed wire.
Before they sang, I went out to lunch with my brother and a couple of his fellow singers. Unlike Bryce, who likes to make fun of me for still getting carded at R-rated movies and my supernatural inability to cook noodles, I got the sneaking suspicion that his classmates were looking at me in awe. There is a real, live college student, they thought.
""Did anyone see that puppy shit in front of the restaurant? Holy crap! What was that thing eating?"" I asked as I sat down at the table. ""I'm Kiera by the way."" I extended my hand. No one accepted.
I looked around at these kids. They were '90s babies. They were mere infants during the Nickelodeon glory days of ""Are You Afraid of the Dark?"" and ""The Adventures of Pete and Pete."" I must look like an old lady to them. If only, when I was their age, I knew what I know now. I probably would've just skipped college and honed my pole-dancing skills instead. I also would've stopped eating, so that I could be barbed wire.
The competition lasted for almost three hours. My brother, who had a solo, did incredibly. After one group la la'd and bee-bopped their way through a song titled ""Words,"" which, ironically, had no words, and after an awkward prepubescent boy gave a rather inappropriate interpretation of Maroon 5's ""This Love"" (this included hip circles during the line ""keep her coming every night""), my brother's group was awarded second place.
""The first-place group sucked,"" their psycho teacher complained, glaring disappointedly at her students.
The first-place group didn't suck. They were actually really good, like many of the other groups that didn't place.
Suddenly I wanted to protect them. Not just my brother, but all of them. I wanted to shield them from the unfounded criticism of the crazies of the world, of deranged choir teachers, self-righteous professors and lunatics whose Beanie Babies once committed suicide.
I wanted to pull her aside and say, ""Listen, bitch. You're an ungrateful wacko. You belong in the zoo, and that's not just because of how mean you are to these kids. It's because somewhere along the way you've become so unhinged that you refuse to recognize that your face bares an uncanny resemblance to Homer Simpson's ass.""
But, of course, I didn't. I'm not a hero. I was never supposed to be a hero. I'm the older sister who looks like she's 12 and cracks jokes about dog shit. All I can do now is hope that that's what those kids needed that night, and not a post-mortem choir teacher who was mysteriously impaled on good-old DeKalb barbed wire.
If you can name more than one type of barbed wire, e-mail Kiera at wiatrak@wisc.edu.
