I know I’m smarter than Brad—I know it—and not just because of grades. It’s like Brad never thinks or something. He just goes around and DOES things and that’s it. He’s very simple. But Brad was always golden, always good, always doing the right thing, even if the right thing was something dipshitty like getting his truck stuck in the mudflats or getting in trouble for fighting at Homecoming or something idiotic like that. But with me, the one who didn’t get caught, the one who didn’t usually fuck up, my mom was always sighing. And my dad? I don’t know what he was doing. He would ride Brad’s ass a lot, but that was because he was older and more into the kind of sports my dad liked: football, baseball. By the time it was my turn for that stuff, my dad was too fucked up to notice. I was trying to tell Neecie this, not in those words, really, but trying to explain all the shit in my head, in order for her to get it, why we were up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning in early February, but she just sat in the passenger seat of my car, holding her coffee and sausage biscuit on her lap.
