Dani

If you know me, you probably know my younger brother Daniel, or Dani, as I like to call him. Even though he is 14, he fits in pretty well among my friend group, and we often talk about him before swim practice. If you had just met us, you would guess we were always best friends, but that's not really the case.

When I was little, I was what I like to call a devil child. I was confident, surprisingly strong, and had no empathy. I loved being the alpha and I also loved making up new games. Among these games were me sitting on a pillow in a cardboard box and having Dani drive me around, playing town with our stuffed animals (my room was the house and his room was the store if you're wondering) and something I liked to call matatovdo where I spun around randomly and told Dani it was a new martial art that you had to feel within you to master, and then criticized his every move.

But perhaps the most evil of the games was one that lasted well past our move from Israel and until Dani was at least nine years old.

It all started when I noticed a bowl on the floor and I decided to make a game of it. And I told Dani to fill it with water. Of course he asks me why fill a random bowl with water, and I, being myself, told him that we needed to pray to the gods.

Obviously he didn't know about these gods that I had just made up, and asked me to tell him about them. I told him about how every person who is born is assigned a god based on where they were born. And I had the Santa Clause god (the only American entity I knew of at the time) and he had the Pharaoh god (because obviously a Pharaoh is Israeli).

So he filled the bowl with water as I instructed him and then got one for me. I told him that in order to keep the gods in our good graces, we needed to pray to the bowl of water every night and then leave it under the couch overnight every. I made Dani pray to that bowl of water for about a month, until one day my mom was walking by the couch and noticed something underneath. That was the end to the water-bowl praying.

A year and a half later, after we had moved to Champaign, and got settled, so my family decided to buy a new car. But, this wasn't any regular car, it was a 2009 silver Toyota Sienna. This silver mini van had a button on the right side of the back seat that could open the door automatically (a spectacular invention at the time). Dani, at this point, was around six years old, not as easily tricked into doing what I wanted, and fought me over the seat next to the button.

I, the genius that I am, remembered about our respective gods. I told Dani to remember his Pharaoh god. I said that I had talked to both of our gods ( I could communicate with the Pharaoh because I was an Israeli citizen, of course,) the Gods had said only a person with a Santa Clause god could sit on the right side of the car and that people with the Pharaoh god had to sit on the left (this was because America was on the right of Israel, a 100% proven fact). He gave up the seat.

Another couple years had gone by, and the gods had only made minor appearances, until we were ready to buy another new car. This car came fully loaded with a DVD player, a dvd player with only one remote that is. So of course we fought over it, so I pulled it out, my go-to reason for why I should get something, the Santa Clause god had told me that only people born in America could control the TV remotes of car DVD players, because the remotes were made in America. Logic right? Dani, now eight, was super skeptical and told me, “you know, sometimes I think the gods aren't even real,” But after I professed my deep belief in the Gods he kinda believed me, and guess who still has the control over the TV remote? This girl!

Even though all of these "games" are a part of my "pre-gender studies Sarah phase." I like to think that I made my brother's childhood interesting with all the games I invented. Sometimes I would get a burst of joy and we would play for hours on end instead of doing homework, or we would take all the cushions out of the couches, stack them up, and sit up high while watching TV. Of course the older he gets, the less of my shit he is willing to take, I can't even beat him up anymore!