My second instinct was to erase all of his files, but then I realized he would have anticipated this, and maybe didn’t care. It was quite possible that he was done with the game, which meant that my retaliation would have no effect at all. He’d win, and would secretly gloat that he had completely duped and manipulated me.

At this point, you may feel I was overthinking this—but if you do, then you’ve never experienced the mind-boggling actions of a passive-aggressive sibling.

Case in point: three months ago.

A bunch of friends and I were going to see the band Konniption in concert. They actually broke up the day after the gig, so it would be the last time anyone would ever see Konniption perform.

And I lost my ticket.

Usually that wouldn’t be a problem. You just print out a new one, right? But one of the band’s eccentricities was that you had to actually go down to the stadium and wait in a physical line, to get physical tickets, as an intentional throwback to the early days of rock and roll. And my ticket had vanished.

“Your room’s such a mess; how can you find anything?” my mother had pointed out. This was true, but if it was a mess before, that was nothing compared to the debris field left behind after I tore through my room like a tornado searching for that stupid piece of paper.

Ticketless, I went with my friends anyway to plead my case at the entrance, but, of course, no one at the gate cared, or even believed me. I ended up spending the whole night sitting in the car, listening to my Konniption playlist, and pretending I was inside hearing them live.

It didn’t occur to me until a week later that maybe I didn’t lose that ticket at all.

One night while Hunter was off at a friend’s house, I did a much less destructive search of his room for my ticket, on a hunch. I found it—it was in his top desk drawer beneath some old homework. He hadn’t even hidden it well.

I was furious, but by the time he got home, my anger had turned to sad bewilderment.

“Why?” I asked him. “Why would you do that?”

At first he claimed he found it after the concert, but even he knew that story had no wings to fly. Finally he got red and teary-eyed and said, “You could have gotten me a ticket, but you didn’t even think to ask me, did you? I would have paid with my own money, too.”

“So you made sure that I couldn’t go out of spite?”

“I was gonna give it back to you,” he insisted. “I just wanted to freak you out for a while.”

“So why didn’t you give it back?”