He looked down. “Remember when I came to talk to you while you were tearing apart your room? ‘Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,’ I said. And I asked if I could help.”

I did remember that. I was already so worked up that I told him to get the hell away from me. And when he wouldn’t go, I chucked a moldy sandwich at him. So he left.

“I was gonna drop it behind your desk, then pull the desk out, and let you find it,” he told me. “But you didn’t want my help. So you didn’t get it.”

Of course none of that excused what he had done. “I swear, Hunter, sometimes it’s like I don’t even know you,” I told him. His answer to that still makes me shiver.

“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve never even tried.”

I didn’t tell Mom and Dad about the ticket. These kinds of things are between brothers. Instead I installed a better lock on my door—one with a code that no one knew but me. Which made my parents suspicious about what I might be doing in there, but then, if your parents aren’t a little paranoid, you’re not doing your job.

The thing is, no one ever fully trusts their siblings—that’s normal—but you do trust them to have your back when it really counts. Hunter and I didn’t even have that.

So did Hunter erase my WarMonger 3 file on purpose? You tell me.

“You can use one of my files,” he offered, never actually saying the words “I’m sorry” throughout his whole apology. “I wasn’t as far as you on any of them, but it’s better than nothing.”

At the moment I was still reeling from the loss, thinking about all that wasted time that I’d now have to waste all over again. But I thought about Hunter, and the way he was playing me. It was the same way he played checkers when he was little; stealing pieces off the board when I wasn’t looking. The only way to win was to walk away and deny him the victory. So I took a deep breath and swallowed my anger.

“No worries,” I told him. “I didn’t really like that game anyway.”

He was expecting a storm from me; my response threw him off. “But . . . but you said WarMonger 3 was better than the first two combined.”

I shrugged. “Did I? I don’t remember.” Then I left the room and didn’t look back at him, for fear that he might read some true feelings in my face.