The night started out as expected, a crowd of wealthy donors mingling in a large ballroom, waiters in crisp uniforms offering cocktail shrimp and mini crab cakes. Elise and I huddled together by one end of the bar, sipping sparkling apple cider, laughing as she made fun of what some of the donors were wearing: “Sequins should be banned.” Mom chatted people up with Christian by her side, occasionally glancing at the door for Dad’s arrival. He’d gone into the Coke office that morning, taking his tux with him. He was supposed to join us here but when it came time to sit, he still hadn’t shown up. Watching Mom smile and make excuses for him to our tablemates, I could see the lines tighten around her eyes in anger.

Elise, not picking up on the tension, was peering at the person on the other side of my mom.

“I keep forgetting that Christian’s your brother,” she said, distracted.

I gave her a look. “We have the same last name.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to assume,” she said, her eyes still on him. Christian was Riverside-famous. Everyone at school seemed to have a crush on him, from the captain of the volleyball team to the president of Speech and Debate. Even Melody, who considered boys a waste of time, was drawn to his good looks and stellar grades. But he was more than grades and academic extracurriculars. He’d been class president every year until he ascended to student council president his senior year. He played three varsity sports, was the captain of the basketball team, and was being recruited by coaches at Brown and Princeton.

Christian was like our mom, constantly working to surpass that Asian-American stereotype. Mom was always telling us that we were American just like everyone else. She liked to remind people that both she and Dad had been born stateside, and once, when drunk, she delivered a rambling speech at the dinner table on the Japanese internment even though we weren’t of Japanese descent. “They locked up people who looked like us,” she said, pointing to her face. “Did they round up Germans or throw Italians into internment camps? No, of course not. Two-thirds of those interned were born here, but that didn’t matter. My grandmother wore a pin that said ‘I’m Chinese, not Japanese’ every day for years. Every single day. For years. Because she was afraid they’d take her store and ship her off by accident.”

It was like she wanted to wear pins that said “I’m American, not Chinese,” like it was still necessary to prove we belonged here.

All of this stuck with Christian but never quite affected me in the same way. Maybe because he was a stereotypical academic overachiever, he felt like he had to prove he wasn’t only that. Just like Mom, who was a doctor—a brain surgeon. Maybe I never felt that kind of pressure because any success at school I experienced was owed to Melody.

But Christian. Everyone wanted to be him or be with him. He was golden, could do no wrong, but more important, he was respected. And loved. In our family, the lines had been drawn early—Christian and Mom, me and Dad. Mom never bothered to hide the fact she favored Christian, her perfect everything. “The flagship child,” she called him once as a joke. He was going places and I was going nowhere. If he was the flagship child, I was an obscure and failing franchise, an eyesore they didn’t want marring the family name.