I collect the last of the cards and rise, my posture more assured than hers but I don’t look like I took years of ballet like Rachel or like I listened in cotillion. I’m definitely not what my parents wanted me to be.

And I say aloud, to Nathan, “I’m not dealing another fucking person in, man. I’ve already started.” And I start. Right now. Looking like a dick as I do so.

Before Nathan protests, the girl leaves, weaving between a sloppy drunken guy who spills beer on her shoulders. It’s like watching Bambi lose its mother or something. And I can’t help but feel like we were the ones that shot the deer.

What do I do about it? I finish dealing the cards and numbly begin the next hand.

Around 2:30 a.m., I finally leave Nathan’s. I grab my bike and slowly (so fucking slowly) ride down the dim street, lit only by lamps and the few houses that reside here. Instead of houses stacked closely together, each mansion has acres by itself, leaving the neighborhood mostly barren.

I bike past grass and a couple trees.

Not far down, I turn right onto Cider Creek Pass. I live in the same gated neighborhood as Nathan Patrick. As Loren Hale and the Calloway sisters. Ever since they moved in, paparazzi camp outside the gates, waiting for them to leave. It’s pitiful—on whose part, I don’t really know.

I take my palms off the handlebars and just peddle, trying not to think about those people.

There it is.

Floodlights illuminate my front yard, white rose bushes outlining a gray stone, out-of-place Victorian mansion. Like we’re some kind of English royalty.

The minute I see my three older brothers on the stone front stairs—unevenly lounged and leaning against the iron railing—I think about riding away. My problem: I have nowhere else to really go.

“There he is.” I hear the muffled voice of my oldest brother, Davis. He rises first, football in hand. “Where’ve you been?” he asks me straight. It’s not concern on his face as much as annoyance.

I peddle onto the yard and then slowly climb off my bike, knocking it down without care. “Out,” I say, wanting to climb the steps and bypass them into the house, but I gain five-feet before they all join me in the yard, silently saying you’re not going anywhere.

We’re all two years apart from the next. And somehow they all look the same: short haircut, collared shirts, khaki pants and Sperry boat shoes.

Davis is the twenty-three-year-old college graduate, striving for his MBA and a position at my father’s million-dollar tech company. He sucks at computers, by the way. Can’t even read code—but he’s charismatic and a real “guy’s guy” so whatever.

Hunter is the twenty-one-year-old athlete with anger issues that everyone blames on “pent-up testosterone” because he refuses to fuck or masturbate until lacrosse season ends. He’s a dick—and I say this with zero brotherly affection. He destroyed that when I was a kid.