I was never the type of person to invite people home. Group hangouts? Not at my place. Getting ready before a party? I’m sure someone else’s bathroom is 10 times better. Sleepovers? My bed just isn’t the comfiest. I always had a reason lined up as to why my house was the perfect place not to host.
I can give you 50 different reasons as to why I felt so, but what was always at the top of the list was my room. There was nothing explicitly wrong with my room; I just hated it. I didn’t like the decor, the walls were an ugly colour, the house was too old, but most importantly, my room was messy. Not messy with clothes lying around, but messy with the life I’ve lived over the years, and that embarrassed me. I was embarrassed by the paint stains on the floor, the chipped walls, the scratched-up wood, and the “I love you 3000” mandala. On the rare occasion that I’d let anyone in my room and they’d see the mandala, I would always get made fun of. The small cabinet right next to my bed, with two doors to open it with: One proper door, a full wood piece, the other, just a frame with a giant, gaping hole in the middle, with the flimsy mandala that I used as a cover-up.
I’m not too good with dates, but it was around the time “Avengers: Endgame” was released. My room was in the process of being redone. Polythene sheets covered all the furniture that was fixed in place. Part of the furniture that was fixed was my wooden cupboard. It went from floor to almost ceiling. There were 2 cupboards, split in half by drawers. The smaller bottom cupboard had a door with a frosted glass pane, with a wooden frame holding it in place.
My brother was bored, and he decided that I was his object of entertainment for the day. I was sitting watching TV when he came up to me with a football in hand and asked,
“Play football with me?” I told him that it was hot and I was tired, so he suggested we play in my empty room. My parents weren’t strict about much, but they had some ground rules everyone followed to a T – one of them being, absolutely no sports in the house. But my brother was bored, and he wanted to hang out with me. There was no way I’d say no, and Amma and Papa would just never know, so I agreed.
The goal was the width of my cupboard. He was going easy on me and I knew it, even with the goal being so small, there had to be some shots I let slip by. Did he think I wasn’t capable of saving his shots? He wasn’t that good either.
“You’re making it too easy, Anna. Play properly, I can handle it.”
I could not handle it.
I let almost every shot go, and the ones I did save with my foot or hand stung so bad, but I couldn’t let him see that. I was tough, I was cool, and I needed him to think I was cool. So I asked him to use all his power and take a good, proper shot.
The first thing we heard was a loud pop. The glass on the cupboard door had fully shattered, but it still stayed in place. Before my brother could even say anything, I opened it to check if anything inside was ruined, and the glass came down all in one go. I didn’t register how and when it happened, but I was suddenly on my bed after being calmed down, and my brother was next to the broken glass, broom in hand and dustpan in the other. I had no idea how we were going to tell my parents about this.
A week had gone by, and my parents hadn’t said a word. They’d walked into my room multiple times and still not said a word about the broken glass. I went into my brother’s room still stressed, frantically asking him how he was so okay about the situation, how he wasn’t scared about our parents finding out, how he did not feel what I felt? That’s when he told me that he’d told my parents and taken the brunt of it, that I was completely off the hook, and that he’d taken all the responsibility.
I didn’t know how to say thank you, so I took a half-finished mandala from an art class I was forced into, wrote “I love you 3000” on it, and gave it to him. His solution was to tape it on the empty wooden frame. The wood is chipped and dented, the paint on the walls around it has peeled, yet it’s still stayed up since then, with the same tape he used to first stick it on.