Ball of Paint. What’s a ball of paint, you ask? Fair question. It’s actually a regular-size baseball with more than 21,500 coats of paint. You can check it out on our family Christmas cards from the past twelve years. We pose in front of it every year.

My dad was a regional sales manager for an electronics company. He was like one of those CIA guys who goes to the office and comes home and never speaks of what he does. The only part of his job he brought home was his love of gadgets. This really pisses off my mother, who’s really nervous about things like technology and assumes that anything that plugs into a wall is a carcinogen. Although my dad is clueless, somewhere someone thought he was smart enough to be promoted to a consultant. That’s how he got moved to the New York office. Apparently a consultant is someone who peers over your shoulder as you do your job and tells you how to do it better. I couldn’t picture my dad doing this. My mother, on the other hand…

My brother, Luke, and I had just finished the tenth grade at this Catholic school, St. Luke’s, a few towns over. Luke was a running back on the football team and a point guard on the basketball team. He had played both so well in his sophomore year that the coaches promised he would start as a junior. As for me, I’d been promoted to editor of the literary magazine. Okay, so I’d been promoted from sole contributor to editor. And, okay, the St. Luke’s Lit only had a circulation of five (that would be me, the faculty adviser, my mother, and two anonymous students who had been too embarrassed to include their names in a survey). But “editor of the literary magazine” would look good on my college applications.

But I was pretty sick of St. Luke’s. Despite my powerful position on the Lit, no one really respected me. Especially this kid Johnny Frackas, who was always bugging me. Since everyone called him “Johnny Freckles” (both for his own freckles and for his mother’s full-body freckles, which were the subject of much speculation), he grew embittered and took his anger out on the closest person. Thanks to the school’s obsession with alphabetical order, the closest person was me: Finbar Frame. Every homeroom through ninth grade, Johnny Frackas would hail my arrival in the classroom with “Good morning, Fagbar” and a bout of raucous laughter. In tenth grade, I got upgraded to Admiral Fagbar. In reality, that should have made him a loser, because it was an allusion to Return of the Jedi, but somehow pointing this out didn’t win me any points. And I should have been protected from this torture by my twin brother, who shared my last name and thus should have shared my homeroom. But Luke only showed up in homeroom three times a year, because his football and basketball coaches gave him passes to get him out of everything. I was left to fend for myself.

Monday mornings of sophomore year were the worst. Most guys were starting to get driver’s licenses, girlfriends, and fake IDs that didn’t make store owners laugh in their faces. Other guys now looked forward to the weekends, to house parties and playing beer pong and puking their guts out and kissing girls. (Hopefully not those last two simultaneously, although I’ve heard stories…) None of these things was happening for me, not even the puking.

It wasn’t like I was never invited anywhere. In fact, my brother, Luke, invited me everywhere. Every Friday afternoon, he’d sprint down the long hallway that separated his room from my room and say, “Hey, Sean O’Connor’s brother gave him three cases of beer. All the cans have dents in them, but he Googled it and said that we probably won’t get botulism. Come drink with us!”

Or: “Maddy Keller’s hot sister got back from Sweden and they’re having a party. With Swedish girls. They’re the hottest girls after Brazilian girls. Finn, you gotta come with. It’s gonna be uh-may-zing.”

Or: “Did you see the commercial for that horror movie where that Disney Channel girl shows her boobs? The team is going, come with!” Pause. “But there’s chain saws, bro.”

To my brother, Luke, a ball of energy and optimism, lots of things were uh-may-zing. That’s because every time Luke walked into a room, there was applause and adoration. For Luke, every high school party was like a red-carpet