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Around the time the first photo was taken, my family was eating lunch with another Filipino family in Chicago. Out of nowhere, Patrick grinned the evilest grin and blurted out in his annoying 6-year old voice, Ate likes Nathaniel! Everyone froze and I grimly said, “Everyone knows that and it was sooo second grade” and dinner shrugged onward.

When he was tiny, my brother used to tell people that his mission in life was “to make ate miserable!” But that’s normal for siblings — you bicker, you embarrass each other in front of crushes, but you also stand up for each other and defend each other to the death during Super Mario Party. To be honest, Patrick and I got along pretty well. Our family always traveled and it was always the two of us in the backseat, passing the time by annoying our parents (“Are we there yet?!?”) or making up stories and acting them out with our menagerie of stuffed toys. We raked the lawn together, rode the school bus together, ignored each other snootily in school, and whipped out the Nintendo 64 to play as soon  as we got home. We used to wake up very early on Sunday mornings and eat ice cream while watching a movie rented from Blockbusters. When we moved to the Philippines, these traditions continued: the N64 became a Wii and we still watch movies on Sundays.

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