My Only Bitchy Cousin Is A Yankee-type Guy- The... ◎

Bradley had pale skin that burned if you looked at it wrong, and he wore the same navy-blue polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts every single day. He was nine going on forty. While the rest of us kids were catching lightning bugs and eating watermelon on the porch, Bradley would be inside, reorganizing my grandmother’s spice rack alphabetically.

I stood up. “Bradley,” I said, sweet as pie, “I have a question.”

And yet, every Christmas, there he was. Sitting at my grandmother’s dining table, correcting everyone’s grammar. My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...

He shrieked—a high, pure sound like a teakettle—and flailed in the murky water for a full thirty seconds before realizing he was standing in three feet of it. He marched up the boat ramp, dripping wet, khaki shorts now translucent, and announced to the entire family that I was “a menace to civilized society.”

By high school, he was six feet tall, razor-thin, and had developed a vocabulary specifically designed to make you feel like a piece of lint on his blazer. He went to a boarding school in Connecticut where they apparently taught Latin, crew, and the fine art of condescension. I went to public school in Macon, where I learned how to hotwire a golf cart and make a bong out of a Gatorade bottle. We had nothing to say to each other. Bradley had pale skin that burned if you

“Because,” he said, “you’re the only people who tell me to shut up to my face.”

That night, after everyone went to bed, I found him on the back porch, looking at the stars. The sky in Georgia is nothing like the sky in Connecticut. He had a beer—a Miller Lite, because he was still a Yankee-Type Guy and couldn’t drink a proper sweet ale to save his life. I stood up

He smiled. Not a smirk. A real, small, almost shy smile.

He raised his beer. I raised my sweet tea. We didn’t clink. We just sat there, two completely different people from two completely different worlds, watching the same stars.

But I didn’t have her patience. I was a feral, barefoot girl who climbed pecan trees and fought with snapping turtles. Bradley and I were oil and water—except the oil was also complaining about the water’s pH balance.