Three Weeks With My Brother

by Nicholas Sparks

  Micah, it must be said, followed those rules, and only those rules. Everything else, it seemed, was up for grabs, and for the next couple of years he continued to press the outer limits. On more nights than I can count, I remember listening to my mom and dad fretting about him.

  “He just keeps getting wilder,” one would say. “What do we do?”

  A long silence would follow.

  “I don’t know,” the other one would answer.

  That year brought about changes for me, too. I began competing in track and field, and though not great, I was one of the better freshmen on the team. This isn’t saying much, since in the distance events, there were only a handful of us.

  Still, I loved track and field, and as fate would have it, there was a genuine track and field legend who also lived in Fair Oaks. Billy Mills, an Oglala Sioux Indian raised in poverty in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had won the Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 meter run at the Tokyo games in 1964. It is still regarded as the greatest upset in Olympic track and field history. He’s the only American ever to win the Olympic 10,000 meters, and proving his talent for posterity, broke the world record the following year. Years earlier, I’d read about him in one of the many almanacs I’d perused as a kid, and I’d been fascinated by his story. When I learned that he lived in Fair Oaks, I was ecstatic, and I remember running to the kitchen to tell my mother.

  “Oh Billy,” she said, nodding. “I know him and his wife, Pat.”

  My eyes widened. “You do?”

  “Yeah,” she said easily. “They get their glasses at our office. They’re wonderful people.”

  All I could do was stare at her, thinking that I was standing next to someone who’d actually talked to a genuine American hero.

  This was heady stuff for a kid, and after talking to my mom, I was always on the lookout for him. I’d get excited when I saw him walking into the grocery store (I’d memorized how he looked) or into a restaurant, but I couldn’t summon the courage to introduce myself. When I learned that informal, neighborhood track meets were held at the local high school, I wanted to go because I suspected that he might be there as well. Sure enough, he was there, and when I saw him, I was transfixed. I’d watch him walk and think to myself, “That’s how the fastest man in the world moves,” and try to imitate it. Needless to say, I wanted to impress him with my talent, but to be honest, it never happened. Billy had three daughters and his youngest competed. Unlike me, however, she was great, and never once lost a single race.

  Learning about Billy’s past led me to read about other great runners. I dreamed of running like Henry Rono, Sebastian Coe, or Steve Ovett, but that’s all it was—a dream. Yet I went out for the track team, and gradually I became friends with Harold Kuphaldt, a junior who was also on the team.

  Like Billy, Harold was almost a legend, albeit a high school one. Harold was one of the fastest runners in the country (he would record the nation’s fastest time in the two mile for juniors, and hold the American junior record for a while), and, as with Billy, I idolized him from afar. Again, there’s a world of difference between the lives of freshman and upper classmen. Yet one afternoon, toward the end of the season, the team was running as a group and I found myself running alongside Harold. We started chatting until Harold eventually grew quiet.

  “I’ve been watching you run,” Harold said to me after a few moments of companionable silence. “You can be great if you work at it. Not just good, but great. You’re a natural at this.”

  I remember nothing about the run after that. It seemed as if I were floating, carried along by the words he’d said. There was nothing anyone could have said that would have meant more to me than what he’d told me. Not only did his words feed my fantasies, but they also touched the deeper core within myself, the one that always sought approval from my parents. I could be great, he’d said. I’m a natural . . .

  I vowed at that moment to make his words prophetic, and instead of spending the summer goofing around as I usually did, I decided to train instead. I trained hard—harder than I’d trained during the season—and the harder I worked, the harder I wanted to work. I ran twice a day, often in temperatures exceeding a hundred degrees, and frequently ran until I vomited from exertion. Despite Harold’s words, I wasn’t a natural athlete, but what I lacked in talent, I made up for with desire and effort.

  My brother, meanwhile, was working and earning money; in the past couple of years, he’d matured a bit and was rapidly becoming a man. And a handsome man at that. Combined with his natural confidence and charm, he quickly became irresistible to the opposite sex. The fact that he had a steady girlfriend didn’t seem to matter; girls flocked to his side or admired him from afar. My brother was essentially a babe magnet.

  Not so for me. I was shorter than Micah, with skinny arms and legs, and had none of the easy confidence of my brother. It didn’t matter, however. Running offered me the chance to excel if I worked hard enough, and I began focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else that summer.

  Well, almost everything. I was as worried about Micah as my parents were. Toward the end of the summer, after much lobbying, I convinced him to join the cross-country team with me. The team, led by Harold, was expected to be one of the best in the state, and would travel to meets in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where, after the meets, we would have the chance to visit amusement parks or boardwalks—places we would ordinarily never have the money or excuse to visit. “All you have to do is run fast enough to be in the top seven,” I told him, “and you’ll have more fun than you could ever imagine.”

  He finally took me up on it. Once my brother started running, he quickly made the top seven. Our team went undefeated, and for the most part, Harold did as well. Harold broke course records at nearly every meet, and ended up finishing second in the high school national championships.

  While Micah didn’t focus on running the way I did, with a desperate determination to excel in it, it nonetheless changed him for the better. He was part of a team, a team that counted on him, and—not surprisingly, considering the way he’d been raised—he took the responsibility seriously. Little by little, he began courting less trouble, and the more successful the team became, the more he took pride in being part of it. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I was faster than he was; in fact, he was always the first to congratulate me on how I’d done.

  More important to me, however, was that we were spending time together again for the first time in years. And best of all, enjoying it.

  My sophomore year was transformative. Not only did I learn to love athletics and running, but it was the first time in my life that I outperformed my brother physically.

  At the same time, I continued to focus on getting good grades. Unfortunately, it was becoming more and more of an obsession; not only did I want straight As, but I wanted to be the top student in every class.

  I also began devouring novels. My mother, like my father, was an avid reader, and she frequented the library twice a month. There, she would check out anywhere from six to eight books, and read them all; she particularly loved the works of James Herriot and Dick Francis. As for me, I discovered the classics—Don Quixote, The Return of the Native, Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Emma, and Great Expectations, among others, and grew to love the works of Stephen King. Because I’d been raised on old horror movies, they struck a chord with me, and I’d read them over and over as I anxiously awaited a new title to be released.

  In my sophomore year, I also had my first real girlfriend. Her name was Lisa and, like me, she ran cross-country. She was a year younger than I, and, as fate would have it, her father was Billy Mills, my boyhood hero.

  We dated for the next four years, and I not only fell in love with Lisa, but with her family as well. Billy and Pat were different from my parents in that they genuinely seemed to revel in my accomplishments. More than that, Billy would talk to me about my training and the goals I wanted to reach, and had a way of making me believe they were poss
ible.

  My life was growing busier; between school, running, homework, and Lisa, I didn’t have much time for anything else. Nor did I have any money, and I came to realize that this situation wasn’t exactly conducive to dating. Since our parents didn’t give us allowances, nor would they open their wallets if we wanted to go to the movies, I decided to follow my brother’s lead. After the cross-country season ended, and on top of everything else I was doing, I got a job as a dishwasher at the same restaurant where my brother worked. In the beginning, I worked until closing two school nights a week; within a few months, I was working thirty-five hours a week, and had been moved up to busboy. Eventually, I became a waiter, and with tips was earning a tidy sum for a high school student. Every minute of every day was accounted for—I was on the go from seven in the morning until nearly midnight, seven days a week—and this schedule would remain essentially unchanged until I graduated two years later.

  On our training runs, Micah and I often talked about both the past and the future; sometimes we talked about our dreams, other times we talked about money.

  “Do you ever stop to think about how poor we were when we were younger?” he asked me.

  “Sometimes. But to be honest, I never really knew that we were poor until a couple of years ago.”

  “I hated being poor,” he said. “I’ve always hated it. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get older, but I’m not going to be poor. I want to be a millionaire by thirty-five. I don’t know how, but that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “You’ll make it,” I said.

  “How about you?”

  I smiled. “I want to be a millionaire by thirty.”

  Micah said nothing. Our strides moved in unison, our feet slapping the ground with almost perfect precision.

  “What?” I finally asked. “You don’t think I’ll make it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just think thirty-five is more realistic.”

  “So what are you going to do to make it?”

  “Who knows. How about you?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  My brother and I ran together, worked together, and in our free time began to hang out with the same friends. Harold, Mike Lee (another member of the cross-country team), Tracy Yeates (California state champion in wrestling), Micah, and I called ourselves the Mission Gang.

  In spite of our general reputation as model student- athletes, we shared a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde-type existence. It was with them that I got drunk for the first time in my life, and we found tremendous joy in using fireworks in ways that weren’t entirely smart, or even legal. We regularly blew up various friends’ mailboxes, whooping with delight when they were launched into the air with big kabooms. We also teepeed friends’ houses with so much toilet paper that it looked like it had snowed the night before. Once, around Christmas, we came across a street where every house was decorated with twinkling lights. Over the next two hours—thinking we were soooooo funny—we unscrewed every lightbulb and hauled them off. We’d filled six plastic garbage bags with lights, and the houses looked as if they’d been visited by the Grinch. I really and truly can’t explain why we did such things. It’s juvenile and embarrassing, but I can’t help but think that if we had a chance to go back in time, we’d end up doing those things again.

  Due to the time we spent together, my brother and I grew close again. By then, however, our relationship had changed from what it once was. We weren’t simply brothers anymore; we’d become good friends. From my sophomore year on, we never had another argument or fight about anything.

  In the spring, my brother and I competed in the same events, and my training had begun to pay off. With me leading off and Harold as the anchor, we set meet record after meet record, and our distance medley team ended up running the fastest time in the country. Harold won the state championship in the two mile, and my time in the 800 was tops among sophomores nationwide.

  Among my family, only Micah was there to cheer me on. My parents rarely made it to meets; in fact, in my entire career they would see me run—and break records—only once.

  While some might think my parents’ lack of interest as odd, it never bothered me. After all, they didn’t watch Micah run, or see Dana participate on the drill team either. More important, we were doing these things for ourselves; we’d been on our own for so long by then that we didn’t expect them to attend these events, and I think all three of us kids understood that our parents were so busy during the week—working, keeping up the house, tending to daily responsibilities, taking care of us, and struggling with finances—that it didn’t seem fair to ask them to devote their weekends to us as well, when we all understood that other activities were more relaxing for them.

  My mom, for instance, loved to work in the yard or on the house, and nothing made her happier than planting bushes or trees, or painting one of the rooms. Whenever I’d return from a meet, she’d have a smudge of dirt or paint on her cheeks; her jeans were spotted and stained like a laborer’s. My dad, on the other hand, used the weekends to catch up on work in a quiet house, and enjoyed organizing—and reorganizing—the books that lined his shelves. And no doubt it was nice to have a quiet house once in a while. Whether they took advantage of that to spend some quality time together, none of us ever knew. Our parents were very private when it came to their personal relationship and told us little about their days. And none of us ever bothered to ask.

  Micah trained with me the following summer, and as a senior he’d become one of the better runners in the area. At most meets, we would both finish in the top three, but Micah never became as serious about running as I did.

  After graduating, he went to California State University at Sacramento and put his energies into enjoying life instead. He dated one beautiful girl after the next, skied on the weekends, took up snowboarding, and fell in love with mountain biking. He went boating and water-skiing, and spent weekends in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, or Yosemite. He went white-water rafting, and eventually mastered it well enough to become a guide. He was a member of a yacht crew that raced on weekends. He moved into an apartment near campus and joined other students at bars and nightclubs. Every weekend, it seemed, he was doing something new, something exciting, reveling in his newfound freedom. At the same time, he kept up his grades, and worked as an intern at a commercial real estate firm.

  I, on the other hand, spent my senior year as a nervous wreck. Good grades had become an obsession; I was on the verge of graduating valedictorian and didn’t want this honor to slip from my grasp at the last moment. Furthermore, I knew that if I continued to run well, there was a chance I’d get a scholarship—a goal I’d set for myself—but I had yet to receive an offer, and wouldn’t until nearly April. I continued to work thirty-five hours a week and spent whatever free time I did have with my girlfriend. The stress of keeping it all going led to horrible bouts of insomnia. I slept less than three hours a night, and felt constantly on edge.

  Part of me envied the kind of life that Micah was living. I admired his ability to simply live, without having to achieve. In the hallways at school, I’d listen to friends describing their weekends at Folsom Lake, or how much fun they’d had skiing at Squaw Valley. Maybe I should try to have more fun, a voice would whisper inside me, but every time I heard it, I forced myself to push the voice away. With a shake of my head, I’d tell myself that I didn’t have time, that I couldn’t risk injury, that I was too close to the finish line to quit now.

  But I wasn’t necessarily happy. My goals had become ends in and of themselves, and there was little joy in pursuing them. Nonetheless, I somehow survived. And just as I wanted, I graduated valedictorian. A month earlier, after running one of the fastest 800-meter times in the country, I’d accepted a full athletic scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. And three months later, I would be living in South Bend, Indiana, two thousand miles from the only family I’d ever known.

  Part of me didn’t want to go off to college. If yo
u live the sort of childhood I did, you’re forced to bond with your family. My brother and sister, along with my parents, had been the only constants in my life, and though I’d known for years that it was inevitable, it was still a little frightening for me to leave them behind.

  While I’ve written a lot about Micah and myself, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that my sister was any less important to me. In the early years, my sister and I played together as much as Micah and I did, albeit in different ways. She was always the one I talked to about our adventures; she was the one I talked to when I was having trouble in my relationship with Lisa. In the end, I talked to my sister about everything I’d felt growing up, and my sister, more than anyone else, seemed to understand why I’d become the person I had. Even better, my sister loved me, and she alone seemed to have the ability to put things into perspective for me. My struggles had always been her struggles, and hers had always been mine. And if you ask my brother, he would say exactly the same things about her, for he had the same type of relationship with Dana that I did.

  Toward the end of my senior year, I remember hearing my sister crying in her bedroom. After knocking, I went in and found her sitting on the bed, her face in her hands.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, taking a seat beside her.

  “Everything.”

  “No tell me. What happened?”

  “I hate my life,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, “I’m not like you or Micah.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You guys—both of you—you have everything. You’re good at everything. You have good friends, you’re good in sports, you get good grades. You’re popular and you both have girlfriends. Everyone knows who you guys are, and they wish they could be more like you. I’m not like you two in any way. It’s like I came from different parents.”