My Sister’s Sweet Ass

rowing up with a younger sister came with its perks and its annoyances. It was convenient having a younger sibling to poke fun at and manipulate into doing chores for me. I also rather enjoyed having someone other than my parents enthusiastically cheering for me at hockey games, wearing old jerseys of mine to show her support. She was my biggest fan when we were kids. Youth hockey is pretty all-consuming during the winter where we grew up. She happily followed along from town to town, hotel to hotel, as I worked my way through peewees and bantams.

I kind of took it for granted. She had her own interests, too, but I showed up to maybe one or two gymnastics meets or dance recitals of hers a year, and only because my mom forced me to. In my mind, her activities were far less important than my glorious pursuit of one day playing in the NHL. I truly believed that was my future, at least until I was about 16, when it became clear playing varsity for the high school team was probably as lofty a goal I could realistically achieve in the sport I love.

Alyssa is two years younger than I am, but I always thought of her and her friends as kids. Things change quickly, though. The first time it occurred to me she wasn’t that much younger than I am was junior year. Her years of cheering me on across the upper Midwest paid off when she made the varsity cheer squad as a freshman. She now stood alongside my classmates, the girls I dreamed of dating. After scoring a goal, I’d sometimes forget she was part of the squad as I celebrated in front of the student section, getting caught off guard when I saw her beaming smile as she waved the pompoms energetically.

That was when I began to feel the annoyances of having a little sister. Hearing locker room chatter about the cheerleaders was now uncomfortable, especially when guys specifically mentioned her as being one of the hot ones. She had always been a cute girl, but I’ve been part of these discussions for a couple years, and now the immature comments about the girls took on a much different dynamic.

Of course, it soon became more normal as our friend circles started to mesh. I dated a couple girls in her grade in high school, and we ended up hanging out together as peers through our mutual friends. My best friend, Jake, became pretty close with Alyssa, and they eventually started dating my senior year. It bugged me at first, but eventually I grew accustomed to it. The three of us, along with Alyssa’s friend, Lucia became a tight little group. Lucia and I started dating a few months later. Even though Jake was and is still my best friend, he spends more time with my little sister than he does with me.

Jake and I are in our second year of college now, and Lucia and Alyssa are seniors. They both practically live in the dorm room Jake and I share. There was always an unspoken rule of respecting boundaries, and it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it could have been having my kid sister hanging around all the time. She and Jake were careful not to make me uncomfortable with PDA. Lucia and I were having regular sex at this point, as young lovers tend to, but I was able to somehow not give too much thought to Alyssa and Jake’s romantic life.

I saw them kiss, obviously, but they never got weird in my presence, and I tried not to make things weird for them either. The whole dynamic worked pretty well actually. At least it used to. A couple weeks ago, Lucia and Alyssa showed up with a bottle of cheap vodka on a Friday night, and the four of us got drunk and played card games in our room. Usually they would leave around midnight, but the alcohol forced us to reconsider that idea.

When it became evident around 10 PM that the girls would be in no shape to drive home, Alyssa asked if it would be okay if they stayed for the night. I was too drunk to really care, and she had no problem convincing our parents to stay the night, since I was there to watch over her. At twenty years old, Jake and I had done our fair share of binge drinking, but the 18 year old girls, neither weighing more than 115 pounds, hadn’t developed much of a tolerance yet.

As we played Cards Against Humanity, everyone loosened up quite a bit, especially the girls.