You ever have that one sibling who seems to get handed a life wrapped in ribbon while you’re standing there with the receipt for yours, wondering why you had to pay full price?
That was Paige.
My younger sister was the kind of person people made room for before she even entered it. When she was little, my mother called her “our miracle.” She had this soft voice she used only for Paige, like every word needed to land on a pillow. My father carried her backpack, fixed her cereal, warmed up the car for her. At family parties, aunts leaned in and asked what Paige was doing lately, as if a seven-year-old’s tap class was breaking national news.
I was Jaden. Three years older. Accidentally born before the miracle arrived.
No one ever said that out loud to my face when I was a kid. Not directly. But families have ways of teaching you where you belong. Paige got private school with red-brick buildings, uniforms pressed so sharp they could cut paper, and music lessons in rooms that smelled like polished wood. I got public school, a bus stop with a cracked bench, and a “you’ll figure it out, buddy” whenever I needed anything.
When Paige turned sixteen, my parents surprised her with a white Audi in the driveway. It had a red bow on the hood so big it looked like Christmas had swallowed the engine. She screamed, cried, filmed it from three angles, and hugged our parents like they had rescued her from poverty instead of upgrading her from being driven everywhere.
On my sixteenth birthday, I worked a closing shift at Henderson’s Grocery. My father texted, “Happy birthday, champ,” at 9:42 p.m. My mother added a cake emoji. I ate a gas station muffin in my car before driving home.
That was normal.
The crazy part was Paige believed she deserved it. Not in a mean-girl movie way, at least not at first. More like the world had taught her she was special, and she never questioned who had been made small so she could feel bigger.
After high school, she went to an expensive performing arts college in Los Angeles. My parents talked about it like she’d been accepted into NASA. I moved to New York with two duffel bags, a cracked laptop, and $430 hidden in an old sock. I studied computer science by day, worked tech support by night, and learned how to sleep through sirens, radiator clanks, and roommates arguing through paper-thin walls.
