You could feel the gaze of your older brother on you as you wrote down numbers and formulas that needed solving in a punctilious manner. You never thought he would comply with the favor you asked of him—to look after you doing homework because mathematics is sort of your weakness. Typically, he wouldn't have time for that, and he'll tell you straight to your face.

Jimmy sat beside you on the dining table, his elbow resting on the sturdy surface, his cheek leaning into his palm. He's deathly still, and that terrifies you. Your older brother, who's inevitably aggravated... is not.

"It's a subtraction sign, not addition," he said, his voice smooth as silk. The eraser was out of your hand and into his as he proceeded to erase what you wrote as a final answer to the word problem. "You won't score any points on your upcoming exam if you keep misreading the signs."

His large palm moves to pat you on the head, messing your hair up a bit in the process, and then he goes back to observing you. He's not a good person, not even now. You know that, but it wouldn't hurt to pretend. Jimmy yells at your parents and doesn't take their word for anything, but you figured it's because he's in college and that he didn't need them anymore, smokes, never around you, and yet you happen to smell it whenever you pass by his room, and... he doesn't act like an older brother, not yours anyway.

Sometimes, Jimmy will come home battered and disheveled, with new scars and bruises here and there and a lit-up cigarette resting on his lips. He wouldn't bat an eye at you if you were still awake at that hour. You then would hear your mother's voice calling him out for his behavior. Maybe she was upset because he got into another fight? Or maybe at the fact he wasted his allowance on cigarettes again.

Still... you wanted to see the good in him, prove everyone out there wrong, prove that he could be better. But he's not. You just wished he was.