For the first six months, my older brother, Ted, and I could still easily talk despite our differing reactions to the pandemic—my near agoraphobia and frenetic doorknob wiping, his disregard and out-there theories. Distance likely helped. He still lives on the East Coast, where we grew up, and I now live in the Midwest. The calm didn’t last. At the end of October 2020, my siblings and I were on a group text filled with light autumn chatter: pumpkin emojis, pictures of a new pandemic puppy, videos of a local family of black bears. Then Ted asked to be removed from the conversation.
“Why?” I texted.
“We are not family,” he replied, and added a smiley face emoji that read like a middle finger.
It was early in the morning, still dark, and I was seated at my desk, racing to finish the last pages of my graphic memoir. I sat up straight.
“What are you talking about?” I wrote.
“I’ve been dismissed and overlooked,” he said. He was referring to a few texts we’d all ignored. Something about Skull and Bones, links to a few YouTube videos claiming COVID-19 was manufactured in a lab. I couldn’t really say what
