Chapter 2: Exposed by My Own Brother

Taking a deep breath, I clicked into my brother’s profile page.

It took everything I had not to send him a flaming text. Instead, I pulled up his profile, half expecting to find more drama and, sure enough, there it was—another post, already racking up comments and likes.

Besides the previous post, there was another one.

The title was just as blunt and crude:

"I Think My Sister Is Actually My Mom. How Do I Make Her Admit It?"

It was like he wanted the world to know he was on a mission. I could picture him typing it, probably grinning at his phone, convinced he’d stumbled onto some great secret. My blood pressure spiked just reading it.

Just seeing the title made my blood boil.

I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. It’s one thing to rant in private, but this was straight-up defamation, broadcast to the entire internet. I scrolled on, both dreading and needing to know what he’d written this time.

I dove right into the content.

"My sister—well, I’ll just call her my real mom. I’ve barely seen her since I was a kid, she only comes home for Christmas."

It was true that I lived two hours away and only made it back for holidays. I never realized he’d twisted that into some kind of secret shame. The way he framed it, I was some absentee parent, not just a busy sister trying to make rent.

"Whenever she’s mentioned, my grandma (meaning the woman who raised me, actually my grandma) always says she ran off with some loser."

My grandma is blunt, sure, but she’d never say that about me. Still, I could almost hear her voice in his exaggeration—small-town gossip tends to snowball, and maybe he’d picked up on the way relatives talk behind closed doors.

"My grandma says she’s never seen a woman as shameless as my real mom, always flirting around since she was a kid, in high school always hanging out with the wrong crowd, even caught her fooling around with a guy."

There was no shortage of family drama in our house, but none of it was this scandalous. The stuff he described was like something out of a reality show, not our little neighborhood on the edge of Savannah.

"After having a baby, my real mom was so ashamed she wanted to drop out, didn’t even take the SATs."

I snorted. I’d graduated high school, gone to college, even made the dean’s list once. The SATs were the least of my worries back then. But I could see how he’d woven together half-truths and outright fiction for maximum sympathy.

"So I suspect my real mom hooked up with some bleach-blond guy, got pregnant, found out after the fact, hurried to have me, and wanted the bleach-blond guy to marry her."

"But the bleach-blond guy ran off. She probably figured she’d have to get married someday, so she dumped me with my grandma and ran off to the city to live it up."

"Can anyone help me figure out how to make her admit she’s my mom?"

If this were a movie, it would’ve been a Lifetime Original, complete with dramatic music and commercial breaks for tissues. The best part? He actually wanted advice from strangers. Like Dr. Phil was about to pop up in his DMs and solve everything.

The comments below were all roasting him.

[Is this what happens when you get too much screen time as a kid?]

[That phrase is getting more valuable—seems like a lot of people are losing it.]

[I guessed the poster’s gender in one second. Your turn.]

[If you start an account like this, what about your driftwood?]

[Why bother with something that doesn’t exist?]

[Haha, senior, after graduation, where are you going to hang out?]

Some of the comments were just random Gen Z nonsense, a few so obscure I had to Google them. But most were people calling him out, poking fun, or rolling their eyes at his melodrama. I almost wished someone would DM him to set him straight.

My brother replied to every comment, defending himself.

It was all copy-paste. Just one line: "He has evidence to prove he is my son."

He spammed the same line like a broken record, hoping if he said it enough, the universe would cave. The sheer stubbornness almost made me laugh—almost.