In Bed With My Hockey Stepbrother

From a small child, I had adored the ground he walked on, trailing after him and his friends, tagging along with him wherever he went. He always protected me, taking the blame at home when I did something wrong.

It wasn't easy for him, and being so much younger than him, I hadn't understood the full extent of his struggle. Mam and Dad had only been seeing each other a couple of months when she fell pregnant with Darren at fifteen.

Labeled a bastard baby because he was born out of wedlock in 1980s Catholic Ireland, life had always been a challenge for my brother. After he turned eleven, everything got so much worse for him.

Like Joey, Darren was a phenomenal hurler and, like me, our father despised him. He was always finding something wrong with Darren, be it his hair or his handwriting, his performance on the field or his choice of partner.

Darren was gay and our father couldn't cope with it.

He blamed my brother's sexual orientation on an incident in the past, and nothing anyone said could get it through to our father that being gay wasn't a choice.

Darren was born gay, the same way Joey was born straight and I was born empty.

He was who he was, and it broke my heart that he wasn't accepted in his own home.

Living with a homophobic father was torture for my brother.

I hated Dad for that, more than I hated him for all the other terrible things he had done through the years.

My father's intolerance and blatant discriminating behavior toward his own son was by far the vilest of his traits.

When Darren took a year off from hurling to concentrate on his leaving cert, our father had hit the roof. Months of heated arguments and physical altercations had resulted in a huge blowout where Darren packed his bags, walked out the door, and never came back.

Five years had passed since that night, and aside from the annual Christmas card in the post, none of us had seen or heard from him.

We didn't even have a phone number or address for him.

He as good as vanished.

After that, all of the pressure our father had put on Darren was switched onto the younger boys-who were, in our father's eyes, his normal sons.

When he wasn't down at the pub or the bookie's, our father was dragging the boys off to training and matches.

He focused all of his attention on them.

I was of no use to him, what with being a girl and all that.

I wasn't good at sports and I didn't excel at school or any club activity.

In my father's eyes, I was just a mouth to feed until eighteen.

That wasn't something I had come up with, either. Dad told me this on countless occasions.

After the fifth or sixth time, I grew immune to the words.

I'd long since grown tired of begging for love from a man who, in his own words, never wanted me.

The pressure he put on Joey concerned me though, and it was the reason I felt so much guilt every time he had to come to my aid.

He was in sixth year, his final year of secondary school, and had his own stuff going on, with GAA, his part-time job at the petrol station, the leaving cert, and his girlfriend, Aoife.

I knew that when I hurt, Joey hurt too. I didn't want to be a burden around his neck, someone he was constantly having to look out for, but it had been that way since as far back as I could remember.

To be honest, I couldn't stand to look at the disappointment in my brother's eyes another minute in that school. Passing him in the hallways, knowing that when he looked at me, his expression caved.

To be fair, the teachers at BCS had tried to protect me from the lynch mob, and the guidance teacher at BCS, Mrs. Falvy, even organized fortnightly counseling sessions with a school psychologist throughout second year until funding was cut.

Mam had managed to scrape together the money for me to see a private counselor, but at eighty euros per session, and having to censor my thoughts at my mother's request, I'd only seen her five times before lying to my mother and telling her that I felt better.

I didn't feel better.

I never felt better.

I just couldn't bear to watch my mother struggle.

I despised being a financial burden on her, so I sucked it up, slapped on a smile, and continued to walk into hell every day.

But the bullying never stopped.

Nothing stopped.

Until one day, it did.

The week before Christmas break last month-just three weeks after a similar incident with the same group of girls-I had come home in floods of tears, with my school jumper ripped down the front and my nose stuffed with tissue paper to stem the bleeding from the hiding I'd taken at the hands of a group of fifth-year girls, who'd vehemently suggested that I had tried to get with one of their boyfriends.

It was a bold-faced lie, considering I'd never laid eyes on the boy they accused me of trying to seduce, and another in a long line of pathetic excuses to beat me up.

That was the day I stopped.

I stopped lying.

I stopped pretending.

I just stopped.

That day wasn't just my breaking point; it was Joey's, too. He'd followed me into the house with a week's suspension under his belt for beating the living daylights out of the brother of Ciara Maloney, my main tormentor.

Our mother had taken one look at me and pulled me out of the school.

Going against wishes of my father, who thought I needed to toughen up, Mam went to the local credit union and took out a loan to pay the admission fees for Tommen College, the private, fee-paying secondary school fifteen miles north of Ballylaggin.

While I worried for my mother, I knew that if I had to walk through the doors of that public school one more time, I would not be walking back out.

I had hit my limit.