Len, The X-Files, and My Doppelganger

"Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you. I saw this girl on TV that looks just like you."
My brother was sitting in his usual spot in front of my 32" television which had finally made its way out of my bedroom and into the living room, uniting us all. Len had moved his x-box out of his own room and hooked it up. My TV was both larger than his and HD capable, though Len scolded me that 720p did not compare to 1080p when you dealt with video games. I didn't care. I was just glad he was sitting with everybody and being less of a hermit.

Things were improving at 3501 West Houser Road lately. Since I'd scraped the bottom of the barrel and changed my lifestyle a bit, staying at home every night of the week including weekends, I spent a lot more time on the couch with Len watching Netflix oldies like The X-Files. Oh David Duchovny...

"Are you telling me you saw my doppelganger? I hope she was pretty and not ugly and fat."
"Oh, no, she's all right. She just looks a lot like you in the face. Like from the nose up. Hang on and I can find it." He clicked through page after page of Netflix shows.

Len had recently scored a paid internship with none other than the nations' second most-watched wrestling federation. After finishing his first day, he had already sorted and read some fan mail from some of the bizarro viewers.

I was really proud of him. I was actually a bit jealous. But it made me happy to think that things would be okay with Len. I had rolled my eyes about him for probably all 22 years of his existence. But this was cool. I had gone around to half my co-workers at the office just to break the news that my brother would be working for a company that made money off of cage fights, ladder matches, and too much spray-tan.

"Okay, I found it. Here it is."
He pressed play as the camera was zooming in on an old British guy surrounded by an audience. I recognized the show as an auto program from the UK about restoration. The old guy and his buddies were hilarious. I'd seen an episode where they drove across four US states in cars that they bought for only a thousand dollars a piece, only to come back and close their show saying that the number one thing they'd learned in America was NOT to go to America.
"Look, see that girl behind the dude? She looks just like you, doesn't she?"
I sat up in my seat on the couch.
"Hey! She does look like me!"
"Seriously, doesn't she? Like, hold up she's about to smile."
A few seconds later, sure enough, the girl smiled.
"See, check out her cheeks and the way her eyes look when she smiles. She looks JUST LIKE you."
"Oh. Yeah, she does." I was kind of taken aback. Len was really excited about this.
"I was just watching the show and I was like, dude. Is that my sister? Is my sister in the UK right now?" Len laughed and then slowed down the video. "See, check it. She just did something. Wait, let me roll it back."
Len rolled the video frame by frame over the girl in the background as she smiled a tight-lipped smile and quirked and then dropped an eyebrow.
"That is JUST LIKE you!"
"Yeah. I guess it is."

Then Len went back to late night TV and I sat there on the couch wondering about how he saw me. I thought it was funny that he had even noticed someone in the background of a television show who looked like me. And I thought it was even funnier that he had taken the time to show me, and roll frame by frame over the facial expressions that made this would-be doppelganger look the most like me.

I thought of the other times in our lives when Len and I had been kind-of friends. We both liked funny youtube videos. We had hooked up the netbook to the TV so we could watch on a bigger screen. We had gone to eat by ourselves a couple of times. Really, though, Len had gotten on my nerves a lot.
He lives a lifestyle that was totally and completely opposite to mine. In college I had pretty much gone wild, while Len had come home like clockwork every weekend, saved his money, bought only video games and food, and didn't ever actually buy a car until he was a Senior. Yes, in college. I had a cell phone and a car by the time I was 19 and I used them to create my own idiotic independence. I was young, pretty, and boy-crazy. Len was conservative, quiet, and practically a eunuch.
We were opposites and we looked down our noses at one another.

Lately, though, it was almost like we were meeting in the middle. Len had gotten a sweet job, and I wasn't boy-crazy any more, or going out on retarded pseudo-dates. We sat around together and watched weird X-Files episodes about inbred freaks, alien abductions, and genetic mutants.
It made me think about when Len and I were younger. And I mean a lot younger. When Len was still little and I was his big sister walking him home from kindergarten. I had an excuse in the third grade that I could leave early and walk home with Len out of his kindergarten class. I can still remember the day when Mrs. Ault stopped me on my way out the door.

"Don't you think your brother can make it on his own today?"

I felt like she was butting in on my relationship with him. I liked being protector, leader, BIG sister. To this day, I'd call myself a nurturer. And maybe that's what some of those pseudo dates were about. What all the Catching in the Rye was about. That I am straight up, 100%, a nurturer. But what if, all this time, I was the one who needed to be nurtured the most? What happens when you realize that the one you've been trying to Catch is yourself?

Len laughed at something on TV. I was glad he hadn't lost me over the years. That he could still pick my face out of a crowd in the background of some random British TV show. It made me smile.