Billy Anderson was seven when he got a new baby brother. From what he understood, his mom had the baby too early, which was why they had to stay in Illinois with Grandma way longer than they originally planned. Initially they were only going to be there for Christmas, but his brother was born on December 23 and that kind of threw everything off. Billy would, for as long as he lived, remember that Christmas not as the one when he got a brother, but as the Christmas his mom and dad weren't there to celebrate.
When his parents first introduced him to Evan, they explained that Evan was like Daddy in that he couldn't see. Billy absorbed this information gradually. In his seven year old mind, he'd believed that only grown ups could be blind. He didn't know why he thought this- even at seven it didn't seem particularly logical, but the idea that someone could be born blind boggled his mind. It made him feel protective of his new sibling. Evan was tiny and he cried a lot, but Billy found it hard to fault him.
As they got older, Billy learned that Evan was not the kind of person who needed protecting. In the grand tradition of their parents, Evan grew to be whip-smart and sharp-tongued. Though he couldn't care less about computers, he hungrily took advantage of his father's technology. By time he was eight, Evan had received more (deserved) discipline from their parents than Billy had at fifteen.
"He's our problem child," their mother once said in a sing-song voice after catching Evan snooping on their dad's confidential work stuff. If it was in the house and it was in Braille, Evan was reading it. Even as a child Evan's life mission seemed to be to know everything about everything, converting knowledge into his own personal fifth sense.
Though Evan and his father could have become inseparable, living in their own personal world of gadgets and adaptation, such was not the case. The two butted heads on nearly everything. If Auggie showed Evan a trick for how to do something, Evan would turn around and attempt the task every other possible way. This included: folding money in a wallet to distinguish the type of bill, using the stove, navigating public transit, and stairs. Yes, this resulted in five missed bus connections, innumerable stair-induced bruises, a couple nasty burns and the time he accidentally stocked his wallet with ones instead of fives and tens and ended up having to play the blind card on a date, but hey, it was trial and error.
"Adaptation is science," he insisted once, as Billy drove him home from a bus station in Baltimore. "The variable is everything, and the constant is that I can't see shit."
There was a lot Billy Anderson could say about being Evan's older brother, but the main perk was this: he took a lot of the pressure off.