Brandon Graves¶
Brandon Graves is the older brother of Sabrina Graves, an investment banker based in New York City, and the sibling against whom Sabrina quietly measured her own effortfulness for most of her childhood. He is socially easy in ways she is not, professionally successful in a conventional lucrative corridor, and closer to his parents in frequency of visits than he is to his sister in emotional depth. He does not know Sabrina is autistic, because she has not told him.
Early Life and Education¶
Brandon grew up in McLean, Virginia, attended a strong suburban public high school, and went on to a Northeast university where he double-majored in economics and something safely complementary (finance or business). He was the kind of student whose transcript was impressive in a low-drama way. He was also the kind of student who was always on a team, always at the party, always in the group text, and who arrived at adulthood with a network that has compounded into career advantages in the specific way that certain networks do.
Career¶
Brandon works in investment banking in New York, in the particular lane of it that pays well and consumes the working hours of the person in it. He lives in a Manhattan apartment, flies home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and has the kind of job whose specifics he does not enjoy explaining to family members because the specifics do not matter to them.
Personality¶
Brandon is charming, socially fluent, and comfortable. He makes friends without effort and has never, to his own knowledge, been required to. He is not unkind; he is simply operating in a mode that assumes the world is organized in his favor, which it largely has been. He is fond of his sister in the way older brothers can be fond of sisters they do not understand: from a distance, with goodwill, and without particular curiosity.
Relationship with Sabrina¶
Their relationship is warm-ish and thin. They text at birthdays and holidays. They see each other at family gatherings two or three times a year. They are not in each other’s daily lives, and have not been since Brandon left for college when Sabrina was thirteen.
Sabrina spent her childhood quietly, effortfully trying to close a gap between herself and her brother that she did not know was a neurodevelopmental difference rather than a character flaw. Brandon was unaware of the competition. He loved her in the ordinary way older brothers love younger sisters, which is to say intermittently, with minimal investigation, and generally from the next room. Sabrina’s eventual diagnosis clarified the difference for her. She has not clarified it for him, partly because she does not think he would know what to do with the information and partly because she has not wanted to.