FINMP09

Chapter 3: Bonding

"FIN! FIN! WAKE UP!" a voice spoke shaking my sleeping body awake from its hibernation.

"WHAT?! WHA!" I jolted up from my comfy position and started flailing my arms once again like a lunatic. I went into complete panic mode, thinking that someone had broken into my house to kidnap me. I grabbed the first item I saw to defend myself. I snatched my Algebra textbook from my side table and threw it at the figure that hovered over me.

"OW! What the hell Fin!?" the voice replied.

"Oh jeez! Sorry, Ollie!" I exclaimed tripping over myself to help my older brother off my floor. Ollie was stunned on the floor of my room in pain with my eight hundred page textbook resting on his chest. His strawberry blonde hair became disheveled from the impact, and a scrape had appeared on his palm from a pencil that I had left on my floor.

"I'm so sorry, Ollie! I couldn't tell that it was you!" I exclaimed scrambling to help him up. I grabbed the box of bandages from my desk trying to hand them to him at the same time.

"Get away from me!" he said as he pulled his arm away from my reach to help him smacking the bandages away as well.

"Mom has been calling your phone all afternoon looking for you! She thought maybe you were hurt! I told you to keep your phone with you at all times! You know how anxious she can get!" he yelled while he slowly regained his composure trying to return to his feet.

"Calm down, Ollie! I get it! I'm sorry! Why are you here anyways!? Shouldn't you be at work?" Ollie usually spent all of his free time working at a pizzeria on the other side of town. He did everything from manage, deliver, cook, bus tables, wait tables, and clean up the whole place. If you needed a job done, Ollie was the first person you would ask to help you. I was quite surprised to see him standing in front of me considering he probably saw the local drunks at the pizzeria more than he saw me.

"Mom got so paranoid that you weren't answering your phone that she asked me to bring you to her. She doesn't trust you here by yourself at the moment. Now come on! I need to get back to work," he said as he motioned me to grab my school bag and marched out the room.

"Ugh...are you kidding me?! I don't wanna go to the diner!" I whined loudly. My mom worked at our local family diner that my grandparents owned about twenty minutes away from my house. It was an old, run down, dingy looking aluminum trailer stuck smack dab in the middle of our little town of Westport. On a bad day when the restaurant hadn't been cleaned in awhile, it smelled faintly of dirt and grimy scum. That restaurant vaguely reminded me of Ms. Bradford's Algebra room. It was on the smaller side of a normal eatery. The diner was just a small hole in the wall that stood out like an emo in a crowd of girly-girls. For some reason my family thought it would be an excellent idea to put the dive in the middle of the busier city parts of the town. That was probably a big reason I hated spending time there so often. I have a love-hate relationship with that aluminium trailer restaurant. I mostly disliked going there because my grandmother constantly blabbed on about the crazy hooligans that came into the diner every Friday after school or her quilting club. Not to mention my cousins, Calvin and Jackson, love to terrorize me every time I went to the restaurant, which wasn't helpful since I spent a lot of time there. But hey, at least I get some good free food out of it.

"Shut up, Finn! You should be lucky I picked up the phone when I did or you would have had to go to your father's house, and we both know you wouldn't want to do that! C'mon!" Ollie said as he picked up my school bag, slung it over his shoulder and walked out my room. By that I knew it was my signal to get my butt in the car to go. I accepted my fate with a loud sigh seeing if I could convey some type of message to Ollie. I soon realized that my attempt at trying to guilt trip my brother would be unsuccessful, so I decided to walk out of my room trying to shut the door behind me. I then ran down the stairs and rushed out the door once again and to my brother's car in a flash before I could get yelled at again.

I grabbed my coat from the front closet and stepped out the door and sprinted towards Ollie's blue hatch back. As soon as I opened the door to his car I got a very strong scent of Axe cologne mixed with the smell of grease from the pizza he was late to deliver. I sat down in the worn out passenger seat and buckled myself in. My feet swam in the sea of hundreds of delivery receipts that crowded the floor under me. I could hear all of the annoying crunching of the receipts as I set my backpack on the floor in front of me. As I sat in that worn out seat I marveled at how bad Ollie really was at driving. We hadn't even reached the halfway point to the diner, and he had managed to go past two stop signs, through a red light and almost run over a squirrel in the process. I swear an ostrich probably gave him his license for all I know.

"You know it smells like someone binged on pizza then died in here, right?" I said concerned. It smelled like garbage mixed with toxic waste in that car, and I was quite concerned for my brother's safety. With his severe asthma I'm very surprised his throat hadn't closed up yet from all of the toxic fumes. I sat there in the passenger seat next to Ollie as he concentrated on the road trying not to run over another squirrel as I started to fiddle with the radio.

"OH! I love this song!" I screeched as I reached for the volume dial.

SMACK!

Ollie swatted my fragile hand from the dial.

"Keep your grimy hands off the dial, Finley." Ollie said with a stern and serious expression.

"Me? Grimy? You're the one who delivers greased filled heart attacks in a box 24/7! Do you even see your shirt?!" I pointed at my brother's somewhat white work shirt that he wore almost everyday. The blank canvas of a shirt was splattered with pizza condiments and other mysterious substances.

"Don't you have better things to do then to make fun of my outfit, Fin? You are lucky I even came to pick you up. I could have let you walk to the diner."

"Jeez Oliver... What crawled up your butt?" I retorted with an extra splash of sass and annoyance in my response. That response was able to shut him up the rest of the way there and silence was the only thing I heard.

"Damn, I guess I took that a little too far?" I thought to myself. As we rolled up towards the diner the car jumped little by little as we traveled up the rocky entranceway.

"Get out!" he said with a stone cold look on his face staring at the steering wheel.

"Listen Ollie, I'm..." I said as I got out of the car trying to apologize until I was cut off.

"Finley, drop it. Leave. Now.." Ollie said as he threw my bag out the car and leaned over to shut my door then he sped off down the road. I stood there in the parking lot battling with my consciousness again and pondering.

"There you go again, Finley. Screwing up your relationships left and right..."

"You really need to think before you speak..."

With the constant battle of my mind and physical body raging inside me, I decided to push that aside and go into the diner. I picked up my backpack off the gravel entrance and brushed off the dusty remains and shuffled off into The Joel's Family Diner.