Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Four: Can't Read My Poker Face

The next morning, the damage of my mother’s spider discovery still laid strewn about, making it look like the house had been broken into and torn apart, but she acted like it was all supposed to look like a Dali painting. She made my brother and I breakfast before we set off for our standardized testing in his car delivered with the moving truck, which right about now felt like a gift from the gods. For three days we repeated the process, bypassing our mother’s carless destruction, eating organic eggs, nearly dying on icy roads, gauging our eyes out with the erasers on our number two pencils; rinse, lather, repeat.

After three days, the school deemed us good enough to start.

They called the house and told our mother that we were to report to school the next morning at a refreshing time of seven thirty, a whole thirty minute start time later than our high school in the FL, but not enough to appease my brother, who went and pouted on the couch at the mere mention of seven o’clock. When my mother wagged her finger at him and reminded him that he was still going to have to drive me to school, he went ballistic.

“She’s a little shit!” he objected to our mother, pointing at me wildly. “She nearly killed us both this morning. When I was driving she totally reached over and grabbed the wheel and tried to send us into traffic.”

“Did not!” I cried. “He was on his cell phone! It was either wrap around a tree or veer into traffic!”

Our mother considered that for a moment. “That’s a doozy,” she finally replied, looking to my brother. “Try not to kill your sister tomorrow, okay?”

His mouth popped open, but his objection did not make it out. He gaped at her for a long moment before she shrugged at him and pranced out of the room like a gazelle—or what a gazelle probably would look like if they didn’t trip over the door lip and fall straight into the couch. He and I watched our mother as she popped up like nothing happened and kept right on going, nothing having the ability to stop her.

He blinked, still looking after her for a moment, before he snapped his mouth shut and turned to give me the stink eye. “I’m only taking you because Mom and Dad probably wouldn’t feed me if he didn’t.”

He was probably right, but my only reply was a nod and a shrug, like I couldn’t care less. Actually, I thought it would probably cause me more pleasure to watch him be punished, but I knew I wasn’t that sadistic.

Or was I?

I pursed my lips at him for a moment before I smirked to myself and made my way to the stairs, humming to myself as I passed by the progression of mine and Felton’s lives leading the way in picture form up the stairs. I remembered a time where we used to get along, and it was almost comical now. Once upon a time, I used to admire my brother. But that was before I learned what IQs were, and that my brother’s was less than the common squirrel’s. That was before my brother was supposed to be walking me home but he shoved me into an alligator-infested lake. That was before he told me that he would hang out with me, but girls had cooties and his friends thought I was weird.

I sometimes had sneaking suspicions that Felton still believed I had cooties, but that was a story for another time.

I made it to my closed door and sighed—the door had been giving me trouble, to say the least. I closed it the first night we stayed in the house only to discover myself locked inside of it the next morning, the door absolutely refusing to move, its hinges locked like a colt’s knees. After three hours of my mom screaming on the other side of the door (“OH MY GOD VINNIE DO SOMETHING SHE’S GOING TO DIE!”), I eventually figured out that my door thought that it was guarding something precious, because to open it I had to knock three times and say “Eggplant” before it swung open with ease, so easily I barely had to touch the handle. If this was someone else’s life, these events would probably be strange and unpredictable, but I expected absolutely nothing less.