Why I Hate Hunter

{2}. Don't rely on Math

Even that one night she though Cole would dedicate himself to her before he went to college, he had chosen to spend it with Hunter. That and the day before when she got arrested, or the day before that and the whole summer. He had stopped being her big brother since Hunter Jensen moved next to them. After they hit it off, Cole would never stay anymore inside the house and play with her or with their little brother. Cole had been the one always on the go, always having fun, always being with friends, the popular one, the amazing child. He had been so close to Mavis before, never leaving her alone and sharing everything with her and then he had just gone away leaving their family to do everything on their own.

Scolding herself to not even think of crying, she sent a message to Lilian telling her that she would pass later by her house before the concert, got changed and slept without getting a shower or brushing her teeth. She could do all of that later, now she wanted to forget everything and just sleep.

She didn't see Cole again for a while, not the day of the concert or the week after that. Every time she was awake Cole was either in his room or out so she kept her distance and made herself only think about the family's ongoing life, her volunteering causes and her SAT exam practices. She had even distanced herself from her friends a bit by texting less and participating in fewer meetings. The only people she hadn't turned her back on were Justin and her closest friend Lilian. There were people that she would never ignore and things she would never do. So when the day that Cole would leave drew close, she made sure that she was helping him to be ready even if it was from the sidelines.

***

She was going to do it this time. She was going to win no matter what.

"Justin, Mavis down now or I'll shove the controls where it hurts the most!"

Mavis sighed as Justin paused Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed game almost immediately. She wouldn't be able to pick up the game in time to win it and that's what her little brother was hoping.

"It's OK Mavis, the math says that you will win on the time that it takes for you to go to college. You have lots of time." Justin faked a painful sigh as he got up from the dark blue mattress they had sat on the ground like they always did when they played and his small, almost bony foot pushed her controller away. He paused dramatically at the wooden door of his room and added as an afterthought "Maybe you should not rely much on math though, last I calculated it, you should have won at least a game by now. Like seriously!"

A whimper almost left Justin's lips and Mavins knew she would have won this time if it hadn't been for her dad's scream.

"You are never going to see those games again if I don't see your a$ses down here now!"

Mavis rolled her eyes and pushed herself up. If her dad screamed once and threatened, that was okay, you could take your sweet time before even answering to anything, but the second time was the time your sugar had run out of sweetness. Her dad worked weirdly like the traffic lights. The first call was laud and angry but it was still green, safe for anyone to get a warning. The second call was the orange light, the one that came shortly before the red light shined and Justin had calculated the switch time so any of them could be in front of their dad before the red was bright.

"I'm gonna..." the red, but bright face of Mavis's dad (even his face could work like traffic lights) greeted them on the hem of the stairs just on time and he had to stop himself before he spat on their faces while he screamed his head off.

Taking a deep breath, Mavis's dad tried to compose himself while preserving the angry face, which the three of them Justin, Mavis and their older brother Cole had tried to talk him out of. Their dad was great at many things: single-handedly raising three annoying children, cooking every morning for everyone, managing to bring home at least two different chicks every week (they were quite good at cleaning, bless them) and working to feed four extremely hungry mammals at home, but he could never get the angry face right. One time he had Googled how an angry face should look so he could be better at parenting (apparently books on how to be a better parent were sold out at that time and Internet was all he had left) and read a very distinctive description 'face turned red, eyebrows locked together and slightly pulled down, a scary glare on the eyes and the most important feature: narrowed thin lips. But their dad's lips were never going to be thin and his idea of narrowed lips was more into the pout that anything else. But, no matter how many times they tried to make him fix it he would just turn to them and say: