THE GUYS' girl

Chapter 17

Song Vibes: Gone by *NSYNC

A babyfaced Justin Timberlake is definitely worth watching this video :)

"You're different here. More relaxed." My tone wasn't accusatory. I was just stating the facts.

I finally had alone time with my brother and I wasn't going to waste it on small talk. Our flight back to Florida left in just a few hours, so I knew I had to capture the Kentucky version of Aiden while I still had him. But the only sounds filling our childhood treehouse were the chirping of birds above and the scurrying of squirrels through the fallen leaves on the forest floor.

Aiden ran his hands over his face and sighed. There was no doubt in my mind that Aiden was dealing with something on his own, but would he share it with me?

"What's going on with you, Aid?"

He laid down on the bare wood floor, crossed his legs at his ankles and threw his arms behind his head. Under different circumstances, the action would have appeared nonchalant, but I knew he was attempting to relax his body to calm his nerves. Aiden only had a few tells. He tried so hard to mask his emotions, but I was totally onto his "everything's good" vibe that usually meant everything was not good.

He may have been the one in our family known for reading people, but I was the one that could read him.

"Remember when Dad tore down my fort?" he asked.

Aiden was eleven when he'd dragged scrap wood and tools out to the treeline with his friends, determined to make a fort on his own. My dad discovered their lean-to one day and nearly had Aiden's backside for keeping his project a secret.

"Someone could get killed if this thing collapsed!" Dad had yelled at him.

He'd had a point. Rusty nails and rotting wood were not exactly child-friendly building materials. I could still remember Aiden storming into the house in tears, screaming at Dad that he hated him and would never forgive him. I later learned that Dad tore down the fort in front of Aiden's friends and hauled the materials into the burn pile.

"I remember," I nodded. "But an even stronger memory was of the three of us building this treehouse."

The weekend after their fight, Dad woke us up early to drive into town to Home Depot. For a month the three of us worked on building the most amazing treehouse we'd ever imagined - complete with a rope ladder, roof, and deck. Dad taught Aiden to hammer nails and drill screws while I stained the wood.

Officially, the treehouse was Aiden's clubhouse with his friends. Off-the-record, it was Barbie's dreamhouse retreat. Later, when we got older, it was Aiden's secret make-out spot and my quiet reading nook. Now, it seemed we finally had a common use for it - a place to remind us of our roots.

"Do you know what I remember?" he asked, not waiting for a reply. "How much I hated Dad for embarrassing me in front of my friends. Did you know I was planning on running away the day he surprised us with the plans to build this place?"

Dumbstruck, I shook my head. I'd never heard Aiden mention the idea of running away from home. It scared me that he'd spent several days making an actual plan. There were two things that had always been true about my brother. One, he was stubborn as a mule - an old, grumpy, bull-headed mule. Two, he'd always been resourceful. It'd been his idea to build a fort and the others unanimously made him president of their boy club.

What scared me was that if he'd made a plan, even at the age of eleven, I knew he could've carried it out successfully.

"Where were you planning on going?"