“Fine. Let’s go with degenerate.”
Her bubblegum pink lips formed a shocked “O” and she took a swipe at me, which I easily ducked.
“Miss Forrester,” a stern female voice called. “We don’t hit others.”
“But he’s my brother,” Marley whined while I laughed, put her in a headlock, waved good-naturedly at the teacher standing by, and pulled my little sister along with me to where I’d parked my rental car as she punched me repeatedly in the thigh until I let her go.
“Are you here until my graduation?” she asked, throwing her backpack into the back seat and smoothing her hair as she got into the passenger seat.
“No. Just for a couple days,” I said, sliding behind the steering wheel. “But I’ll be back.”
“You’d better be.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah!”
She reached forward and paired her phone with the car and then turned up the volume to a decibel level that threatened to shatter our eardrums.
I turned the volume down again and she pouted for a good half second before launching into her plans for her birthday party, which was happening on Saturday, two days from now. I wouldn't be here for that though. I’d be leaving that morning, escaping before I could be put to work on decorations or made to sit through a fashion show while Marley pretended to need my opinion and then ignored every single one I gave.
“Smart man,” my stepmother, Lisa, had said when I’d told her and my dad about my early flight out.
My father had leaned into me quietly. “Take me with you,” he’d begged.
“So then,” Marley said now. “We’ll have cake and all that boring stuff to please the folks of course, and presents?—”
“To please you,” I broke in.
“Obviously. And then movies and music and snacks…”
She went on and on, and I grinned, letting her words and excitement wash over me. For the first sixteen years of my life I’d felt I’d missed out on having a younger sibling, but had made my peace with it. So when Marley came along, I’d not known at first what to think of her. But one look at that impish face, which had only grown lovelier with each year, and I was hooked. The doting big brother, reporting for duty.
I tried not to spoil her, but it was hard. She was intelligent, funny, and had more style in a single discerning raised eyebrow than I did in my entire body. Not only that, but she saw people. Really saw them. Not in the same way I did, which she said was through some romanticized hazy lens, walking across misty moors.
She could tell a person’s character within seconds of meeting them. Which was why I’d never live down marrying Nadia. Marley had warned me, but I’d blown off her concerns with a “you’re too young to understand” naïveté that had bitten me, quite hard, in the ass when I’d learned my now ex had been cheating on me for the better part of a year.
Or, to put it another way, for most of our marriage.
There had been no “I told you so” from my little sister, which had been kind of her, since I’d been shell-shocked, demoralized, and heartbroken. But anytime she got even a whiff of a woman in my life, she became a bloodhound keen on the scent of female pheromones. Because she didn’t just read other people. She could read me as well.
I pulled up to a stoplight and felt her eyes on me.
“Are you seeing someone?” she asked, turning down the volume so that it was still loud, but with only minimal bleeding from the ears.
“No,” I said, keeping my eyes on the intersection. It wasn’t a lie, but for some reason I still felt I’d been caught out.
“Interested in someone?”
I took a long breath in, held it, and exhaled before turning to her scrutinizing glare.
“No. Why?”
“Because I’ve been blasting sappy love songs for the past ten minutes and you haven’t said a word. Normally you’d threaten to embarrass me with one of your butt rock songs from prehistoric times if I didn’t turn it off.”
“I’m evolving as a man,” I said and turned back to stare imploringly at the traffic light.
“Bout time.”
