“No, you will,” Rory said, knowing the second, the very second, that Mrs. Fitzpatrick turned her back on them that the large jar of pink glitter by the window was going to find its way into Connor’s hair.
Twenty years earlier...
“Give it back, Connor!”
He held it up higher, making little Rory James jump for it. She tried to glare at him, but unlike the other boys at school, he wasn’t afraid of her or her big brothers. As far as he was concerned, little Rory James had been put on this earth solely for him to torture.
“Give what back?” he asked innocently, waving her notebook in the air above the brown pond water just to taunt her. Not that he was going to give it back to her, because he wasn’t. In a minute or two when he got bored with this, he fully planned on throwing it in the water with the hopes that she’d go after it.
“My notebook, you jerk!” Rory said, giving up on trying to get it back and moved on to the kicking phase, but he’d been ready for that. After five years of making her life a living hell, he knew what to expect and he knew that if he gave her a chance that she’d drop him to the ground. Then, she’d probably make him eat dirt again.
“Just give her the notebook,” Zack, the annoying boy from Mrs. Plumes’ class who’d been following after Rory for the past two weeks like a puppy dog, said. Connor hadn’t minded the kid before he’d started following Rory. He was a decent basketball player and knew how to make an awesome spitball, but he didn’t like anyone getting between him and Rory.
“I can take care of myself,” Rory said, never taking her eyes away from him, which pleased him immensely, but he wasn’t happy with the interruption.
“Why don’t you come take it for her?” Connor suggested as he reached out and palmed Rory’s face and shoved her away before she tried to kick him while he was distracted. With a curse that would probably have her father reaching for a bar of soap, she stumbled backwards, fell over a dead log, and landed in the mud. Connor would have laughed, but he had other things to do at the moment.
“Fine,” the only slightly smaller boy said as he stormed over and made a move to grab the notebook. With a bored sigh, Connor held the notebook higher. As soon as Zack reached for it, Connor hooked his foot between the boy’s legs and pulled up just as he turned, causing the boy to lose his balance and take a header into the dirty water.
“Next time, mind your own business,” he said, laughing when the boy started to cry. Crying over a little dirty water, what a dork, Connor thought. Rory wouldn’t have cried. She never cried, which he took as a personal challenge.
“And next time,” Rory suddenly said as he felt her small hands press against his back, “don’t touch my math homework.” With that, he went stumbling forward and landed in the water right next to the big crybaby.
Connor rolled over and spit a mouthful of murky water at Rory, laughing when it hit her bare leg. Deciding that wasn’t nearly good enough, he used her now-soaked notebook and splashed her until she was as wet as he was.
He wasn’t entirely surprised when she launched herself at him instead of running off and crying like most of the girls he knew would have done. There was no running off and crying for Rory James, not when she could try and kick his ass.
As they rolled around in the muddy water, trying to make the other one eat a handful of mud, he couldn’t help but smile. She was just so much fun to torture, Connor thought as he forced a handful of mud, and God only knows what else, in her mouth.
Fifteen years earlier...
“There’s no talking in detention!” Mr. Williams snapped.
Rory shoved her green, black, and pink paint-splattered hair out of her face and wondered, not for the first time, why the school hadn’t let them use the showers in the locker rooms or sent them home to wash up and let them start their two weeks of detention tomorrow. It would have made more sense and would have saved them from having to stand at the back of the room on newspapers so that they didn’t get paint everywhere.
“That’s what I told her, Mr. Williams,” Connor said, discreetly reaching over when Mr. Williams became distracted by a spitball flying past his head and shoved Rory, making her stumble off their newspaper and onto the pristine white tiled floor.
“You bastard!” Rory hissed as she jumped back onto the newspaper, but not before her paint-soaked stocking feet left large smears of black and red paint all over the floor.
“Just wait until detention’s over, Rory. You’re going to pay for making me miss practice,” Connor said, shoving her again, but this time, she managed to stay on the newspaper.
“We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t shoved me into the art room,” she said, shoving him back, causing him to stumble, slip, and slide on the floor, leaving an impressive streak of green and pink paint behind.
“If anyone should be mad, it’s me. You made me miss work!” Rory hissed, giving him another shove that added a little bit of black paint to the mix.
After this little episode, she’d be lucky if she still had a job. Her father told her that if she pulled any bullshit, she was fired. She hoped that he meant any bullshit on the job because otherwise, she was screwed since she couldn’t seem to go a day without getting into it with Connor.
Over the years, their parents, teachers, the priest at their church, their coaches, and even the Neighborhood Watch had gone out of their way to keep them apart, but nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. Over the past ten years, they hadn’t been allowed in the same classroom at school or CCD at church. They weren’t allowed to play on the coed teams after school out of fear that they’d beat the shit out of each other with baseball bats. Neighborhood watches all over town blew those damn whistles whenever the two of them were spotted together.
It was really annoying.
They hadn’t gone a day in the last ten years, not even when she was laid up in bed with the flu last year, without giving each other hell. She still remembered waking up at two in the morning to find Connor short-sheeting her bed while she was still in it! To this day, she didn’t know how he’d managed to sneak into her room for two weeks straight. It wasn’t like her room was on the first floor or she’d left her windows unlocked. No matter what she did, the jerk always found a way to break in and piss her off into a speedy recovery so that she could kick his ass.
When he was laid up for two weeks after she’d gotten over the flu, she’d made damn sure to return the favor.
“Oh, please, it’s not like you have a real job. I bet your daddy,” he said mockingly, and he was the only one with the balls to do it, “has you fetching his drinks.”
She had to snort at that. Her father worked her to the bone. Rory did everything her brothers had to do and more because she had a talent and skill with the saws that none of them could touch. Every day after school, she joined her brothers and father wherever he was working and they worked their asses off until dinner time. Then, they went home, made dinner, did their homework, and passed out.
