“Janie, you are SO annoying.” Hope stomps into the living room of the cabin where the Birdsongs are staying, carrying an empty pitcher.
Janie looks up from her book, her nose scrunched in irritation. “What?”
Hope brandishes the pitcher. “Is there any more peach tea?”
Janie takes a sheepish sip of the peach tea she’s holding. “Oh. Sorry!” she says.
“It’s fine,” says Hope, but her eye-roll says that it isn’t really.
Janie holds out her glass. “Do you want some?”
“I said it was fine,” Hope grumbles.
She goes to the fridge to get something else. I follow.
She lowers her voice. “She always manages to get the last one of everything. It’s a dark gift.”
“Kind of like your dark gift for always spilling stuff on my shirts when you borrow them!” Janie yells from the other room.
Hope sticks her tongue out at her when we come back with our (barely tolerable, might as well be poisoned) root beer.
She told me this would happen. For the first six days, they’d be falling all over each other with excitement, but by the seventh, that feeling of missing each other would wear off, and they would become capable of annoying each other like normal siblings.
Her idea of normal siblings is still a heck of a lot more kumbaya than mine.
I’m just finishing my root beer when I get a text from Pam:
Hi Spencer,
Come home and pack for camp!
Love, Pam
She always writes them like that, like it’s a mini–e-mail or something.
I look at Hope, who is making huffy noises into her empty root beer bottle, and Janie, who is turning the pages of her book with audible vehemence, and decide that writing my name on all my boxers in Sharpie is a super critical task that I should be performing, like, right now.
“Okay, see you guys,” I say awkwardly quick and rush out the door.
As soon as I enter the Barton cabin, I am greeted by Dean. With a headlock.
Speaking of annoying siblings.
“Hey, Spencer, I wanna try some new wrestling moves.” He clamps his armpit tighter against the back of my head. He smells terrible.
“Yeah, well, I don’t.”
I try to pull my head out. I’m tired of being his practice dummy. Plus, I can’t stop thinking about the dazed way Hope was looking at him after their four-wheeler ride.
“Well, I didn’t want you to tell Janie all kinds of embarrassing crap about me, but sometimes we don’t get what we want.” He keeps squeezing.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Keep it down,” snaps my dad. “I’m watching a game.”
He goes back to Braves vs. Mets.
I manage to get my head free, but Dean attaches himself to my leg, safe in the knowledge that I can’t cry out under threat of meeting Dad’s wrath (which goes from a nine to an eleven any time the Braves are playing the Mets).
He drops me to the ground using one of the fancy moves his coach taught him. He’s going for the pin. I could give up. If I let him pin me, I can go upstairs like I want.
But I am so over this crap.
I fight back. Hard. I am ferocious. I am a praying mantis. A black spitting thicktail scorpion. An entire swarm of killer bees. He is not going to pin me. Never again. I slip out of his hold like I’m slathered in baby oil. Fast as a dragonfly. I snake my forearm under his neck and lock it with my other arm and use the momentum to throw him off me. Fear flashes in his eyes. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to know. He’s scared I might win.
His fear is my adrenaline. Knowing that, it’s huge. It changes everything. We’re no longer playing our specified battle roles. Dean: offense. Spencer: defense. I am attacking the crap out of him, and I. Just. Might. Win.
I go for his leg, and I’ve got him, I can feel it. If I can just twist his arm a little more. Shift my weight by a couple degrees. Crap. He jerks out of it. And before I can get him again, we’re crashing into an end table. The one that holds my dad’s beer during games. I wait for the beer and my dad’s temper to come crashing down on my head.
They don’t. In fact, my hair is refreshingly beer-free. And my dad, he’s smiling at me.
“Where did you learn to do that?” The smile melts into his voice.
I duck my head. “I don’t know. I guess I must have picked up a few things from Dean.”
He shakes his head like he’s still working on believing what he saw. “It’s more than that. You’ve got a hunger. You’re small, too. It’s hard to find guys like you. Are you going out for wrestling this year? You’d be a natural.”
“You actually would,” Dean agrees. He doesn’t even seem pissed that I almost pinned him. “I could work with you on your moves and stuff.”
“Next year,” I say. “They don’t have wrestling in eighth grade. But I could do it next year.”
Did I just say that? I’ve never even thought about wrestling, but the way my dad is looking at me, with his arms crossed and his chest puffed up—it has never happened before, and I don’t want it to end.