Karl was sulking in his room, his snapback hat still on his head, as he looked at porn on Laurie's laptop, which he kept borrowing without asking.

When Laurie came in, he didn’t even bother closing what he was watching. He turned a glare on her, letting her see and hear everything, watching her face twist into something like disgust, and he felt some sadistic satisfaction. She deserved it after all for just barging into his room like that.

Never mind that it was Laurie's house.

"What the hell was that?" he complained. "I know it's your place and all, but this is currently my room, isn’t it? Can I not get some privacy around here? I could have been jerking off, you know."

Laurie could feel her face twist even more with disgust. As if it wasn’t bad enough he was watching porn. And not just that, but on her own private computer. She'd had it for a while, considering all the work she had done on it, it was one of her most prized possessions. But her brother took it, and all he wanted to do on it was watch his stupid porn.

She'd tried everything to stop him from taking it every time, but even though he wasn’t as good with computers as she was, he knew more than enough of the basics to get through her passwords so it wasn’t really hard. It was a wonder that he was smart enough to handle even that much when he couldn't do most things for himself. Or perhaps he was just too lazy.

He didn’t seem to understand or care, that the computer had a lot of important information and data pertaining to her work, no matter how many times she reminded him when he took it, so it had led to arguments a few times already.

There were other ways she could avoid this, of course. She could buy him his own computer, or fix an old one for him. The only problem was that, with him around it was putting a strain on her funds as it was. She couldn’t afford to get him his own computer. When he'd put up the argument himself she had explained to him why not, then he'd insisted he could just use hers if she wouldn’t buy him his own.

It wasn’t like she agreed to it, but she didn’t have much of a choice. She couldn’t keep her computer on her all the time, and it was a good way to keep him behaved and distracted, if only momentarily. So it was something of a necessary evil, but she still hated when he took it without asking. Either way, she was going to retreat instead of turning it into a fight.

Though, she could have done without him yelling at her, or putting the image of him jerking off to porn in front of her laptop in her mind, especially with all that noise in the background. Did he think it made him seem like he deserved privacy? Because she wasn’t just going to give in to him in her house with the way he was acting. For a second, she sympathized with her father for kicking him out. She knew he wouldn’t have acted like this there, though, so she pushed the thought away.

Still, while she was still angry with their father, Karl was acting like a total brat, and she was not amused.

Laurie opened her mouth to tell her brother off. She wasn’t even sure where to start. There was all the mess he kept leaving around and expecting her to clean up like she was his maid. There was taking her bike without telling her to who knew where, and biking without a license at that. It was like he didn’t even care about the trouble it would have caused if he got caught by a cop riding when he'd had his license taken from him for being careless. There was also taking her computer without asking and what he put it to use for.

This was why she was sick of putting up with him already. The only reason she hadn't kicked him out was knowing he had nowhere and no one else to go to. The responsibility of him being her blood relative, her little brother, was all that kept her from tossing him out. Every time she thought about it, she actually felt guilty remembering their dad had done the same thing, just turned his back on his only son.

But this was more than even she could handle. She'd had endless patience back when she still lived at home, but she had changed in the past eight years, and it was probably time her brother realized it and changed or she'd end up tossing him out, too.

Words wouldn’t come out of her mouth, though, because there was a sudden, loud moan from the computer that had her flushing from head to toe in embarrassment. It was disturbing, the thought of porn and her little brother together, and she swallowed back bile.

Karl noticed, and she glared at the smirk he sent her way.

"See? Why don’t you just leave and we can talk after I'm done here? Since I already started, you can just leave me alone for now, can't you?"

He drifted a hand over his stomach, and her eyes followed automatically before she caught herself and looked away. She could just imagine the look he had on his face then.

Laurie responded to his taunting by pulling out a remote she'd designed herself and had started keeping on hand after a while since Karl started living with her. She hit a button on it, turning the computer's power off from across the room.

She glanced back over at her brother, keeping her eyes focused on his face, feeling smug at the annoyed look that crossed his face.

"What the hell did you do?" he growled, shooting out of his seat so fast that it clattered to the floor, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He tapped at the computer, before turning to her. "No, seriously, what even was that? You're my older sister, but being a few years older than me doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do!"

Laurie just eyed him with pursed lips as he threw a fit at her.

She thought back to what her new neighbor, Mickey, had called Karl and decided that it was apt. She wondered if he even heard himself talk, how much he sounded like a fourteen-year-old boy complaining to his parents and throwing a tantrum.

There were all sorts of things she could have told him. Like, how she had the right to monitor what he did, at least while he was in her house. Only, it sounded way too much like their dad that she felt a moment of horror, knowing neither of them would take that statement well.

Even though it was true. She'd thought it was bull when her dad told her the same thing when he restricted her from what she wanted to do. It had seemed unfair at the time, and she still felt that it was, because she was nowhere near as destructive as her brother was now acting. But this was her home, she paid the bills, bought the food. When Karl ate, or left laundry lying around, or threw trash all over the place instead of where it was supposed to go, the one left to clean up after him was her. This behavior was probably why he didn’t even have any friends that would put up with him.

Well, whatever.

Laurie sighed. She actually wasn’t in the mood to put up with her brother just then. So, instead of arguing, she walked in, grabbed her laptop, shut it, and walked out, informing him, "I'll be locking this up whenever I'm not home."

"What?" he yelped, following her out. "You can't! If you do that, what the hell am I supposed to do here all day?"

She rolled her eyes at his whining as if she was locking him up in a prison. "You are free to go outside whenever you want. There's also the TV. It's not like you'll be completely without entertainment."

"But I can't surf the internet from the TV and you only have boring channels. Most of my entertainment I get online, and where the hell am I supposed to get the internet from outside?"

She turned to him with a frown. "Don’t you have a smartphone?"

"Of course not," he snorted at her. "Who would have bought it for me. Dad? Even if he did, do you think he'd kick me out and let me take it with me? I have a phone but I can't do anything but make calls and send texts on it."

He did have a point there, Laurie couldn’t say it was wrong. She didn’t know anyone that didn’t have a smartphone, but their dad was old-fashioned enough that he would have refused if Karl requested him to buy one. She had one she'd bought herself, but she couldn’t hand it over, and she couldn’t afford to get him a phone either.

"Come on, Laurie. Please? There's nothing wrong with me using it when you aren't, is there?"

There was. Laurie worked a lot on her computer, storing a lot of private information on it. She had it all under encryption, of course, but that didn’t mean it was completely safe. He could do all manner of things, like visit unsafe sites, and a computer virus might pass through the firewalls she'd put up, and even encrypted, she could lose everything. When had she last backed up her data? She'd never had reason to because she was always careful. The only reason she'd done it in the first place was because it made sense, but she didn’t always remember to keep it up.

She didn’t want Karl destroying her house, but she didn’t want him messing with her work, either.

He noticed her hesitating and narrowed his eyes. "Why don’t you just buy me a phone, then? Because you already said no to a computer and won't let me use yours."

"Like hell," she snapped back immediately. "I can't afford it right now or I would have done it already."

Not something he would be satisfied with, anyway, and she couldn’t pay his cell phone bills above hers with everything else she had on her budget if they didn’t want to go hungry. Hell, who was she kidding? She would be the one going hungry because her brother was just that selfish.

They continued arguing back and forth, Laurie hugging the computer protectively to her chest.

"All right," he finally admitted after some more arguing, "my 'Russian buddies' gave me some bad schwag for 'all my hard work' and I wanted to relax and enjoy it." He didn’t get specific, didn’t even explain exactly what they'd given him, but by the twist in her expression, she had some idea.

Laurie barely heard everything else, she didn’t even care for any more details. Her brother had low-grade marijuana, and he brought it to her house, intending to use it while watching porn on her computer.

"You know that hanging out with drug dealers and doing favors for them is courting jail," she angrily pointed out. "You can't keep doing that sort of thing! You got lucky before, but I am not Dad. There's only so much trouble I can get you out of if I even can at all, if you do something stupid and end up getting caught by the police."

He just waved at her dismissively. "Whatever. Just let me use the computer. Weren’t you doing something outside? Just go back to doing that, and by the time you come back I'll be finished with it and you can have it back."

She glared at him. Like hell, she was just going to do that now. But she didn’t know exactly what to say to him. She finally just left in disgust, without another word, planning to make an early dinner for herself and then go for a badly needed bike ride.