me to fulfill that stuff. I’m his sister, I can’t do it.” Montana looked at me curiously for awhile before speaking.

“Sooo, you’re scouting out girls now for your brother.”

“What did you two talk about that you felt wasn’t important enough to tell me yet?” I began showing irritation in my voice. I didn’t want to answer her question. She caught onto my impatience.

“Well, we talked maybe five or six times, for a couple of hours each.”

Five or six times, what was she pulling at? There would be no way a person could forget the exact number of something like that.

“We talked a lot about my sister, and of course I bragged a lot about myself. I basically said that she was too stubborn to change and I wasn’t, let alone I didn’t even need to change to make him happy. Mainly I just flirted with him a lot. It was impossible to tell whether he liked it or did it back to me. But he let me do it to him.”

Montana paused and looked to my face.

“You can’t blame a girl for trying,” she remarked.

“And did all this information just slip your mind all the times we talked about my brother before.”

“You would do the same if it was my brother. You would have never let me see him if you knew that stuff. Besides, I made hints about it.”

She did make hints that she liked my brother, and that my brother probably already mysteriously liked her back, but nothing big enough to figure all that out.

“Also,” she continued, “if you are looking for a girlfriend for your brother, one time, I did jokingly ask him if he would go out with me when he gave up on my sister. He said yes, even though to you, it would sound like a joking yes, I think he meant it.”

This was all way too much way too fast. She said there were hints though. She left hints. My mind did suspect something all along. I always had a gut feeling. Damn it. Those tiny things, tones in voices, wording of sentences, pauses between words, facial expressions; were those things Ean used to plan everything. Things I always overlooked as insignificant. They were impossible to tell the meanings too, I think. Was that why Ean was so smart?

Montana was playing with her food waiting for something from me. Waiting for me to make my move. I acted on impulse. Things just came to me. Montana waited. Was she planning? Why was she so slow in math? I could solve problems much faster than her but in the end, she was at minimum, twice as thorough as I ever could be.

I had to stop it, soon I would promote her to Mad Genius. She was a fifteen year old girl with a crush on my brother. She was like him in so many ways but still only fifteen. A sophomore in high school just trying to get at a guy.

The way Ean looked at me that morning, the way he kissed me. He stopped seeing me as his little sister; he started seeing me as a girl he loved. I couldn’t let my brother fall in love with me. I hated myself so much. Not three weeks prior, that was my ultimate goal. How did everything turn around? Now I was protecting Ean from feeling too much for me. He was the one who started out protecting me from wanting him too badly. All I knew was somewhere, somehow, in the past few weeks, I grew up a lot.

If Ean fell in love with me, I wouldn’t know what to do. We couldn’t get married, we couldn’t have a family. Damn everything. That constant loop stuck in my mind. Was that what Ean felt when it all started?

“Don’t worry,” Montana said softly looking to my thoughtful face, “I won’t steal him from you. Even if he does like me, I’ll make sure he knows that you come first. I’m not going to abandon my best friend just for some guy, even if it is him.”

“Thanks,” I cooed. Now they had both said it. They both said that I was first before anyone else, before the other. Everything was falling apart right under me, everything that I tried planning or ignoring, it all crumbled down to my last hope – Ean and Montana, both devoted to me.

All the planning and hoping I did between the two that they would never meet then fell down to me wishing everything that they would fall for each other at first sight. Apart, they relied so much on me, too much. I wanted them together. Everything I denied, all the thoughts that flashed through my mind before, the happiness the two would make each other, all of that, without me. But it was with me at that point. I was included. I wanted them together then, but just with me in there too somehow.

But with any new thought of new potential, more fear began rising that I struggled to ignore. What if they didn’t like each other when they met? What if they were two similar? What if they just annoyed each other? What if only one liked the other without the other liking back? Everything would fall back on top of me.

Why couldn’t I just be a normal fourteen year old girl with normal fourteen year old problems?

The remainder of lunch was pretty silent between us. On our walk to the middle school after classes, Montana though shocked me a bit.

“Yeah,” she said, “if one of my parents call for your mom, you have to pretend she’s out at the moment and not gone completely. Also, I kind of mispronounced your last name pretty bad so they wouldn’t question the relation to my sister’s boyfriend.”

“They don’t know your staying with him!” I yelped.

“They would never let me stay with him, they would think he was psycho depressed or something and if he wasn’t, they would think he was just a cold person and a bad example. Also, they believe they know your mom from church or somewhere. I think I saw your mom in a parking lot in the distance and pointed her out because she was pretty far behind someone I knew my parents recognized as a nice lady, so they think that’s her.”

I was speechless. All I could do was stutter.

“It gets loads more complicated too, but in the end, they’ll eventually find out but I think I can get off with only a week or two grounded. Even then, I’ll just read books in my room and live vicariously through you in our lunchroom chats.”

“So then, off to your house, then call Ean to pick us up,” was all I could muster in my disbelief.

“Yeah, but we have to sneak up to my house to double check that my parents are gone, otherwise they’ll want to just bring us over. So if their flight was delayed, I’ll need some time to piece my backup plan together.”

Wow. That was all I could think of her right then as we waited before the growing crowd of middle school kids walking from the doors.

Bentlee popped up next to me without me even noticing. I managed to catch most of my jerk so I didn’t look so startled that she would laugh. We started off toward their house as Bentlee began about all her aspirations for the weekend.

Thankfully, the flight must not have been delayed and their parents were gone with only a note on the kitchen table. I called Ean and then left upstairs with Montana to help her pack. After we fit everything she wanted into a large duffle bag and her emptied book bag, we walked over to check on Bentlee.

Bentlee was working on a second laundry basket full of stuff beyond a large duffle bag and her book bag. Montana and I made short work of almost all of it by critiquing everything she had in a manner we made to sound like Ean. Countless teddy bears and stuff so amazingly pointless flew from her packing as we laughed and scoffed at it.

Bentlee was a lot like Montana and I guess Crystal, but she was so incredibly different as well. She was strong and had some wisdom somewhere in her, but she was so much like the other kids I remembered in seventh grade, maybe a little worse. She was probably more like Crystal in the long run over Montana. She seemed much more extroverted and willing to mold into the crowd.

Perhaps in the end, we scoffed maybe too much, because she ended up with less stuff than Montana. Even still though, I thought they both had an excess for only staying four days at my house.

Driving home with Ean proved to be quite an awkward silence. My theory was proven correct in just how scared those two were of actually meeting him. As we pulled into our driveway though, I noticed Ean looking into the rearview mirror and something clicked in my head. He had been doing that the whole trip and once I started thinking about it, the more odd it was for him to do that. At least that was until I looked back and saw Montana also staring at the mirror. That mirror that Ean so inconspicuously adjusted before leaving their driveway. Was he putting a current face to that voice he talked so much too before?

I marched first, leading the two others into my room. The first thing I saw was my panties on my bed. Those little girl panties that were filled with Ean’s cum. He must have thrown them there. Immediately, I grabbed them and threw them into my laundry basket. I wasn’t in the mood for some reason right then.

Montana and Bentlee dropped their stuff onto my floor. I guess that would be the home base. We would most likely end up in the living room before the TV sleeping.

Ean didn’t really know what to do apparently and retreated to his room leaving the door open a crack. Bentlee kept bugging me to get him so we could all do something together. I told her that she could get him if she wanted, but if she wanted a reaction from him she would have to be specific. He didn’t fare to well with doing ‘something’.

In time, Montana suggested that we load Bentlee up with sugar and let her be the entertainment. Apparently sugar and her didn’t mix well, or just mixed too well, so her parents cut her off of it. Montana said that it just made everything so much worse when she actually did get a hold of some.

I went straight to my kitchen and found a box of snack cakes. I laughed silently as I showed Montana the ingredients. The first two were “Sugar” and “Corn Syrup,” aka, liquid sugar. I’ll end that with saying that Ean soon enough had to close his door, and us girls had a great time.

A little after midnight though, Ean came out when things silenced down. Bentlee was out cold in her sleeping bag and Montana and I were fumbling through movies to watch. Ean walked into the living room eating a sandwich and dropped the empty box of snack cakes in front of me.

“I thought she wasn’t allowed to have sugar,” he asked.

“She only had three,” I defended weakly, assuming he must have been informed about that rule from Crystal. “Do you want to watch a movie with us?”

“I guess.”

Yes. That was definitely a good sign. He didn’t even ask what movie. I guess after the day by himself, he just wanted to be with people. Not his usual self but even better.

Montana was already putting in a movie as Ean retreated to the couch.

---

“Ean,” I whispered as the ending credits scrolled up the television screen in the black room. Montana was to my other side leaning over with her head sleeping on the arm rest of the couch. My own tired head laid gently on Ean’s arm.

“Hmm?”

“You can do whatever you want to them and they would only like you more,” I said softly. “Don’t worry. This whole weekend will be so boring for everyone if you hide away in your room all the time.” I watched in silence as more meaningless names moved up the screen.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just can’t stop thinking about you. And what I want to do… Montana… You have no idea how right you were. Just knowing she’s in the same house as me makes my legs weak.”

I smiled. “Be strong. You’ll get her faster than it took me to get you. Just waiting will kill you. Trust me, I tried waiting for you and about died.”

“What about Bentlee though.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know how to put a little girl in her place,” I whispered menacingly before we both sat a while longer in silence.

Montana shifted in her sleep.

“Well, I guess I should go to sleep,” his voice broke a bit louder as he began getting up. As he left the room, I turned to Montana and began shaking her.

“Montana, wake up,” I whispered loudly, “it’s time to go to bed.” I felt pretty stupid after I finished that sentence but it made some sense to me. Our sleeping bags were on the floor, we were on the couch.

-

e.l. hanes

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