“Poor baby has terrible mucus and phlegm problems,” Mom murmured, nodding her head at the beast. “At night, he snores louder than your father.”
Because his chair was angled away from hers, she didn’t notice him pointing at her and mouthing, “Hers is still loudest.”
The emergency that’d led to us visiting turned out to be them installing a doggie door for the beast.
I’d been on my hands and knees helping Dad do it at one point, and Fonzie had come closer to me while my head was turned, scaring the shit out of me when I’d heard something breathing harshly right next to my head. He might have been scary as fuck with a few feet distance between us, but with only a few inches, it’d been a whole new level of near pant shitting fear.
They didn’t know what breed it was because it appeared to be a mix of quite a few, but it was probably twice the size of a Yorkshire Terrier, with wiry salt and pepper colored hair. On the top of its head was a big chunk of black hair like a mohawk with a streak of white at the front. Add that onto its weird eyes and teeth, and it was the stuff nightmares were made of. I was also fairly certain that it hated me and was planning my death while my parents weren’t looking.
When we’d finished, and the lock release mechanism was fitted onto Fonzie’s collar so that the door would open when he wanted in and out, Mom had sat us down for some lunch, which was what we were doing at this precise moment. She’d been quiet to begin with, but once my parents started telling Tamsin embarrassing stories about me as a kid, she came out of her shell.
Mom was holding onto Dad’s arm, laughing. “I-I came home, his sister, Cat, was on the couch watching a Transformers cartoon, and there’s no sign of Garrett and Raoul. I thought maybe they’d snuck out because they were shitheads like that, but when I went to our bedroom to make sure, there they were, makeup all over their faces and my grandmother’s clip earrings on their ears,” she wheezed, mascara trailing down her face with the tears. “Garrett smiles at me—” she broke off, howling as I tried to sink under the table.
Dad, who was also laughing, held up a finger. “Wait there, it might be better if I got something.”
Laying my face on the table, I muttered, “No, it wouldn’t.”
Did my family give me a break? Did they hell.
Within minutes Dad was back, but I didn’t look up when he started talking. I really should’ve, then I could have hidden or burned what he was about to show her.
“Let’s see… Ah, this is it.”
I heard something move across the top of the table and assumed he’d brought through the earrings, but when Tamsin gasped, I lifted my head and blinked rapidly at what she was looking at.
A photo album.
A photo album I’d never seen before in my life.
An album that held all of the horrors of my childhood, apparently.
Why? Because on the page the woman I was falling in love with was looking at was a photo of Raoul and me smiling, dressed in Mom’s clothes—bras on the outside, for fuck’s sake—with makeup all over our faces, including our freaking teeth.
We’d also found her bright red lipstick and colored in our cheeks and lips, not realizing that if you pushed too hard as you did it, the shit went between them and onto your teeth.
Groaning, I rubbed my face with both hands. “It looks like we’ve been shot in the mouth!”
“Well, you were eating it, honey.”
Lifting my head quickly, I glared at my mom, who up until five minutes ago I’d loved hugely. “You’re lying.”
Shaking her head, she said earnestly, “I am not.”
Thinking back to that night and what little I could remember of it, I fast-forwarded through the clothes, the jewelry, makeup, and… Oh, for the love of shitting hell. Dropping my head forward again, I groaned against the surface of the table.
“Raoul told us Garrett had said it tasted like cherries, so both of them bit into it to check,” Mom snickered. “It took about an hour of brushing their teeth to get rid of it.”
The sound of plastic being peeled apart followed it, and I lifted my head again and snatched the album out of Tamsin’s hands when I saw what she was looking at now.
Rubbing her lips together, she couldn’t hide the laughter building inside her. “You proposed?”
Why me?
“I was only little,” I snapped, wincing at the semi-lie.
“He was ten,” Dad interrupted, winking at her.
“Why are you still here?” I hissed.
Staring at me innocently, he shrugged. “Because it’s my house.”
Standing up, I held the album close to my chest. “Good point. So why are we still here?”
“Oh, sit down, Garrett,” Mom chuckled, waving her hand around. “He was always so serious, Zuri. You’ll have to grade him on a curve and ignore that from him.” Then, turning to me, she nodded at the book in my hands. “You can keep that.” Just as I relaxed and went to sit down, she added, “We’ve got duplicates hidden around the place.”
Throwing her head back, Tamsin burst out laughing.
“I’m glad my humiliation is amusing,” I huffed, placing the album on my chair and then sitting on it.
“Listen, you fell in love when you were ten. There’s no shame in that,” Dad said, reaching for another biscuit and the butter. “When you said you needed to buy a ring, we weren’t sure if it was for your sister or just because you wanted one, so we said okay and let you. Boy, you were absolutely determined to give it to her as well because we stood in that line for over an hour.”
I hated my life. Maybe not all of it, but there were chunks I did hate, including right now.
Every word he said made Tamsin laugh harder until she was gasping in oxygen.
“I’ll never forget when it was finally his turn, he went running up to her, pushed Donald Duck out of the way, then dropped down onto one knee and yelled how much he loved her,” Mom giggled.
Dropping her head forward, Tamsin snorted loudly, still laughing. Both of my parents looked delighted by this move, and when Mom looked over at me, she winked and gave me a thumbs up. I wasn’t about to fall for that bullshit, so I just glared back at her.
Finally, when she was able to, Tamsin croaked, “You proposed to Daphne Duck!”
Yes, I, Captain Garrett Evans, had proposed to Daphne Duck while we were at Disney World. I was that much of a sad sack that I’d queued in the hot sun for over an hour to propose to her. Somewhere out there was a woman in a Daphne outfit with a ring from a machine on her finger, telling her other friends in their costumes about the kid who’d declared his undying love for her.
My humiliation wasn’t complete, though. Oh, hell no.
“If you’d like, Harry had a new video camera at the time, so he caught it all. Do you want to go and watch it?”
Suddenly, spending time with my new ugly brother didn’t seem like such a bad option. I could handle the nightmares from it versus the ones this would give me.
Then a thought occurred to me.
“Didn’t Raoul shit his pants—literally—when we went to that fishing place, and a stingray came out of a rock pool and landed on him?” When they both looked at each other and nodded, I grinned evilly. “Did you happen to get that on video?”