“Me neither,” she says. “I have a bunch of friends with siblings. Half the time they seem to love it and half the time it’s like they just wish they could kill them, you know?”
Oh.
Oh.
So…
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on anything,” she goes on. “Do you ever wonder that?”
So…
So casually.
She said it so casually. People say it all the time, those words. I could just kill him. I swear, if she pisses me off again, I’ll kill her. Sometimes I just want to kill that guy.
The world is filled with invisible, theoretical assassins, armed projections of our deepest ids, bearing guns loaded with wish-bullets. If you listen closely, you can hear them singing as they whiz by your head, always passing harmlessly through their intended targets.
“I guess not. There’s no point, really.”
She pauses and turns to regard me with a thoughtfully cocked eyebrow. In my entire life, I have never noticed a person’s eyebrows so much. I am only vaguely aware of my own, the sketch of light brown arches over darker brown eyes. But Aneesa’s eyebrows already obsess me. They are shape-shifting punctuation for her speech, altering as necessary.
“No point,” she repeats. “Yeah, that’s true. It’s not like our parents are going to suddenly decide to have another kid at this point, right?”
“Right.”
“I never thought of it that way before. Why do I even worry about it, then? It’s a moot point.” She grins at me with satisfaction, with a lazy sort of joy, the kind of happiness that comes from slaying not a dragon, but rather a worrisome newt.
I grin back reflexively. Life is so much easier when you just give people what they expect.