TYLER HAD SAID HE WANTED a girl with a brain. Someone who didn’t obsess over boy bands. Those were two big things I was going to have to help Olivia with. I mean, she does have a brain; it’s just normally occupied with things like . . . boy bands.
Sigh.
Realizing we would need more time, in gym I had asked if she wanted to stay for dinner. Dad was at some sort of seminar and wouldn’t be home until late, so I knew we’d be eating at a reasonable hour because we wouldn’t have to wait for him. Of course she’d said yes, and Mom had said it was okay when I texted her to ask, so that would give us a few hours to work on what I was calling Project Ty-Livia.
“So here’s the thing,” I said to her as I closed my bedroom door. Olivia plopped down on my bed, keeping a safe distance between herself and the sleeping Hector. “You’re going to have to show him your inner nerd.”
“What inner nerd?” she said, looking at me suspiciously.
I came over and sat on the bed, absently petting Hector. “The inner nerd who is interested in the kinds of things he likes. And like I said before, you can’t do the over-the-top stuff. No squealing, no clapping, no hair tossing.”
She frowned at me. “But what if I’m excited about something?”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t like drama. Just be . . . you know, chill.”
She seemed to think about that for a minute and then nodded. “Right, chill,” she said in a calm, low voice.
“Yeah, like that,” I said, glad she was catching on. “You can start by talking to him about books. He’s a big reader.”
She scrunched up her nose.
“What?”
“You know I don’t read. Not unless I have to for school.”
I got up off the bed and stepped over to my bookshelf, grabbing my worn copy of Knights at Sunrise, the first of the Blackwood Knights series. I turned and held out the book toward her.
“What’s that?” she asked, looking at it as though it were a snake or something. She made no movement to take it from me.
“Tyler’s favorite book.”
“It’s huge.”
I shrugged.
“There’s a dragon on the cover.”
“It’s about dragons,” I told her. “And knights, of course.”
She looked from the book up to my eyes. “You expect me to read that? It has to be a thousand pages.”
Actually, more like five hundred, but it wasn’t something I needed to point out. “Do you want Tyler to connect with you? He loves nothing more than talking about this book and the ones that come after.”
“There are more?” she whined.
“Yes, seven more. But start with this one.”
She huffed but took the book finally. “Can’t you just tell me what it’s about?”
“It’s actually a really good book, Livvy. It’s about these eight knights that meet as children and grow up to become . . .” I stopped talking when she stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes so hard all I could see was the whites. I laughed. “Okay so you don’t have to love the book, but at least give it a try. If you can talk to him about it, I guarantee he will be impressed.”
She huffed again but nodded. “Fine. What else?”
“Are you willing to play video games?”
Her eyes lit up. “Like the ones where you dance?”
I couldn’t imagine Tyler dancing at all, let alone in a video game. “Uh, no. I’m thinking more like Zombie Slashers.”
Another eye roll. “Nope. Next?”
“Movies?”
She looked at me sideways. “What kind of movies?”
“Mostly ninja and samurai movies. Some of the comic-book ones. He watches a lot of anime, too.”
“Like Disney movies?” she asked.
“No, not animated movies—anime,” I said, trying not to be mean about it, but seriously, how did she not know what anime was? I was sure I’d talked about it a million times. “You know, the Japanese-style shows I watch sometimes?”
“The ones with the big eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“Those are animated, Kat,” she said as though I were the clueless one. Whatever.
“Anyway, that’s what he watches.”
She looked down at the book in her hand. “I guess I’ll start with this. Any chance the movie version is on Netflix?”
“No.” I shook my head. “There’s going to be a movie, but it’s in preproduction.” I knew this from surfing the author’s website the weekend after I finished the last book in the series for the third time. “We don’t have time to wait for it, though.”
“Awesome,” she said, clearly not meaning it. “So tell me more about him so I can impress him. I guess all I really know is that he’s good at math; he always seems to know all the answers in class.”
I sat back down on the bed beside her, nodding. “He’s really good at math. He wants to be either a mathematician or an architect when he grows up.”
“Okay, that’s cool,” she said. Finally, something we could agree on! “What other things does he like?”
I thought about that. “Well, he likes animals.” Though I didn’t think that fact was going to help very much, since Olivia wasn’t an animal lover. She didn’t mind Hector so much, probably because all he did was lie there beside her. But she’d hated dogs ever since that Thanksgiving when we were four and our uncle Fred’s giant Great Dane had barreled into her and knocked her down.
“What’s his favorite food?”
“Hamburgers,” I said, reaching over and giving Hector a scratch on the head. He yawned and got up to stretch before settling himself on my legs to continue his nap.
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” she asked.
I looked up at her. “What?”
“Hamburgers?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s what he likes. But he likes most food. Except olives.”
“Hmm. I like olives,” she said.
This is when you’re supposed to realize you have nothing in common with him AT ALL and change your mind about wanting to go to the dance with him. Unfortunately, Olivia couldn’t read my mind.
“So what else does he like to do? What did he do over the summer that made him so tan?”
I was about to tell her about his wilderness camp when there was a knock at my bedroom door. A half second later Laura opened it really quickly, like she was hoping to bust us doing something wrong. All she did was scare Hector half to death, making him jump off me, but not before he dug all of his claws into my legs.
“Laura!” I yelled. “Ugh! Ow!”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Whatever. Mom said to wash up and come set the table for dinner.”
“Hi, Laura,” Olivia said.
Laura grunted something but didn’t even look at Olivia before she left. So rude! But my horrid sister wasn’t my immediate concern. I was wearing jeans, so I couldn’t see exactly what Hector had done to my legs, but the burning sensation told me I was going to have red welts all over.
“When did she get so mean? She wasn’t like that at the Fourth of July barbecue,” Olivia said.
I shrugged as I stood up. “I don’t know. Mostly since starting high school a couple of weeks ago. I try to stay away from her.”
“I don’t blame you. You okay?” she asked as I cringed at the pain in my legs.
I did a quick check of my legs under my pants, and sure enough, there were puffy red scratches on both of them. At least they weren’t bleeding.
Hector: Ninja Cat strikes! I was going to make a joke out of it, but outside of my family, only Tyler knew about my manga, and I wanted to keep it that way—for now, at least—so I kept my mouth shut.
“Holy cow!” Olivia said. “Your cat did that just now?”
“Yeah. But it was Laura’s fault.”
Olivia looked at me funny. “Uh, not to point out the obvious, but the cat did that to you, not your sister. Your sister is mean, for sure, but cats are evil. Ugh. I can’t believe you even have a pet that could do that to you.”
I tried to ignore the itchy and stinging scratches, knowing they would go away eventually. “He’s normally very sweet.”
“Right,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced.
“Come on,” I said, heading toward the door. “We’d better go downstairs.”