Day and Night

Ch. 4 Little House

The only thing that I can think of to do is pick up a roll off of the table and throw it as hard as I can at Dace. Everything goes quiet for a second and then Dace turns to me with an evil grin.

“Did you really just do that?” he asks, arching an eyebrow at me.

“Maybe,” I reply and then take a deep breath. I’m pretty sure that I’m about to die.

“Then I guess you won’t mind if I do this,” he says and grabs his entire plate of food before dumping it on my head. I gasp in surprise and everyone else goes completely still. Then everything is chaos.

It only takes seconds before the rest of our dinner is covering each of us. After Dace dumped his food on me, Wesley was cracking up so I turned and dumped my cup of Iced tea onto him. Soon enough all of us are dodging food and creating quite a mess while we’re at it.

It doesn’t take long before we run out of things to throw and I crawl out from beneath the table where I had been taking cover. When I see all the others completely covered in food I can’t help but to start cracking up.

“You…You…You have spaghetti in your hair!” I gasp out in between bursts of laughter.

“I think it looks good on me,” Wesley replies before wiping some sauce off of his shirt and wiping it on my face.

“Hey! I thought there was a truce!” I complain and everyone else laughs at me.

“Not for you. You’re the one that started this,” Dace says and I give him a dirty look.

“You’re also the one that’s going to be cleaning this up,” Mads cuts in.

“What? No! You guys all did it too!” I exclaim, but she just pats me on the back before walking upstairs, probably to take a shower to get the food out of her hair.

“You guys don’t really want me to have to clean this all on my own, do you?” I question while trying to pull off my brother’s puppy dog look that lets him get away with everything.

“Have fun!” is the only response I get before they all leave as well. I glare at their retreating figures before sighing and looking at the mess that surrounds me. This is going to take awhile.

I spend the next hour or so trying to get all of the food cleaned up. It is really difficult because somehow it got all over the walls and the floors and so every time I think I’m done, I find another spot that needs to be cleaned. No matter how frustrating it is, I still think that it was worth it. By the smile on my brother’s face when we were done, he had completely forgotten his sadness from before. That’s all that I really wanted.

Finally I finish and then head upstairs to clean myself up. I take a shower and have to scrub my hair repeatedly to make sure that there is none of our dinner still stuck in it. When I’m done I walk down the hallway to get to my bedroom. When I pass Keaton’s room, though, I hear what sounds like muffled sobs.

I open the door without knocking and see him sitting on his bed with tears streaming down his face. My heart breaks when I look at him. When he sees me he tries wiping the tears away and opens his mouth probably to tell me to go away, but I don’t give him the chance.

I shut the door and walk over to sit beside him on the bed. I lean back against the wall and rest my head on his shoulder. He doesn’t say anything at first, which is good because I was afraid that he would yell at me to leave.

“I miss her,” he whispers, voice cracking.

“Me too,” I mumble and then I’m crying right along with him.