The Rules of Engagement (Mercer #2)

RoE Chapter Two

Believe it or not, it was actually an improvement and my methods showed promise.  Sort of.  Well, it worked like magic when both kids were sleeping.

Mycha laid Ryan down on his bed and tucked him in, and I rearranged Lucky, who’d shrugged herself free of all of her covers and turned so she was sleeping upside down, her head where her feet should have been.  As was the Mercer way, she didn’t so much as twitch as I righted her and pulled her Peter Pan comforter up to her chin.

I placed a kiss on her forehead, one on Ryan’s, and left the door ajar as we left the room.

A glance further down the hall showed both Tanner’s and Scout’s bedroom doors closed.

“Tanner and Scout asleep too?”

“Tanner is,” Mycha murmured, jerking his head towards the door further down on the left.  He glared daggers at the one opposite it.  “As for Scoutzilla, who the hell knows?  I told her to start thinking about going to bed half an hour ago.  She screamed at me, stomped to her room, and slammed her door in my face.”

A groan escaped me and I brought my hands up, rubbing wearily at my eyes.  “Seriously, what is that girl’s problem?” I asked nobody in particular.  It was like she was suffering an extreme, permanent case of PMS.  And no matter how hard I tried to talk to her, she shut me down flat.

Mycha shrugged.  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

I shook my head in bewilderment as we made our way back to the living room, just as lost as he was.  Scout had been walking around channelling Satan for a long time now.  There wasn’t even a specific moment I could backtrack to, to pinpoint it as the spot where it all went wrong.  And her volatile, explosive attitude was so consistent and expected that we were mostly used to it.  Didn’t mean we liked it.  On the contrary, I had to remind myself several times a day that strangling the life out of one of my siblings would definitely earn me some jail time.

I’d thought of everything possible to try and make amends for whatever it was that was bothering her so much.  She refused to talk to me, so I kept taking wild guesses, hoping one of them would be the eureka we were after.

Did she need more space?  Apparently not, because as soon as we’d moved into the loft from our old, tiny two bedroom flat, I’d given her a room of her very own and in return she’d tested out the fire escape outside her bedroom window.  It worked just fine, and I’d spent that first night scouring the streets of downtown Chicago looking for her.

New clothes didn’t help, even though she’d needed them.  As a thank you for that particular kindness, she’d taken the three pairs of jeans I’d bought for her, and shredded the thighs or knees to make them trendier.  The denim jacket she’d gone and splattered with paint, and the long sleeved tees she’d punched holes through the cuffs for her thumbs to slip into.

Freedom and space didn’t help.  For every inch I gave her, she took a mile.  There was no such thing as curfew in her eyes, and more often than not I had to go out in search of her when she snuck out of her bedroom window or she didn’t come home from school.

“Maybe she’s just too spoiled,” Mycha commented, parking himself at a stool in front of the wide granite kitchen counter.  

He snagged an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it.

I snorted and rolled my eyes at him.  “Yeah, because every kid who has a bed to sleep in and clothes on their back is just spoiled rotten.”

The living room curtains were wide open, the bank of windows facing the street five storeys below offering us a view of the wet, littered streets below, a few dank alleys, and other old, one-step-away-from-being-condemned buildings like the one we were currently renting an apartment in.