Page 10 of Bad to the Bone

“Hey there, big bro,” says a familiar voice. I look up from my sandwich and watch Shannon skip out of the shadows and into the quad. It’s abandoned at this time of day, which is why I thought I was being smart coming here to clear my head. Turns out I was wrong.

“What’s up?”

“You have a lot of explaining to do.” She sits down beside me and crosses her arms over her chest. A tiny smile creeps its way across her lips, but she quickly clamps down on it.

“Something tells me you know more about what I want to say than I do.”

“Maybe,” she smirks.

“So what’s good? You tell me.”

“I think you and I both have something in common, besides our love for Aunt Kim. I think that you want to ask me about my origin story,” Shannon says softly, dipping her head down low so that nobody can hear us or read her lips.

For a second all of the blood in my body stops moving. I look down at her innocent looking face, and for the first time realize what a facade it is. Duh, of course she’s not a clueless girl. She’s too smart for that. Even if she didn’t have any information to give me she’s certainly smart enough to figure out what I have been trying to discover.

“So?”

She reaches into her bag and pulls out one of those DNA test kits that you can order online.

“You want me to get him to give me a DNA sample?”

“No, idiot. We don’t need him. If it is the way we think it is, you and I should be enough of a match to be siblings.” She rolls her eyes and sticks one of the swabs into her mouth, rubbing it up and down between her gums and her cheek. Capping and sealing the sample she holds the other one out for me.

“Moment of truth?”

I look at it like it’s a dead snake. Do I really want to know? Even if we aren’t related by blood, I still think of her as family. I still see her as a little sister. My suspicions are just that, as yet unfounded. If I do this then I’ll have proof one way or the other. Do I really want to know?

“I can guess this is about Aunt Kim. If your dad is the kind of guy who would get her blacklisted all over town, there’s no telling what else he might do. Especially if he knows something that we don’t.”

“If this goes the way I think it will, he’s your dad too. Does that bother you?”

She takes a deep breath and for a moment her mask slips. Under all of the sunshine and blonde hair is a very shrewd and calculating girl. The kind of daughter my dad would be proud of, if he were into that kind of thing.

“I’ve got shitty parents. I can live with that. But I have a great Aunt.”

“Your mom wasn’t that bad. Your Aunt really seemed to love her,” I interject.

“Yeah, she did, because she’s a damned fool. Aunt Kim loved my mom, but my mom hated her. Did you ever ask yourself, why was my mom on the same plane as her sister’s fiancé?”

“...”

“They were taking a romantic trip together. They were going to run off together eventually. That was the plan. What makes it worse is, guess who they stuck with babysitting while they were gone?”

“Kim.”

“Exactly,” she says, disgust contorting her features.

“But, why?”

“You’ve seen pictures of my mom. Ever wonder why she looks nothing like Aunt Kim?”

“Sometimes one kid looks like one parent and the other looks like-”

She holds a hand up to cut me off.

“Neither one of them look like their dad. When my mom was 11 her dad left to be with another woman. In my mom’s fucked up head, somebody had to pay for breaking up her family.”

“So, Kim…”

---