Page 60 of Worse Than Wicked
“Let me guess,” I say, picking one up. “Your favorite is the everything bagel.”
“Yep,” she says. “Have you ever had one before?”
“Sure,” I say. “Lots of times.”
“Royal says everything bagels are a lie, because they don’t really have everything,” she says, glancing at my brother. “Not even everything you can put in a bagel, like blueberries and cinnamon and asiago. That’s a kind of cheese.”
“I know.”
“It’s pretty good, but not as good as American cheese.”
“That crap you like isn’t even cheese,” Royal says.
“To us it is,” Harper says, shooting Olive a conspiratorial look. “But it’s cheap, and we don’t have to eat it anymore.”
“I like it,” Olive declares. “And I think it’s fancy. Each slice has its own wrapper.”
Royal shakes his head like she’s hopeless.
“Every single slice?” I ask. “No way. Thatisfancy.”
Olive grins and shrinks down in her seat, biting into her bagel again before glancing at Royal to see his reaction to my amazement. She’s clearly pleased to have impressed me with her poor-person food, which makes me feel about ten times better about forgetting her birthday.
“This one time, I asked why they don’t make everything anything else. Like why don’t they have everything pizza or everything cookies? So we went to a pizza place, and Royal hadthem put everything on one pizza. There was so much on it that it kept falling off.”
“I bet.”
“It wasn’t that good, so we’re not doing that for my birthday,” she says. “But the next day, we went to the store and got everything you can put in a cookie, and we made everything cookies. Those were good. So we’re having those tonight, and everything ice cream. And we’re going to watch every kind of movie I like.”
“How many is that?”
“A lot,” she says. “We’re starting out withThe Fast and the Furious, if you want to watch.”
“The Fast and the Furious?” I ask, glancing from her to Harper. “What happened to Tow Mater?”
“That’s for babies,” Olive says, wrinkling her nose.
All the good feeling melts away as I think about how much I’ve missed, how much she’s grown up and changed in just a year. When she was talking about bagels, I kept thinking how nice that sounded, which meant I should have been happy for her. After all, she deserves all the best things, someone to spoil her. And now she has it.
But it doesn’t make me happy because I’m a selfish bastard. All it does is make me wish I’d been there to take her to the bagel shop, that I’d thought to make her cookies when she lived with me. Not that I know how to make cookies. But I should have learned. For her, I should have.
I didn’t, though, and now it’s too late. One more time I didn’t see what was important until it’s gone, and I can’t go back.
“And then we’re going to watch a show about koalas,” Olive rambles on. “Oh! Can I show him what we got?” She turns from Harper to Royal, bouncing up and down in her seat.
“Go,” Royal says. “It’ll give us a break from your yapping.”
Olive ducks under the table and races off, and Harper swats Royal’s arm. “Be nice,” she says. “It’s her birthday.”
“You should be nice to her every day,” I say, scowling. “She’s been through a lot. She lost her sister.”
“She didn’tloseher,” Harper says. “That makes it sound like she’s dead.”
Fuck.
“Don’t you think she would have come back if she was alive?” I ask.
“Let’s hope that’s not true,” she says. “I tried to find her, but obviously I’m not that good at stalking people online, and there were like a million Greens in Oregon, and most of them didn’t answer when I reached out. But I’m sure Baron can find her.”
