The Wrong McElroy

by KL Hughes

  “You are really getting on my nerves right now. You know that?”

  “Right, because you’re not getting on mine at all.”

  Fiona knew he was trying to rile her. It was intentional. He liked to watch her squirm, and though she desperately wanted to resist, just to deny him the pleasure, she was too restless to care about caving. So, she whined again and rolled away from him, taking all the covers with her. She wrapped herself up in them like a burrito and sent him the winningest look she could manage.

  “Really?”

  “Until you learn how to treat your guest,” she said, “your guest, might I add, who happens to be doing you an enormous, gargantuan favor out of the sheer goodness of her heart, you can freeze.”

  “Fine!” He slammed his book closed, not even bothering to mark the page, and tossed it onto the bedside table. “God, you’re such a brat.”

  “So are you.”

  “I wasn’t being a brat until you started being one.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No.”

  Fiona sat up and yanked the blankets up around her neck like a scarf. “Are you mad, Michael?”

  “I said I wasn’t.”

  “Wow. You’re really mad.”

  “Fiona.”

  “Michael.”

  He stood and stomped to the other side of the bedroom. “I said I’m not mad.”

  “Then why are you stomping around like you’re mad?”

  “Because it sucks when you’re right.”

  Fiona grinned. “You hate the book, don’t you?”

  “I fucking hate it so much.”

  They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  Michael pulled open the two doors of a tall dresser cabinet on the opposite wall. Fiona hadn’t paid much mind to the piece of furniture, figuring it to be just another place to throw her clothes if need be. She hadn’t ended up using it, so she put it out of her mind. When Michael opened the cabinet doors, however, she wished she’d given it more than just a passing glance. Inside the large cabinet at the top of the dresser was a moderately sized flat-screen TV. Fiona nearly cried. Michael waved his hand in front of the black screen as if he had conjured it with magic. “Wah-la!”

  “Oh my God.” Fiona pulled the blankets over her nose to quiet a tiny squeal. “I love you so much right now.”

  “You should.”

  She freed her mouth again. “But I still have to tell you, for the thousandth time, that it’s voilà, not ‘wah-la.’”

  Michael released an exaggerated sigh. “You said ‘teenagedom’ earlier.”

  “Yeah, but teenagedom at least makes sense. Wah-la doesn’t. At all.”

  “Oh, and voilà does?”

  “Um, yes, because it’s an actual word, Michael. It’s French.”

  “Hey. You might speak three languages, but French isn’t one of them.”

  “I don’t have to speak French to know a French word. I don’t speak Spanish either, but I still know what gracias means.”

  “Well, whatever.” The TV remote landed on the bed with a plop. “Take that. I gotta use the bathroom. I think it’s a smart TV, so if you want to sign in to Amazon, we can watch Game of Thrones.”

  “Ooh yeah.” Fiona settled in at the headboard and switched on the TV while Michael disappeared into the bathroom. “What season are we on now?”

  “Five.”

  “Okay.” She went about the work of signing into her Amazon account on Jack’s TV. “Shit. Mike! What’s my password? Oh, wait. I think I remember it.”

  When Michael didn’t return after a minute or two, however, she realized it was going to be a while, so she stole his phone off the bedside table and started a game of Candy Crush.

  “So,” she said as she thumbed away at the game, “your family is cool.” She thought of Grandma Sophia’s sweet, wrinkly smile and rude comments. “Well, most of them.” Nice people who were also racist really confused her. It was a good thing she was playing at being straight for the weekend. A gay Asian would have been too much. The old bat might’ve keeled over right then, right into the Christmas tree.

  “They have their moments,” Michael answered from the bathroom. “I think they were all a little surprised when you kicked everyone’s ass today.”

  “Trust me. No one was more surprised than me.”

  “You totally won by accident.”

  “No lie.”

  “It was fun, though,” he said, “watching you get into it after running around like a terrified chicken the whole first half of the game.”

  “Game is a severely misguided word choice.” She moved a blue candy piece into place and watched the tiles disappear. “War is more accurate. Your sisters don’t mess around.”

  “Yeah, everyone gets really into it.”

  “Clearly.” Fiona frowned. “I like them, though. Your brothers and sisters.”

  “Yeah. It’s nice being able to spend time with them, but it’s definitely best kept to a couple times a year. Otherwise, it’s like being a kid again.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, except we all tend to revert back to the most immature versions of ourselves the longer we’re together.”

  “Yeah, but that can be fun sometimes.” Fiona growled as the Jelly Queen defeated her, then quickly started another round of the game. “So, your sister.”

  “Which one?”

  Fiona chewed her bottom lip and glanced up at the closed bathroom door. “Lizzie.”

  “What about her?”

  “You guys seem close.”

  “Yeah.” The sound of the toilet flushing drowned everything else out for a minute. Michael cleared his throat. “We weren’t really when we were kids. I was always closer to Brian and Grace since we were basically the same age, but I’m way closer to Lizzie now.” Sink water rushed through pipes, then squeaked to silence, and the bathroom door finally opened again. Michael stood in the opening, drying his hands on a small towel. “Why do you ask?”

  Fiona avoided his eyes and shrugged, trying to appear as casual as possible. “Technically, I didn’t ask,” she said. “Just made an observation is all.”

  “Right…” The partially damp towel soared across the room in a crumpled ball and hit Fiona’s shoulder. “She tackled you pretty hard today.”

  “She’s kind of a beast.”

  He laughed and leaned against the bathroom door frame. “She knows it, too.”

  “Your mom said she’s the only other one of you guys who’s never brought anyone home before. She’s never been serious with anyone?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t really date much, I don’t guess. Why?” He looked at her hard, knowing. “She’s not gay.”

  “Okay. I didn’t say she was. I just, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. What?”

  “I get a vibe is all.”

  “A gay vibe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, sorry to have to tell you, but you’re seriously off your game.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You are.”

  “I mean, that plaid flannel shirt she had on today, though,” she teased.

  “That’s a Southern thing, not a gay thing,” he said. “I’ve told you before, gaydar doesn’t work in the South. There are straight women down here who have mullets and chew tobacco and are as butch as it gets, and they still go home to their husbands every night.”

  Fiona laughed. “Hey, plenty of lesbians have husbands, especially in the Bible Belt. Compulsory heterosexuality is a thing, my guy.”

  “Lizzie’s not gay, Fiona.”

  “Okay.” She fiddled with the remote. “Have you ever gone to visit her in LA?”

  “You’d have known if I had. Me and you have been friends as long as she’s been in
LA.”

  Fiona said nothing, keeping her eyes on the blank screen.

  “Fi.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why are you being weird about my sister?”

  “What?” She shrugged again. “Who’s being weird?” She turned the TV volume up, then down again—up, then down. The queued episode of Game of Thrones had yet to begin, so no sound actually played. She was free to fiddle without consequence. “I’m just making conversation.”

  “About my sister. Being gay.”

  “I mean, we can talk about your brothers if you’d rather.” She glanced over as he crawled back into bed beside her. “Kind of got a vibe from Charlie, too, if I’m being honest. And I mean, he is having trouble with his wife, so.” She smiled and hoped it would ease the rising tension. It did. Michael’s shoulders relaxed even as he stuck his tongue out at her and mock-laughed. “No, I’ve just had the most interaction with Lizzie so far. That’s all. Just thought I’d ask.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, asked and answered, yeah?”

  “Yup.” She let it drop, sensing his uneasiness. Clearly, the topic of his little sister’s sexuality was not one he was willing to entertain. Or maybe it was just that it was Fiona who was broaching the subject. She wondered how he’d have responded if a straight girl had asked him the same question, but she didn’t push it. His reaction had been enough to communicate that he considered his sister firmly off-limits. The whole idea didn’t sit right with Fiona. Lizzie was a grown woman and could make her own choices. At the same time, however, Michael was her best friend. She was supposed to be there for him, with him. She didn’t want to risk doing anything that might screw everything up, or worse, might put them at odds with each other.

  He stared at her a moment longer, gaze boring into the side of her face, but then his seeming curiosity passed, and he turned his focus to the TV. “We ready?”

  Fiona swallowed the lump she hadn’t realized had been building in her throat. “Just have to hit play.”

  Chapter 5

  The second-floor storage closet smelled odd, like mothballs and air freshener mixed together. It made Fiona’s nose itch. She rubbed it on the sleeve of her shirt as she stood on guard duty under the old lightbulb’s dim light, watching Lizzie’s back like a hawk. Any sign of a tremble and she was ready to catch her. “Is your family’s entire Christmas weekend going to be one competition after another?”

  “Pretty much.” Lizzie stood on her tiptoes on top of a small stepladder, poised under a shelf mounted atop a coat rack. With a bit of effort, she managed to pull down the first box of a tall stack of long, rectangular boxes. “When you’ve got eight kids to entertain, competitions are kind of a given. Mom’s always found it easier to get us to do things if she made us compete with each other. It’s effective, was really effective when we were kids. You know, as long as we don’t bite each other’s heads off.”

  “Is that something you’re prone to do?”

  “A few of us.” She passed the first box to Fiona. “Got it?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to catch you if you start filling my arms up with boxes.”

  “Well, if it comes down to me or the boxes, save the boxes.” She reached for another. “Mom’ll kill me if we present her with boxes full of smashed and crumbled gingerbread. It’s Lucy and Maddi’s favorite. She could totally live with me having a broken tailbone if it meant keeping them happy.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “It is. Trust me.”

  “Ooh. How did you manage that? Don’t spare the details.”

  “I didn’t manage it. Grace did.”

  “Grace?! Sweet, quiet, shy Grace somehow broke your tailbone? No way.”

  Lizzie handed down another box. “Sweet, quiet, shy Grace was a little prone to tantrums when we were kids, and I made the mistake of falling on top of her carefully crafted dollhouse.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, uh-oh.” Lizzie hung onto the coat rack and turned on the ladder to face her. “Dad had made the whole thing for her himself, then they built and painted every little piece of furniture together over the course of, like, two years. She loved that thing. Like, loved. Of course, I didn’t mean to smash half of it to bits, but did that matter? Nope. Not a bit. I swear I thought fire was gonna shoot out her nose or something.”

  Fiona shifted under the boxes. They were just long enough to make holding them for more than a few moments uncomfortable. “So, what happened?”

  “Well, first she hit me with a hairbrush,” Lizzie said, grinning. “Pretty hard, too. I hit her back, then ran away so she couldn’t get me back.”

  “Smart.”

  “Not really. She chased me down the hall, cornered me right in front of this very closet, and kicked me through the door.”

  Fiona’s jaw dropped. “Through the door?”

  “Through the door.” She stared at Lizzie as if waiting for her to reveal that she was only kidding, but Lizzie just sighed. “Landed on my ass so hard it broke my tailbone. Mom was pissed. She made us apologize to each other every day for two weeks and pledge to stop every time we got mad and remember that we were sisters and were supposed to love each other. As if that would stop us from wailing on one another at the slightest inconvenience.”

  “Damn. Having siblings is apparently a life hazard.”

  Lizzie laughed. “It saves you as much as it endangers you, so I say it’s worth it.” She turned back to the shelf and grabbed down another box. “Anyway, now you have that story as evidence in case the snowball fight yesterday wasn’t enough. We clearly get a little too competitive sometimes.”

  “You think?”

  “But no one’s ever accidentally killed anyone, so I’d say we’re doing all right.” She stretched as far as she could toward the back of the high shelf. “Jesus, Mom, did you have to put them so far back?”

  “Why aren’t we having the tall people do this? You realize Michael is here, right?”

  Lizzie lowered back down. “Fiona, come on. Where’s your short-people pride?”

  “Oh, that? I left it in the grocery store like ten years ago after I tried climbing up the shelves to get a can of soup and brought the whole thing crashing down.”

  Lizzie stared at her a long moment, lips pinched tightly shut.

  “You can laugh.”

  The sound jumped free, loud in the small space of the closet and infectious. Fiona felt it wiggle its way in, and the next thing she knew, she had cracked as well. “Please tell me someone got that on video and there’s a meme of you trashing a grocery store floating around on the Internet somewhere?”

  “If there is a God, then no,” Fiona said. “So, anyway, I abandoned the anything-tall-people-can-do-I-can-do-too attitude that day, and whatever random kind giant happens to be lurking around the grocery store when I’m there gets me my soup now.”

  “That is a sad, hilarious story,” Lizzie said. “I should make a movie about that.”

  “Short people would fill the theaters.”

  “Dabbing their eyes with tissues because it’s just too real.”

  “I smell an Academy Award.”

  “Mm, yeah. Smells like a lie.” She handed down a couple more boxes. A merry little gingerbread man with purple gumdrop buttons and a red icing mouth beamed up at Fiona from the cover of the top box as he stood proudly next to his classic gingerbread house.

  “How do you think gingerbread men avoid the temptation to eat themselves?”

  The stepladder wobbled as Lizzie let out a loud bark of laughter. She latched onto a few old coats hanging on the closet rack to steady herself. “You can’t say stuff like that when I’m trying to balance on my toes on a stepladder, okay? Unless you want to endanger my life.”

  Fiona smiled. “Sorry. It’s a valid question, though.”

  “It is. I’m guessing it
’s probably the same as with humans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we don’t eat ourselves either despite knowing how good it is to be eaten.” She waggled her eyebrows at Fiona over her shoulder, who laughed despite the way the words made her stomach flip.

  “That is so not how I meant that.”

  “But it applies.” Lizzie popped down from her stepladder and blew a bit of hair out of her face. “How many kits is that?” She counted down the boxes in Fiona’s hands with her index finger. “Okay, that’s six, so we need at least four more. Mom always gets extras, but we can leave those until we know if we need them or not.” She climbed back up the stepladder and strained on her toes to retrieve yet another box. “Anyway, so our anatomy won’t let us eat ourselves, unless you’re, I don’t know, a contortionist or something, so I’m guessing it’s the same for gingerbread men. I mean, think about it. If they bend over too far, they’d just break in half, right?”

  “Okay, sure, but why can’t they just pull off their little gumdrop buttons and eat those?”

  “Because they’ve got no hands, Fiona,” Lizzie said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Brace yourself. This stack is about to get seriously tall.” She turned on the ladder with four long boxes in her hands but lost her footing just as she was about to pass them over. The ladder wiggled and wobbled under her, then gave way entirely. It tipped and took Lizzie with it.

  Fiona barely had time to curse before Lizzie’s body crashed into hers. Her back hit the closet wall, knocking the wind out of her, and all she could do was wheeze and grunt, trying to refill her lungs, as the momentum took them down. The boxes cascaded around them. Some crashed to the floor while others were squashed and trapped between their chests. One of Lizzie’s elbows dug into Fiona’s gut as she tried to get her footing and failed. Finally, her legs gave out and she collapsed, her forehead smacking into Fiona’s to add to the already overwhelming amount of discomfort.

  The sound emanating from Fiona’s empty, stinging lungs filled the small space, a cross between a whine, a growl, and some strange sort of goat bleat. Lizzie was off her in a second, pulling her up by the arms and digging a hand between her shoulder blades. “Breathe,” she said, laughing around the word. Fiona held her gaze and gulped at the air like a fish out of water, but nothing would go in. Nothing would sink down to where she needed it most.