Free A Face in Every Window by Han Nolan Page B

day had even begun.
    Then after one weekend when all she could do was sleep, I decided we needed some order around the place, and at my urging, Mam assigned us all jobs to do around the house. Mam gave me the job of head yardman, and I not only had Pap bugging me for rides on the mower, which I had to admit were fun the first few times, but I also had Larry telling me how to mow.
    "If you mow it first one direction this week and then the other direction the next, you get a better cut It's better for the grass," he said to me, hollering out the kitchen window. Making dinner was his job.
    "You want to mow the lawn, be my guest," I hollered back. "Otherwise, lay off!"
    That was Larry's and my new relationship. He kept trying to play big brother and because I didn't want him to, didn't want him to be any kind of brother, I fought with him, and in the process acted just like a younger brother. I tried to avoid playing this role, but the only way I could was to keep away from him and that seemed next to impossible. Somehow, wherever I went, Larry appeared—in the kitchen, in the living room, in the woods, at the cabin, out in the garage. He never sat still. I got so frustrated funning smack into him every time I went out of my way to avoid him that I finally asked him if he were following me.
    "No, you just happen to be where I need to go," he said.
    "How could you need to go all over the house? You're everywhere. Can't you ever just sit?"
    Larry sneered at me. "No, I guess not. Looks like you'll just have to live with it"
    I also had to live with Larry's smoking. He had a cigarette bobbing between his lips all the time, while he talked, while he read, while he walked from place to place, even while he cooked. I'd watch him stirring some vegetarian glop in a bowl, or chopping vegetables, and he'd hold the cigarette in his mouth the whole time, letting the ash get longer and longer until I could see it about to drop off into the food, and I'd yell at him.
    Larry would always say he was just about to deal with it, but I wondered if he just let the ash fall on the food and stirred it in with the rest of the mess when I wasn't there. How would we know the difference?
    Larry kept a camera in the kitchen and took pictures of his creations, sometimes artistically arranging fresh vegetables around the dish to create a still life. At other times he'd ask me or Bobbi to hold up the dish and look as if we couldn't wait to eat it This was true acting on our part. We knew that beneath the colorful beans and vegetables hid something dark and unidentifiable.
    "Hey, it's good for you," Larry would say every time one of us rolled our eyes at the food he'd placed in, the middle of the table. "It'll put hair on your chest, color in your cheeks, and pep in your step."
    Bobbi would always say, "I don't need hair on my chest, what I need is a thick juicy hamburger with cheese and lots of ketchup."
    Pap and I would agree, but Mam and Larry stuck to their seaweed.
    Larry claimed these were healing foods that would repair the damage done to our bodies by the environment This he
said with the smoke from his cigarette billowing from his nostrils.
    But as much as Larry irritated me, it was Bobbi who sent me over the edge. I wanted her out of our house. I spent every moment at home with my shoulders hiked, my eyes alert, my ears pricked, because I never knew what Bobbi would pull next. One moment she'd head off to school wearing my rain forest T-shirt, and the next she'd draw arrows on my globe with indelible ink, insisting that she'd thought the ink would come off!
    She had picked the other attic room for her bedroom, and I felt certain she did it just to goad me, just to keep me from having the third floor to myself. At our old house we had one bathroom, and Mam, Pap, Grandma Mary, and I shared it with no problem. In the farmhouse just Bobbi and I shared the bathroom on the third floor, and we fought over it all the time. All I needed was ten to fifteen