Free Blown Away by Stephanie Julian

Christmas one year as a joke. She’s the one who doesn’t cook. She’s almost as bad as Nic.”
    “Really? I’d have figured Janey could do anything.”
    Turning to the cabinets, he started gathering ingredients. “Janey definitely has her strengths and weaknesses, just like the rest of us mortals. Turn on the oven to four hundred degrees. We’ll put the bacon in there.”
    “But your parents definitely aren’t ordinary.”
    He laughed as he had her lay out the bacon on a cooking rack. “No, they definitely are not. What about your parents? You have brothers and sisters?”
    “Same as you, a brother and sister. But mine are ten and twelve years old than me. When I was little, my mom and sister would dress me up and take me for walks around the neighborhood. They loved when people would come up and say how pretty I was. I was their perfect little doll, red curls, blue eyes, chubby cheeks.”
    They’d started on the pancakes now and she’d started to beat the batter. And he did mean beat.
    “When I was twelve months old, I started to talk. In full sentences. I could sustain a conversation by the age of two. They didn’t take me out much after that.” Her mouth twisted in a bittersweet grimace. “Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I was neglected. They loved me. I knew they loved me. They just didn’t know what to do with me.”
    Jimmy took the pancake batter before it was so tough, they wouldn’t be able to eat it. “What do your parents do?”
    “My dad’s an editor for a small daily local newspaper in my hometown. He works twelve-hour days, sometimes six days a week. My brother had health problems that required a lot of doctor visits. My sister and I were never really close. She always had boyfriends and soccer tournaments and softball games, and I had no interest in kicking a ball around or trying to hit one with a stick. I wasn’t all that much fun for them anymore. Until I could do my brother’s geometry homework.”
    She paused and he started ladling out the batter on the griddle, wanting her to continue talking.
    When she didn’t continue, he glanced up at her. She looked lost in thought and not good ones.
    “I always hated geometry. Nothing blew up.” There, he’d regained her attention and pulled a smile from her. “So how old were you then?”
    “Seven.”
    “Damn.” Jimmy just shook his head as she nodded. “Guess I was a late bloomer.”
    “Lucky you,” she muttered under her breath.
    “Had a rough time of it?”
    Again, a shrug. “Didn’t everyone have a rough childhood?”
    Not really, no. “What about your dad?”
    A real smile broke free. “Well, my mom was always running my sister and brother to their activities because Dad worked from like eight in the morning until seven or eight at night. I spent a lot of time at the newspaper after school. I’d sit in the break room and do homework. Sometimes I’d get to sit on the floor with my dad. There was an empty desk in the back, where I could hear the police radio. The police beat reporter back then had to be close to seventy and weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Smoked like a fiend, too, so he’d always be getting up to take smoke breaks and he’d tell me to keep an ear out. I started writing a detailed note for him of everything I heard while he was gone. He’d always thank me for it when he got back. Geez, I haven’t thought about Earl in years.”
    “Sounds like you made a friend there.”
    “Yeah, Earl and I got along well. I think because he was just too old and too ornery to care what other people thought.”
    “What about friends your own age?”
    The timer rang for the bacon and he got it out of the oven while she flipped the last of the pancakes.
    “I didn’t really have any.” Her tone screamed indifference but her shoulders had slumped. “I was always the smartest kid in class, and you know how kids can be.”
    “Yeah, I do. But I had Nic. He’d flatten anyone who messed with me, but he