Chapter 1 - Enthusiast

Okay, so you've suffered through about three thousand words that haven't really told you anything about any of the characters ecxept me. Which is kind of pointless because I'm not that important to the story. I'm just the one who's writing it down. But, because one of the main rules of writing is Show, Don't Tell (I cannot begin to describe to you who are lucky enough to be oblivious to this atrocity how horrible it was to sit through a class period where you've been assigned to write something simply because this rule was always repeated), I think I'll let you make your own judgements about these people. I had to. Moving on!

Something worth breaking that rule (seriously, if it wasn't such a legitimate rule, I'd break it as much as possible just to piss of my teachers): Kyle's never had a girlfriend. Okay, good? Got it? Good.

Continue speculating.

So that night, Lisa and I finished the over-abundance of homework we had (another reason to hate the Second Day of School) and then went to bug Kyle and Blake, who were in the kitchen baking something. It's not unusual.

"Where's the flour?" Blake's voice rang out as Lisa and I stood in the doorway, looking at the scene. If Blake's back hadn't been turned, he'd have seen exactly where the flour was, which was all across the table because the bag had fallen over due to what I assumed to be Kyle's lack of basic culinary skill. Instead, he was fishing out globs of peanut butter from a jar and  mashing it all with a spatula in a measuring pot. He was facing away from us, using the counter against the wall, and we got a wonderful view of his a*s until Kyle, flustered, blocked our view and looked at us desperately.

I rolled me eyes, mouthed "You owe me one", and stepped into the kitchen. I slammed my hands onto the table and yelped, "Sorry!" as convincingly as I could. Blake turned and groaned when he saw the mess. Lisa just smirked and I tried not to.

"El," he sighed, snatching a towel off of the oven handle and tossing it to me, "Try to get it cleaned up, okay?"

I looked at Kyle and amended my statement in silence: "You owe me two."

He grinned at me and grabbed the towel from my hands, snapping it forward so it whipped my back. I yelped again, this time in truth, and then Lisa did the same when she jumped backwards, avoiding the attack. Kyle laughed at me and picked up the measuring cup I hadn't seen that was buried underneath the mountain of flour.

And so Lisa and I began cleaning up the table, already bored and knowing that when Blake made something it was always worth eating, and Kyle took the measuring cup of flour to Blake, who's face eased a bit at the sight of it. "Perfect," he awarded him, taking it and dumping the white powder into the bowl.

"What are you making that takes so much peanut butter?" Lisa asked as she grabbed paper towels and started wiping the table as I knelt on the ground and started wiping it.

"Buckeyes," Kyle answered cheerily, tossing the cup into the sink and heading to the silverware drawer. He pulled out the tablespoon (which was on a key ring with the teaspoon and other such small spoons) and then filled it with water and dumped the water into the batter. Blake just kept mashing it.

"But it's not Christmas," Lisa said.

"So?" Kyle asked. "It doesn't have to be Christmas for buckeyes."

"It can also just be winter," I agreed with a specification, and then looked at my brother and continued with, "which it isn't."

Kyle snorted. "Buckeyes are good any time of the year."

"Any food is good any time of the year to you," Blake remarked, and Kyle hit his back lightly in passing to get a rag to help us clean (it was his fault, after all), even though it was true; Blake loves to make food and Kyle loves to eat it.

"As long as you clean it up!" Grandma called weakly from the hall. She doesn't tend to leave her room much, and when she does it's either to eat or use the bathroom. She's getting on and uses a walker when she goes places. Most times she'd sit in her room and knits. She'd gotten so good at it that in the past month Kyle and I had both recieved two sweaters and a thick blanket each.

"Of course, Grandma," Kyle called back to her. "Do you need any help?"

"I'm fine, Kyle," she assured him, and a door closed to emphasize her point.

In case you're unaware, buckeyes are typically a holiday treat; they're balls of a mixture of peanut butter, flour, and a tiny bit of water, and after they're rolled in balls you refrigerate them for at least three hours, and then you dip them in melted chocolate, and they are simply mouth-watering after the chocolate's hardened but is still warm. The process to make them is fairly easy, like I've just described, and before you knew it, we were wiping the last remnants of flour off the table and setting out tin foil to set the balls on.

"Roll, roll, roll your balls," Kyle sang teasingly, "gently down the -"

"- thighs," Blake finished the line for him and we all groaned as he snickered at himself. The thing about Blake is that he knows he's not funny and that's why he's so funny. Does that make any sense? Probably not. Oh, well, moving on!

And now we're getting to the good part. Or the bad part. Or both. It depends on who you're talking to. And you're talking to me... well, no, you're reading my words and I'm kind of trying to converse with you through them but obviously that's not working because it's all one-sided... um, anyway...

Towards the end of the batch, when Lisa and I were competing to see who could roll the most balls in ten seconds, Kyle and Blake apparently had the same idea to mess with us, and they both reached in to grab the rest of the batter before we could so we wouldn't be able to use it and see who could win, and with the way they both grabbed for it, they ended up grabbing each other's hands instead.

I thought nothing of it. They didn't take it so lightly.

Go on. Speculate.

Even though the details barely registered, because at the time I was just pissed that they were blocking my way to the batter, they both paused for a moment before drawing back slowly, Kyle's hands lingering on the edge of the bowl and Blake holding his in front of him and awkwardly rubbing them together, as if to get the remnants of the peanut butter off. I should have realized by their reactions. Back then I was only confused but grateful that they didn't go on with their plan, so Lisa and I could finish ours. I didn't register how Kyle's eyes kept flicking up to Blake's face and then back to his fingers before he shook his head a bit and began to pick up his balls on his sheet of tin foil. I didn't catch that Blake paused for a moment before doing the same thing, except for the fact that his eyes always stayed averted. But then once they got to the fridge and began arguing over space, it didn't matter anymore and they were back to their usual boyish banter.

Lisa won the contest by three balls, if anyone cares. She's better with her hands than I am. More practice. And yes you can snicker at that. Or sigh pityingly. Either works. Both are appropriate.

And so we all went into the living room and sat down on the couches and we had a four-way staring contest. For some reason, Kyle and Blake only looked at each other, until Kyle's cheeks went a little pink and he blinked and looked away. Which was weird, since he usually wins. But I didn't care. Blake turned to look at us and in doing so he blinked, too, so he was out, and Kyle just kind of turned the TV on to a random channel and started pretending to watch it. Blake didn't even pretend to watch it with him. He watched Kyle instead.

Speculations abound.

Lisa won the contest by three seconds, if anyone cares.

And then Lisa and I decided we wanted to play video games and beat their asses at COD, which left them as angry as always and swearing that one day they'd win. The great thing is that they never complain about being beaten by girls, they just complain about being beaten. Lisa and I play COD more than they do, so it's no surprise, and they're two of the least douchiest teenage boys I've met, and the great thing is that if you say anything sexist or racist or prejudiced in any way they just ask you to explain yourself and get really confused when you eventually get to the point where you have to say out loud "__ is better than __". It makes people really embarrassed and ashamed of themselves for their behavior. I asked Kyle to give me lessons. I'm not as good at it as he is but then he's not as good as Blake. We did it to my mom once together. She just looked at us like we were crazy.

Of course, Kyle has other friends, not just Blake. They have the same group of friends, actually, and the weirdest thing is that their friends get along with mine the way Kyle gets along with me; teasing and bickering and irritation but comfort when needed. I guess, in a way, we're all like siblings. Blake comes over the most often, though, and when he's not over here Kyle's over there.

By the time the balls were ready to become buckeyes and change their name to something that takes a lot more work to turn into an innuendo, Mom was laughing at Kyle's failed attempts to kill us and laughing at us when Blake managed to. LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR: He only killed us because we WANTED to die. No other reason. We were getting bored and were too lazy to forfeit so we let him kill us.

Well, actually, no, we lost fair and square, but we made sure we told him the first excuse, not the second.

And then we went into the kitchen and searched through the pantry for the chocolate, got our melting pot, plugged it in, popped the chocolate into it, and sat around it, screaming for it to hurry up. Grandma didn't say anything and Mom went away so we could be alone. It's a hobby of ours that whenever we make buckeyes we scream at the pot to hurry up like angered British monks. I've actually never heard what an angered British monk sounds like. I assume it's less amusing than our interpretations.

And so, naturally, when the chocolate is ready, we get out the balls and the toothpicks, proceed to stab the ball with the toothpicks, and then use the toothpicks to coat them in chocolate, and then pull the toothpicks out and set them aside. Because some sheets of foil are bigger than others no matter how hard we try to make them even, we keep and count the toothpicks afterwards to see who did the most buckeyes. Usually there's some cheating. That day was no exception.

At first, Blake poked a toothpick into one of Kyle's balls when he wasn't looking and dipped it and put it on his foil. It doesn't really accomplish much, since that's not how we keep score, but it tempted Kyle to do it to him, and then Blake retaliated, and then Kyle did, and the cycle went on until I remarked, "They're really intent on coating each others' balls."

"At least we're not coating yours," Kyle told me, reaching over to ruffle my hair. I ducked.

"Girls don't have balls," Lisa informed them, as if it were news.

"Some do," I allowed. "We don't."

"Sure you do," Blake said, and then he reached over and poked Lisa's b**b, and she shrieked and dropped her buckeye into the chocolate. Luckily for him we are like a family (which can make that a lot creepier if you think about it) and she didn't give him the black eye she'd promised me she'd give the first guy who touched her b***s without her permission. "Those are balls. A different kind, but they're balls."

"Balls of fat," Kyle added on. "Which isn't all that unusual on El."

Some girls might be offended by this, but I'm really not. I'm not that heavy, not enough for it to actually show through any of my Volleyball t-shirts or soccer jerseys, just kind of heavy-set. Even if I was it wouldn't bother me so long as I was happy. I really don't see why weight matters, unless it's unhealthily high or low, in which case you should probably change a few things so you can function better and feel good; it's not like the higher a person's weight is the lower their value gets. Unfortunately for a lot of girls they think that's the case. But I just smacked Kyle's shoulder and said, "More of me to love."

"Yup," Kyle agreed loosely, and succeeded in ruffling my hair. I snapped at his hand with my teeth when he pulled away and shook my head, trying to fix it. My hair isn't silky like some girls' is, it's stubborn and thick, so this didn't do much but make it messier. I made an angry noise in the back of my throat and we went back to dipping the balls.

Lisa won the contest by three toothpicks, if anyone cares.

And then, after we'd finished counting and dipping and scooping out the rest of the chocolate with our fingers, we had a buckeye war. Most people don't know about buckeye wars, mainly because they're scrictly in my family/group of friends(/family), but they're basically when you throw buckeyes at each other. You only aim at their torso, because nobody wants a hardened ball of peanut butter and chocolate to hurtle into their eyes or their crotch that they're planning on eating afterward, and as long as you set parameters for the field, you can use anything in sight as a shield. We decided that the living room would suffice, and so we began.

I won't bore you with the details (which seems to be a weakness of mine - I'm skimming over things as I go along now. Great. I'm sorry, it does get more detailed as we go on further because the details get important) but Lisa won by nailing all three of us over our bellybuttons, which is how you win. Damn. I never realized before that Lisa was winning by all kinds of threes that day. She was on a tertiary roll. Anyways, afterwards, we collected all the buckeyes we'd thrown, washed them off in the sink (yes, you can do that if they're cold enough and it doesn't change them), and then ate them.

In case you couldn't tell, we like to compete.

And you do actually need to speculate about that.