Deli looks up from her phone when I appear at the open door leading into her bedroom.

A frown creeps between her eyes when I walk inside, nearly getting my head tangled in one of her draped scarves. I use her hockey stick to protect myself from the silky attack and manage to escape from the creepy thing without tearing or breaking anything for a change.

Delia's frown expands to narrow her eyes when I put the stick in its place in the corner of her room and pretend that I was never there while I casually remove myself again. I know I told Kira that I'm fine with Deli knowing that I was in the woods with her, but now that I'm here and my sister is levelling her speculative blue eyes on me, I'm having stage fright... again... second time today.

I really don't want to tell her how I've buggered up the plan. Delia told me to turn the situation into a project Kicks would get on board with, and Burlap came up with the perfect one, and I... I'm Ethan Fletcher; hear me roar... or groan in pain...

She's lying on her stomach on her bed, obviously chatting with Sy. The two of them write each other nine-chapter text messages 100 times per day. I don't get it. Seriously, if I have that much to say, I'd rather just call. They do that too, both voice and video calls depending on where they are. It's like parts of their souls got fused together, and they cannot live without each other for more than an hour at a time. We all thought it would settle down and fizzle out and just become normal, but if anything, the two of them have grown closer and more mutually dependent over the last few weeks.

Mom and Dad are worried that they're growing too attached; they don't want Deli to be devastated if things go wrong. She's had many boyfriends but quickly grew bored with each of them; I've never seen her act like this before. I don't want her to get hurt, either, but I'm actually more worried about Simon. He is defenceless when it comes to Delia. I think my parents' other worry, the one where they might become grandparents before we're done with school, might possibly be more realistic.

"So," Delia says when I'm almost out the door and on my way to my own room to go crawl under my bed. I'm in desperate need of a shower after hanging out in that heat and falling off the boulder, but I'm not getting out of this conversation. My sister is tenacious. "It is you that Kiki mysteriously went off to meet! Why did she need a weapon? What did you do?"

"Come on!" I object, a little pissed off now. "When have I ever done anything that would cause Kira to need a weapon?"

Delia gives me a sympathetic smile and, pushing herself into a sitting position, pats the space next to her on the mattress. I'm not going to get away without telling her about my latest stupid attempt at getting Kira to see me as the love of her life, so I saunter over there and plop myself down next to her. I'm dirty and dusty, so I stay perched on the edge with my feet on the floor, and she scoots over to sit next to me.

"What happened, Ethe?" she asks, patting my back.

"Well, I suggested a project to Kira like you said I should."

"You did?" Delia is giving me a suspicious look. "Please tell me the project doesn't involve macaroni art again."

"What?"

Ah! I know what she's talking about. I once asked Kira to help me build a city of macaroni and ended up glueing myself to her and her to the carpet... and a few other things... using quick drying really tough glue... Fun times! She was so mad at me...

"Hey, come on, I was eight at the time," I chuckle. "I'll use better glue this time."

"Just make sure you're in a romantic setting and not in Dad's study again," Delia chuckles, and the memory makes me wince. I was grounded for a month and had to do all kinds of gory chores around the house to pay my dad for the damages I'd caused. "You're older now; getting glued together might lead to all kinds of fun activities."

"You're such a pervert."

"I learned from the best," she laughs, punching my shoulder. "Since you look like the cat puked on your bed, I take it things didn't go so well," her voice has turned to a consoling tone, and she wraps her arms around my nearest arm. "What's the project?"

"I told her to take me for a test drive."

"Huh?!"

"Well, Burlap came up with a seriously good project. One Kicks would've really loved. It involved critters and mud and stuff... and we were going to save them from dying by doing undying them stuff...." I trail off as Delia's expression becomes more and more confused until she is finally just smirking at me, making funny little scoffing sounds.

"When you put it like that... sounds awesome," she snorts, pulling a face at me.

"It was complicated... I forgot," I admit, rubbing a hand over my hair, not surprised to discover a sensitive lump and some leaves and twigs. "It's not like I could pull out some notes and-." I gasp in disgust when the thought hits me. Kira has a thing for notes and notebooks! "Dammit! I should've brought notes. If I'd plucked out a decent notepad with loads of impressive notes on the thing-a-me-bobs in the whatchamacallit, it would've knocked Kicks' socks off, and she would've married me right then and there!"

"Ethe," Delia soothes, stroking the back of my head, freeing more shrub carcasses from my hair. "If you'd had a book filled with notes about some ecological issue in our area, Kira would've forgotten about your existence right away and married the notebook. Burlap's plan has a lot of merit, but you probably would've ended up like Liam."

"What do you mean?" I turn a frown on Delia. "I now know that Kira was more into the beetles than the dude, but he felt the same about her... didn't he?"

"Kiki said she was fine with breaking up with him, but I was pissed that he tried to use her, so I confronted him," Delia informs me, leaning over to cradle Lazy-Bones' butt to help him onto her bed when he waggles in, stopping at our feet to look up at us with begging eyes, snuffling in self-pity. Life is hard when your ears are long, your legs are short, and you're shaped like a really big dumpling. "Turns out that while working with her on his extra credit project, he started to really like her and wasn't just using her anymore. Where she was vaguely interested in him at first, she was clearly more in love with the theme for the project and not into him at all... and then there were you, always glaring at him... He figured it would be best just to call it quits, and he had another project coming up and another girl he kinda liked. The guy is a jerk, but he got his heart broken a little bit. Yours would be broken a lot."

So, I wasn't wrong; he did like her. I saw the way he looked at her, but I also saw how careless he could be with her, expecting her to just keep up with his long strides and carry heavy equipment. I hated that. What I hated most was seeing him climb into her window on the night I made my worst mistake.

"So, when he climbed into her window that night, it really was because they wanted to be together and-."

"Kira had bad menstrual cramps, but they were on a deadline," Delia interrupts shaking her head at me with a sad smile. I never talked to her about this before. Last year, when I mentioned seeing him climbing into Kira's window, she just said it was nothing. We should've talked about it, but I just left it there. I guess I was afraid of hearing my fears out loud. "Uncle Joe wasn't home, and she didn't feel like going downstairs to open the door for him and told him to climb up to her window, and she let him in."

"Oh! I really thought-."

"Ethe, this is Kiki!" Delia exclaims, giving me an incredulous look, and she's right; I was an idiot that day. "She barely even held the guy's hand, let alone do anything else."

I now feel like an even bigger fool than I did before. I know Kira is rather innocent and thought it strange that she'd let a boy into her bedroom via the window, but I was just so jealous my mind couldn't come up with better explanations. I really thought that their relationship had reached a serious point, and it made me feel physically ill. It was exactly that knowledge about Kira that made me believe that she was really serious about Liam.

I wanted to charge over there and kill him, but I couldn't, so I ran off, aiming to go into town, thinking I'd catch up with the guys and have some beers or do some other stupid stuff. I didn't care what I was going to do; I was feeling self-destructive... and there was Amber Dyson, our neighbour's granddaughter sitting on a swing in the dark in the small park circled by our street.

She was in a similar mood, and after many holidays and weekends of skirting each other like boxers in a ring whenever she was sent to her grandmother for a visit, I simply invited her to join me on my motorcycle. I bought beer from Fred, a high school dropout who sells to underaged customers whenever he is alone in the store (yeah, I made a lot of dumb decisions that night), and we went to the lighthouse with it. Amber was freaking out about her parents once again abandoning her in Egret's Rest with her grandmother, who she always believes to be too strict, only because she's not used to having any rules in her life. 

One minute we were looking out at the town, and the next, I just let her have her way with me instead of drawing a line the way I always did. I regretted it almost immediately. After that night, I actually tried to have an official relationship with the girl because nothing about it felt right, and I'm not good one-night-stand material.

Amber's grandmother asked me to look out for her granddaughter, so I've always been almost friends with the girl and never used to mind hanging out with her, but I've never been in love with her. I thought I was, for a very short time, but I hate the way she treats Kira, and I used to think that if I could be good friends with her, she might become friends with Kira too. It didn't work. She cannot stand Kicks. She's always taunting her or belittling her, and every Amber visit always ends with the two of us having a fight about that.

After crossing the line that night, I was living in a nightmare. Any illusion that I was in love with her died. I felt so guilty about it that I could barely face Mrs Dyson whenever I went over to mow her lawn. I didn't want to be with Amber, but I felt that I should be with her since I'm not the sleep-around kind of guy... I'm the kiss-around kind. It came as a relief when I found out that Amber wasn't committed to me at all. I am not the only boy in Egret's Rest she'd been pursuing. She seems to have a goal to add as many boys as possible to her list of conquests. 

I realised that about a week later when I caught her making out with Jet... During the short time when I thought I was in love with her and we could be something special, she had him thinking the same thing... Even though neither of us knew that Amber was 'dating' both of us, we were mad at each other and fought every time we met until Lurch and Barn pulled us apart, and Burlap asked us what the hell we were doing beating each other up over a girl who was clearly playing both of us.

When Jet rejected her, she did not take that well at all.

"You're so stupid, Ethan! " I heard those words from her on such a regular basis; it barely stung anymore. "It's because of Kira, isn't it? Everything is always because of that boring little twerp. I see the way you always look at her; it's pathetic," she'd told me, and I knew she was mostly just angry, but it still really hurt. "Nothing will ever come of it. She sees you as her brother, nothing else. She might have some kind of little girl hero worship going on for you now, but once she starts university and discovers the world out there, you'll become nothing but her childhood friend. A memory."

Amber was trying to be a bitch, but the thing is, she was right. I already knew that I was going to lose Kira for good, which is what made seeing Liam climbing into her window so devastating. I was depressed for days. Partially because of what happened with Amber but mostly because I'd thought I'd already lost Kira and that all hope of ever being with her was gone. If she was willing to give herself to Liam like that, it meant that she was very serious about him. After my final fight with Amber and hearing my fears spelt out like that, I got sick. I never get sick, but I just couldn't get out of bed.

My mom and Uncle Joe tried so hard to talk to me, but I just couldn't, not about that. Dad did everything short of dragging me from my bed; I think I really scared him. Delia knew that my illness was emotional rather than physical, and one night she and Kira came up to my room and forced me to watch one action-comedy after another. Zombieland, Shanghai Noon, that kind of thing. Normally it would've helped to have them with me. They often watched movies with me when I was recovering from one injury or another, but having Kira, the real cause of my depression, so close to me, just hurt too much. I couldn't even talk to Deli about any of it. I wanted to, and she was worried, but I just couldn't. 

I made a passive-aggressive joke, asking Kicks if her boyfriend won't be mad if she was sitting in another guy's bed, watching movies and eating snacks. I was sandwiched between the two of them, and they kept on force-feeding me chocolates and crap.

"Why would he? It's just you," she'd said, stabbing me to death, but then she revived my heart again by adding. "Besides, I don't have a boyfriend. We've been over for almost a week now."

I'd turned my head to look at Deli, and she just shrugged at me with a grin and said: "You know the two of you were born for each other. I don't know why you're making this so hard."

Kira scoffed at that, thinking Delia was joking and the darkness I'd slowly been drowning in started to lift. Amber might've been right, but there was still hope. That was when I decided to put in every effort to either win Kira's heart or, if Deli is right and I already have it, to get Kicks to stop being so afraid of whatever it is she fears and just feel what she's feeling for me. Finally, just admit it to herself.

"So," Delia says, grunting when the dog crawls over her lap to put his head on my thigh so I can play with his ears while she scratches his belly. It's always impressive how depressed he can look while he's in doggy heaven. "What the hell did you mean by asking her to take you for a test drive?"

"I panicked," I admit, tickling Lazy-Bones' chin. If he were a cat, he'd be purring right now; instead, he is rewarding us with some slightly noxious farts. "I asked her to be my girlfriend and teach me to be a better version of myself so that I can be a good boyfriend for a decent girl for a change... something like that."

I wince when Delia sucks in a loud breath, bracing myself for possible finger flicks or pinching.

"You, Little Brother, are a genius!" she exclaims.

"Huh?"

"See, you know Kiki best of all," she grins, looking so happy that she scares the dog into abandoning her lap to force his entire body onto mine. He is sitting upright now, with his chin resting against my shoulder, making soft snorting sounds into my ear while I hug him.

"I do?"

"Yes, what did she say?"

"She'll think about it..."

Delia jumps from the bed and starts to pull on her flip-flops. "I'm going to go give her a nudge."

"No," I object, and apparently, I'm so convincing that Lazy-Bones decides it's time to abandon me too. He rolls off my lap, landing on the carpet with a soft grunt and waddles out of the room in search of less enthusiastic people to pamper him. "Don't manipulate her; it won't be fair."

"Kira loves you, Ethan," Delia says, rolling her eyes. "I won't be manipulating her; I'll be helping her. She's always been there for you, and if she thinks that this project will be saving you from yourself, she'll definitely jump on board. She just needs a little nudge." Satisfied that she's got enough between the soles of her feet and the ground, Delia plants herself between my knees, resting her hands on my shoulders. "She'll never admit it, though; that girl is stubbornly denying even knowing you. This is a great idea. You can wean her away from her fear and right into your arms where she belongs."

I'm grinning now, feeling a little excited. Deli has always been my biggest fan... when she's not chasing me with the broom or threatening to set my bed on fire.

"Do you really think so?"

"I know so! We're doing this for her as much as we're doing it for you."

"Well, I was going to ask you to look in on her to see if she's hurt," I finally agree. "She said she was fine, but we fell off the boulder, and she might be a bit scraped up."

Delia is frowning at me now.

"You did what?"

"Nothing, we wrestled, and then we fell off," I shrug. "It's okay; she landed mostly on top of me. I gave her a once over, and she seemed fine."

"Did you at least make good use of the opportunity?" Delia smirks, giving me a wink.

"You really are the pervert in this family!" I tell her, and this time she doesn't disagree.

♂♀