Date: 21st February 2017 - the afternoon after the Harpy attack
How Dustin ended up eating one cursed piece of candy and not an entire bag of them
“What’s going on?”
Dustin frowned, leaning against the doorway. “Uh, nothing? Nothing is going on. Why do you think there is anything going on?” Nothing had to be going on for him to seek out his sister on a lovely Tuesday afternoon.
Lea gave him a shrug. “You look like there’s something going on. And you’re in my room. So. Anything you wanna tell me?”
Dustin shook his head. No, he couldn’t tell her about the harpy. He wasn’t about to give his little sister nightmares if he could avoid it. He didn’t even know how much she knew about the creatures roaming the streets of Ashkent Creek, although she had been the one to spot a moving snowman. “Can’t I just wanna spend some time with my dear little sister?”
Lea squinted at him. “You never do that.”
“That’s not true!”
“Name one time you spent time alone with me for fun.”
Damn. He spent time with Lea all the time, it wasn’t his fault his memory was so bad! “I watch TV with you all the time.”
“Because you’re waiting to get a turn choosing the channel.”
Dustin huffed. “I can’t believe you think that little of me.” He took a few steps into the room just to let himself fall down on Lea’s bed with a sigh.
His sister turned in her desk chair to look at him. “Something’s up. Tell me. Is this about your date last week?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Nothing’s wrong, and again, wasn’t a date.” It hadn’t been. “I’m just bored,” he complained. “There’s nothing to do.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of things to do,” Lea commented before turning around to face her laptop again.
For a few moments, there was complete silence. And sure, maybe hanging out in his sister’s room wasn’t the worst, and definitely better than being alone in his room right now, but now she was ignoring him and he still had nothing that would take his mind off things. Big, winged things. Things like completely failing when asked to run. Things like risking his pretty much only friend’s life. Things like apparently being really fucking useless when it came to dangerous situations. Or any type of situation that involved the supernatural. Because risking his teacher’s life as well as Quinn’s by just stopping to stare at the harpy? That had been just as stupid as provoking the fae at the bar that one type, resulting in Molly getting seriously hurt. And just as useless as he’d been watching his biology teacher deal with that weird tiny creature on his own while he did nothing but freak out.
Fuck. He had to stop thinking about this shit.
Trying to take his mind off it, he got up, peering at Lea’s laptop screen as he came up behind her. “Did you seriously just google ‘what is an intercept’?”
“Shut up.” Lea turned her head to glare at him. “Freshman, remember? And not everyone can just… get maths.”
He looked down at the worksheet next to her laptop. “Are you kidding me? This is not your homework. This is way too easy.” Surely, this was not homework for freshmen? This had to be some of Lea’s old homework from middle school. There was no way it was this easy.
“If you think it’s that easy, why don’t you do it then,” Lea snapped at him.
Dustin considered it for a second. It would definitely take his mind off the previous event of the day… and he would be finished with it in no time. “Okay. Sure. If you write my English essay for me.” Lea was good at that, he knew that. She always got As on her essays. How did she even do that? Essays were impossible. He never knew what exactly his teachers even wanted from him.
“That’s the shittiest deal I’ve ever heard. This is going to take you, like, what, five minutes? Meanwhile I probably have to read an entire book for you and write an essay. No thank you.”
Dustin shook his head, even though she couldn’t even see it. “Not an entire book. We’re doing short stories. You’ve heard of Ray Bradbury before, haven’t you?”
Lea let out an audible sigh. “It’s still an entire essay to write, Dustin.”
“An entire essay that you can just very shittily write. Like, you don’t have to put any effort into it. Just get me a B or something. Please,” Dustin begged. “I have no idea what to write about the story. I liked it. But I can’t even say why, let alone analyse it. Please? I’ll do your maths homework. For the entire week. Deal?”
“Deal.”
After Dustin had retrieved his copy of the short story from his room, the two of them started to work in silence – Dustin lounging on the bed as he started his sister’s maths homework and Lea reading the story at her desk. It really did work out pretty well. Freshman maths wasn’t difficult, but he still kept his mind occupied by having to concentrate on the numbers in front of his eyes. That, and he had an excuse not to be alone right now. On top of that, maybe he could get a decent grade in English Lit for once. After finishing the third exercise, he looked up for a second. His eyes fell onto a bag of sweets on Lea’s nightstand. It was a clear plastic bag. Upon further inspection, the candy inside it turned out to be small candy hearts, words written across them. “Who’s that from?”
“Guy from school.”
Of course Lea would have been given candy for Valentine’s Day. “Really? Are you going to tell me which guy?”
“Are you going to tell me what you were doing last Tuesday?” came the reply from the direction of the desk.
Dustin didn’t bother replying to that. He reached out to take one of the candies, popping it into his mouth, barely making out the inscription of CALL ME before it disappeared on his tongue.
“Yeah, why don’t you just eat all my stuff, Dustin. No need to ask me.”
“Can I have some of that candy, please?”
“You know, if you had asked before you just had one, I would have let you have them all. It’s pure sugar, that’s so not my thing,” Lea replied. “I really wasn’t planning on eating them.”
Dustin nodded. “Cool, so I can have the entire bag then?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?” he protested. “You just told me you don’t wanna eat them.”
“That was before you stole one without asking first,” Lea replied. “Too bad you have no manners. If there’s just one of them missing now I’m gonna tell mum you’re stealing from me.”
Dustin flipped her off behind her back before going back to his- no, her homework, scribbling out his answer and putting a 9 instead of a 3. She hadn’t told him that he had to do all of it correctly, after all.
