"Ben! You left the water running!" she moaned, then acquiesced. "What?"

"Who's..." Ben grimaced. "Russell?"

"Some guy who works at the pizza place," Her answer was as nonchalant as her phone conversation had been animated. "He has, like, a bunch of siblings and his mom was in some movie back in the seventies... Yeah. Anyways, he's just a really nice guy— And he gives me discounts sometimes."

"Oookay..." My thought found voice through my brother. It'd been that way as long as I could remember. We'd been mistaken many times for twins as kids; to the point that people mistook us for eachother on the phone— even after his voice changed. "Well, uh," He looked around and put his, still damp, hands in his pockets. "Let's pick a movie then."

That took forever.

Ben and 'Laina had a very boistrous, entertaining, childhood insult filled argument because she insisted that we watch Twister for, what he called, the "trillthousandth" time. But, at last, everyone settled on a theme, an idea I'm not quite sure was mine, and we were up very late watching the old nineteen-eighties favourites we'd grown up with; beginning with E.T., The Breakfast Club, and Back to the Future, and ending somewhat ironically with The Neverending Story.

The next morning I woke first, squished between the two of them. All of us on the floor, legs outstretched with our backs against the couch. Scattered kernels of popped corn looked at first like twisted bits of fabric to my sleepy eyes. For a while I sat still, watching the sunrise from the window behind as reflected in the fingerprinted foil inside of an empty bag of Funyuns.
The tv channel changed every other second, each one static with a different number. I smiled slightly when I noticed, someone sleeping on the remote brought to mind the memory of the salt and pepper song Ben and I made up when we were five and seven years old.
Simple lyrics to a catchy, if not monotonous-unless-you-made-it-up tune. We'd dance around in the living room watching the static tv after our mid-morning videotape in t-shirts and underoos, chanting "the salt in the pepper and the pepper in the salt" until laughter broke the rhythm... I almost laughed imagining then, what it must have looked like.

'Laina's head pinned my right shoulder to the edge of a couch cushion, the frays from the short brown braids that came over her shoulders swayed in a trance, following the air from the fan that spun quietly overhead. As I looked down on that little face, it became real to me again, how adorable she could be. It had been a long time since that hit me, 'Laina was going to be a beautiful catch when she got older.
Another thing struck me then, that I thought "older" instead of "grown up". I didn't want her to grow up, I still wasn't grown up. And I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not after hearing what growing up was really like from the people who'd taken the plunge.

Benjamin Lancaster looked positively handsome in repose as he was. Thin enough to look tall and muscular enough to keep from being gangly, with soft strands of dark chocolate hair curling just before they reached his eyes. He had long eyelashes, for a boy, but his eyes didn't look feminine; and the marks on his hands and fingers from the instruments he loved so well added a surprising amount of character to his lightly tanned skin. I looked at him for a minute, imagining various futures for the brother who should have been my twin. From shadowy, industrial apartments where he could work alone to his heart's content, to penthouses in big cities with a small family and a big name...
The neon number 86 showed on the tv for the twelfth time.

Carefully, so carefully, and surely not without some supernatural aid, I disentangled myself and rose without waking either of them. Leaving the tv on, so the absence of the static wouldn't ban the dreams their faces told were sweet, I covered them with a soft netted blanket and fled to the warmth of a shower so hot it almost burned.

And, before long, I found myself back at Mitch's.