Page 22 of Wanted Beta

“I don’t have other stuff to do until later,” she says. “We can do what you want until six, okay?”

“If you’re sure,” I murmur.

“I’m sure. Now let’s go before you start shaking from a lack of sugar.”

I laugh. “I’m not that addicted.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says. “I distinctly recall waking up one easter morning to find my little sister with a chocolate covered face while she devoured the last of the chocolate eggs from the hunt Mom and Dad organised in the house the night before.”

“Bring that up again, why don’t you?” I groan.

It was the worst easter morning ever. I ate way too much and gave myself a stomach-ache, and I made my sisters’ angry because I found and ate all the hidden eggs before they were even awake. Catherine was the only one who didn’t get mad.

“It was funny,” she says, smiling.

“No one else thought it was funny.”

She shrugs. “You know Maggie and Pearl are stick in the muds. They could have cut you some slack for being the youngest. It’s not like you planned to ruin their morning, or whatever. You were five.”

“I guess,” I murmur, wondering why our parents made me feel so terrible for it.

Catherine’s right. I didn’t plan it. I just woke up early, and as usual, couldn’t contain myself.

“Do you ever wonder if our parents didn’t really want to have four kids?” I ask.

Her smile turns wry. “Oh, they wanted to have kids. They just had no idea how much work we’d be. I heard them talking a bunch of times. They were overwhelmed a lot when you three were younger.”

“And I suppose you were the perfect daughter from birth?”

She laughs. “I doubt that, but obviously they’d forgotten how much of a terror I was by the time they decided to have more kids.”

“Obviously,” I tease.

“Hm, maybe we shouldn’t be getting you candy,” she says.

“If I don’t get some soon, I might turn homicidal,” I threaten.

“Well, then it’s a good thing I’m not a man.”

Oh my God. I totally forgot about Catherine Corrects.

She used to do that all the freaking time when I was a kid.

Drove all of us mad, but it was also kind of funny.

I press my lips together, trying not to laugh.

“What?” she asks.

“Femicidal, then. Wait, what’s the word for murdering a sister? Siblingcide?”

“It’s sororicide, actually,” Catherine says. “Siblicide is murder of a sibling.”

“How do you even know all that stuff?”

She smiles. “I worked in a law office for a while, typing reports.”

“Wow. That must have been gruesome if you learned those words there.”

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