✅ My Sister's Problem

32. Accusations

"Morning, sleepy head!" Mum said with a smile as Lindy finally came downstairs. She grumbled a little, but she'd never been much of a morning person. Especially not with no school, when Mum would let her have an extra hour in bed if she wanted it.

"Sleep well?" she asked me with a smile, and I knew instantly that she'd managed to put something in my drink last night. It wasn't the kind of question she would normally ask, and the tone wasn't right. She was just angling for me to say something she could use to embarrass me.

I couldn't believe I'd been so careless, but I also couldn't stop wondering what she had managed to find that could have such a pronounced effect. I'd looked online after the first time she tried something, and found a lot of people talking about mixing sleeping pills with some drugs called diuretics; but they were all by people who'd heard about it from a friend of a friend, and I saw no reports of anyone actually trying it. The options for diuretics seemed to be really mild stuff like caffeine, a few herbal options which even Harper Eisen – who had learned from a big family tree of experts – hadn't had success with, or a side effect of heart medication that was really strictly controlled. Not something that would be easy to find. After a couple of hours looking, I'd concluded that it was something that only came true in stories.

"Pretty good," I said, trying to sound as normal as possible. "Slept deeper than ever, woke up early and I was wide awake right away. How about you?"

"Yeah, pretty good. It's nice not having an alarm to wake me up. You didn't have any... problems, did you?"

"What kind of problems?" I asked, wondering how long it would take her to come out and say it. Maybe she'd be smart enough to avoid that, because she'd still been asleep when I came downstairs. If she said in front of Mum that I'd wet the bed, that would prove beyond any doubt that she had something to do with it. And while I'd told Lindy that I wouldn't tell on her if she tried that thing with the drugs again, just so long as she checked with Harper to make sure it was safe, she would have no doubts about how Mum would react. Whatever my sister had done, she needed to keep it to herself.

"Oh, I don't know," she gave in. "Just wondered if anything unusual had happened."

"You mean you're still wetting yourself and you're going to try to say it was me?" I regretted the words before they were even out of my mouth; that wasn't fair, and there was no way I wanted to put her down for a problem that I'd caused. It would stop her accusing me, which was what I'd had in mind, but at the cost of showing her that I wasn't always on her side.

"Sally!" Mum answered right away, cutting off the usual banter. "We all know that Lindy's had a problem, but that is not something to tease her about. You know that I take bullying very seriously, and I expected better from you."

"I'm sorry," I mumbled, and looked back down at my breakfast. It went pretty well, shutting down any future conversation on the matter, but I'd still painted myself as the bad guy.

We ate breakfast mostly in silence, both of us too embarrassed to push it any further. By the time Lindy reached the bottom of her bowl and just had suspiciously brightly-coloured marshmallow shapes left, she was smiling again. A grin of triumph or a plot for revenge, I couldn't know. But I was glad to see that she was happy.

"So, what are you girls planning today? Are you both up for a shopping trip?"

"I've got sports," I answered first. "Sorry, maybe some time in the week?"

"Sports? Is hockey not cool anymore and you have to hide it?" I looked up at Mum in surprise, and realised that although we'd talked as much as always, I hadn't told her about everything in my life. But why would I have missed out mentioning something that I was having so much fun at? I thought back, and realised that i'd only told her I was going to the park with friends, or going for practice. Was I secretly embarrassed about doing a sport that was seen as a boys' thing or something? Or maybe I was nervous she would think I was trying to chat up Hugo, like most of my friends at school seemed to have assumed.