Friendly Dating 2 - Ethan

Chapter 3 - Big Sister Wisdom

Walking into Deli's room is like entering a bohemian tent. If I forget to duck, my head gets tangled in a multitude of Indian silk scarfs draped from the light fixture in the centre of her ceiling to small hooks screwed in the walls.

The room smells like incense, and some weird doped-out flower-power song about honey bones creates a mellow, dreamy atmosphere that makes me wonder if I'm asleep or on drugs. My sister is sitting at her art desk, and no, she's not gazing into a crystal ball or trying to read tarot cards while a one-eyed mangy cat keeps a jaundiced eye out for intruders. 

The cat lying on her desk, intermittently tapping her paintbrush, has both his eyes, and he is watching me with keen interest, waiting for the best moment to pounce. Delia is in the process of designing her next weird-ass t-shirt for some charity or another. Her designs are pretty popular; she often gets requests from organisations and businesses. Well, my sister knows her stuff, though my first reaction to most of her designs is usually: Huh?!

I crash face-down onto her bed and pull a few of her gazillion pillows on top of my head. Lying here, buried under her pillows, I suddenly realise that I've seen Kira do exactly this on so many occasions. Perhaps we do have something in common after all.

Deli's bedroom is one of my favourite places to hang out in, as funky and strange as it is with samples of her warped designs pasted on the walls, the sewing dummy, wearing parts of a dress being created, standing in the fashion design corner and all these friggin' pillows. I guess it is because Deli's presence is one of my favourite places to hang out in.

"What's up, Ethe?" she asks when she finally returns from whatever artistic plane she'd been hanging out on. Delia is not typically the bohemian kind; she likes to experiment with vibes and themes. I'm never entirely sure what I'm going to walk into when I enter her room. The last month she'd been in touch with her inner flower child, but before that, there'd been a few weeks of space invaders... or something alien... I never really got it. A while back, she scared the crap out of me by going full-on death-rules-us-all Goth on me, black walls, the works.

It didn't last long; Deli doesn't have the self-discipline required to be perpetually depressed. Her natural bubbliness kept on getting in the way. I rather like the current theme; it's very calming. I often nap here, especially when she's here too, drawing, painting, or making clothes.

My other favourite place is anywhere Kira is. She doesn't want me in her room, but I still manage to get in there, and she hasn't kicked me out even once when I took a nap in there. She always just carries on as if I'm not there.

I wonder if my bedroom is one of her favourite places too. When she's at our house, and the weather turns bad, throwing thunder and lightning around, she always runs in there and crawls under my duvet whether I'm in bed or not. She does that even if Delia is home. I asked her about it once, and she said something snotty about my room being such a horrible mess; it won't get attacked by the storm because it looks like it has already happened, so the storm will think, mission accomplished, and move on.

I think she was lying.

"You're wrong," I inform Delia, turning onto my side to look at her when she lies down next to me and performs an excavation to find my head under her pillows.

"No, I'm not," she says without any doubt at all.

"You don't even know what you're wrong about," I scoff.

"Doesn't matter; I'm never wrong."

I cannot argue with that because it's true, but I'm going to try anyway. "I don't stand a chance with her. She thinks I'm her brother and doesn't agree with you that I'm the amazing, adorable kind. She thinks I'm the annoying, irritating brother she got stuck with and would like to be rid of."