Candy Gram ✓

chapter seven

My parents are sleeping in before work, which I can't blame them for. Even though it means that I'm responsible for Ben. At least he's old enough to feed himself - he's been able to use the toaster since he was three, I swear.

"I can't wait to go outside," he says excitedly as I spread peanut butter over his toast thickly. (Fun fact: He hates smooth peanut butter. With a frightening vengeance.) "Snow days are the best."

I smirk down at him, pushing his plate over. "What happened to the whole 'Jerry' thing?"

He blushes. It's adorable. "I mean, absinthe makes the heart grow fond," he says, as if reciting classic Shakespeare.

It's not even worth correcting him - besides, he's too cute, anyway. "Do you have your box for your party all ready?"

He smiles in a way that's easy to tell it's genuine. "Yessir. It's Ninjago-themed." Of course. He's been obsessed with that forever. He pulls the box out of his back pack - this beat-up shoe box that he's drawn hearts all over and taped slightly off-coloured pictures of the ninjas. (I was obsessed with Jay when I was a kid. And I hated Nya for toying with his heart.)

"It's awesome," I tell him honestly, because it's definitely the coolest Valentine's Day box I've ever seen. (And shows me I didn't care even way back in elementary school.)

"And it's roomy," Ben adds. "That's important."

"Yeah, it is." I ruffle his hair, and that's when it hits me: "Hey, dude, do you wanna swing by the animal shelter today?"

His face lights up; with his cheeks puffed out from how hard he's smiling, he looks like a very devious chipmunk. "Can we? Can we really? I wanna see kittens."

"Of course," I tell him. There are two bonuses to taking my adorable little brother to the animal shelter on a snow day: 1) My adorable little brother really is adorable, even more so around animals of the infant-type, and 2) there's an equally adorable (if not blasphemously more so) boy who works at the animal shelter. And he has a surprise for me.

The animal shelter isn't too far from our house - the roads have just been cleared, but the car is practically invisible under a pile of snow, and Ben got all bundled up in about five hats and twice as many scarves, so I tell him that we can walk. (He's jazzed.)

We walk along the packed-down street gutters, Ben seeming torn between hanging onto my arm like a stereotypically clingy child or picking up chunks of snow along the road and bunting them (in a way that sends snow soaring into my beat-up boots, but I don't say anything).

"Do you think Mom and Dad would let us get a kitten?" he asks right as I'm opening the door for him and shaking snow off my boots. I can see Josiah's mom behind the counter, beaming at us in that Josiah-like-way that I can't seem to get out of my head.

I make sure the door shuts tightly behind us. "Maybe. Why?"

He's already taken off his gloves and is holding them out to me. I take them, even though I have no where to put them. "Well"--he looks quite thoughtful, which isn't unusual for him--"it's just that . . . you're leaving after this year, and then it'll just be me. I don't want to be lonely." He stares at his feet.

I give him a too-tall, one-armed hug. "So, your plan is to replace me with a cat?"

"No," he says, suddenly grinning like Mom, "a kitten."

"Hey, there," says Josiah's mom. She legitimately sounds like someone from Fargo. 'Hee, deere', not 'hey, there'. But she's smiley, and so is Ben, and who am I to get in the way of overly-smiley people being happy?