Golden ✓

Chapter 3

Junie bows as she eats the last bite of her pizza crust. She's always the last one to finish dinner and we have this sort of unspoken rule in the house that everyone stays at the table until the last person finishes their food. It's a rule that I used to break constantly, running away from the table to finish homework or talk to one of my friends or even just to sit alone in my room and watch YouTube videos. I don't break that rule anymore, and nobody else does, either. And no one really minds that Junie is such a slow eater since she's also the entertainment for the meal. While the rest of us are eating at a normal pace, she's busy standing in front of her chair, making broad, sweeping gestures with her arms to accompany the fantastical stories about her day. Today, my parents and I had clapped politely at the end of each story. Charlotte, my other sister who just started her freshman year of high school this month, isn't acting like herself. Generally, she would participate in the applause for Junie's stories, sometimes even join Junie in the telling of a particular story, but not tonight. Tonight, she just sat silently through all of it, staring at her plate.

"Who's up for a little Clue?" my mom asks, lifting her finished plate from the table.

"I'm in," I say. She chose it because it's my favorite game, after all.

"Me, too," Junie agrees.

"I'm going to head up to my room," Charlotte says, leaping up from the table with a sense of urgency and carrying her plate into the kitchen. We watch her quickly stride away, out of the kitchen to the base of the stairs. She's acting weird. If she were any other teenager, I could just write it off as a normal behavior, of her just wanting to avoid family time, but Charlotte isn't like that. She's a photocopy of our mother, and our mother is up for anything. The weirdest part is that Clue is Charlotte's favorite game, too. She loves it even more than I do. I can't remember her ever bailing out on a game before.

"I'll go talk to her," I announce, rising from my seat.

"If she wants to be left alone, that's fine," my mom says, clearing my plate for me.

"I know," I agree. "I was a teenager once, too."

"You still are," my dad corrects.

I roll my eyes at him. "Dad, you don't understand me!" I sarcastically mutter to him, and then begin to fake-stomp my way across the foyer and up the stairs.

I look over my shoulder at everyone's response. Junie is laughing up a storm at my dramatics, but my parents both look a little unsure. I don't know what that's about.

I ignore it and change back to my normal walking until I get to Charlotte's room. She had shut the door, so I knock softly in a pattern that we created a few months ago. "Char," I call.

"You can come in," she calls back. I open the door to see Charlotte sitting on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest, phone in one hand.

I step into the room and close the door behind me. "What's up? Normal freshman year of high school stuff?" I ask.

"Howd'ya guess?" she asks with an exasperated sigh.

"Because we're living in a cliché," I reply. "A cliché of new beginnings."

"I'm not a cliché," she states, clearly offended. "I'm not scared because it's new. I'm scared because I don't feel like I fit in yet and because your last year at this school seemed like it made you miserable. I don't want to be miserable. I'm too cute to be miserable." She drops her phone on the bed and cups her face with her palm, looking up at me with her big, adorable eyes.