Demon

Natalie

Poor Gabe. This has been a hard week for him. First Jonathan went all crazy and bad and they got into a fight last weekend. Then I had to tell him about guardians, which was a super strange thing for him to accept. Then the whole fight happened with Jonathan on the jungle gym, and they both fell off. Gabe’s ankle is broken, so he’s wearing a cast and using crutches. But he isn’t worried about that at all. He’s just worried about Jonathan.

I want to try to make him feel better, and I think that distracting him from thinking about Jonathan for a while might help.

“How’s your ankle feeling?” I ask him. I think that having him lay down must be helping.

“It’s all right,” he says. “It doesn’t hurt as much as it did at first.”

“You know,” I tell him, “Angel can see how it’s doing. Want him to check it out for you?”

His eyes get big. Poor thing, I just can’t stop surprising him.

Gabe

What? “Seriously? Yeah, sure.”

She waits for a minute, then tells me, “Angel says that the bone is already starting to mend. He says that it is all in the right spot, and the cast is making sure nothing can move while it is healing. He thinks you’ll actually be all better before your six weeks in the cast are over.”

“Oh. Well, cool. Thanks.” I guess that’s good to know.

She goes over to her closet for some reason, and gets out a metal hanger. I watch, befuddled, while she struggles to unbend it. “What are you doing?” I ask her.

“Just a minute,” she says, concentrating on her task, her little tongue poking out of her mouth. Once she gets it more or less straight, she wraps a bunch of masking tape over one end. “Here,” she says, once she’s done. She hands it to me. “Angel said that your foot is starting to feel itchy inside the cast, and that you can stick this down inside to scratch it. Not too hard, though, you don’t want to scrape your skin.”

Ooh! Well, that’s useful. I guess being able to talk to her guardian angel can be pretty handy.

While I’m gently stuffing the hanger down in there, and getting all the right spots, she is looking to the side and listening to Angel. She nods, then looks back over at me.

“Gabe, Mom and Dad are trying to decide whether to keep going back and forth to their houses over Christmas break. Now that school’s out it doesn’t make that much sense to have the week at Mom’s and the weekend at Dad’s.”

Oh, okay. Again, I guess her guardian is useful.

“I think we should stay here,” she says.

“You don’t want to hang around with Timothy?”

“I know that we can get our moms to drive us to visit each other. And Angel talks to Guardian all the time, so I’ll always know what’s going on with Timothy. I just think we should stay closer to Jonathan. I’m trying to figure out what to do to help him.”

Her little face crumples, like she has gotten sad all of the sudden. “It’s my fault,” she says, looking down at her hands. “Everything that happened to him is because of stuff I decided to do. I have to try to fix it.”

I yank the hanger back out of my cast and put it down, then reach over and grab her hand. “Don’t blame yourself, Nat. He was being really rotten to you.”

“Yeah, but even that was kind of my fault. If I hadn’t started the whole thing about trying to get guardians to talk to each other, they wouldn’t have found out how to use energy, and Demon wouldn’t have learned how to control Jonathan. It all comes back to me.” Her lip quivers, poor thing. My little sister is so sensitive. She always wants to make everyone else happy, and I can tell this is just eating at her.

“Not all of it, Nat. Jonathan started it, a super long time ago. He’s the one who was always teasing you and Timothy. I think that was way before your guardians learned about energy. It was already happening before you did that.”

She nods and looks up at me. “Yeah, I know. But I still have to help him. I just don’t understand how yet. I know that if we go over to Mom’s again I won’t be able to see him much until school starts again. And Angel won’t be able to hear him from over there. I need to be close by.”

“All right, sure,” I say.

“Good,” she says, and jumps to her feet like she’s on a mission. “I think we should go tell Mom and Dad that we want to stay here over Christmas, before they finish talking about it.” She takes my crutches that were leaning against the bed and hands them to me. “Come on.”

Oh, okay. Boy, when she makes up her mind she really springs into action, doesn’t she?

Brenda

I’m just about to go call up the stairs for the kids to come down for dinner, when I hear them coming down anyway. Gabe’s crutches thunk on the stairs as he uses them and the banister to navigate the stairway. He hasn’t complained at all about any of it, not the pain or the crutches or anything. I think he was so relieved when his friend woke up that he is completely disregarding his own injury.

Ron is putting plates around the table, and I bring over the casserole dish and put it on the trivet. “Good timing,” he tells the kids, “have a seat.”

Before we get the chance to introduce the topic that we were discussing, Natalie pipes up with, “Can we stay here for Christmas break?” Gabe snorts a little laugh and looks down at his plate.

I start ladling tuna casserole onto everybody’s plates. “Well, actually, we were just talking about that.” Natalie and Gabe meet each other’s eyes in a strangely meaningful way. Oy, those kids. What are they up to now?

Ron takes his full plate back from me and says, “We weren’t sure how you guys would feel about it. You want to stay here, Natalie?”

“Yes, please,” she says primly, pushing her food around on her plate with her fork.

“Why?” he asks, somewhat baffled. We were assuming that Natalie would prefer being at my place, so she could play with Timothy all the time over Christmas break. We were worried that she and Gabe would be in conflict over where to stay.

“I think it would be nice to set up all the Christmas decorations here,” she says, “since the living room is bigger. Maybe we could bring over the stuff from Mom’s house so everything can be together.”

Really? That’s what she’s thinking about? I catch Gabe giving her a glance and a slight roll of his eyes. Okay, what is going on here? The kids are clearly in league together here. But why? Doesn’t she want to play with Timothy?

Natalie looks to the side, then back over to me, and quickly adds, “I’m not worried about seeing Timothy. You’ll bring me over there sometimes to play, right? Maybe when we go to get your decorations? And he’s already coming here tomorrow.”

Why do I get the sense that she’s trying to talk us into something?

Ron asks Gabe, “What do you think?”

“Yeah, I’d like to stay here,” Gabe says, stuffing a bread roll into his mouth.

Ron looks over at me and chuckles. “Well, okay then. I guess that settles it, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “This house it is.”