Page 85 of Badd B*tch

I snorted. "No, you wouldn't. You have a lumpy skull."

"I do not!”

“You do! I brushed and braided your hair every morning for years. I know the shape of your skull better than my own."

Tania was quiet for a long time. "You know, I knew how to braid my own hair by the time I was nine."

I blinked at her, rolling to my side. "Tania, what?"

"I pretended not to know how. I’d mess it up on purpose so you'd have to fix it."

"Why?" I asked.

"You liked doing it," she whispered. "And I liked it too. The way you did it reminded me of Mom. It made me feel like Mom was still with us."

"I could never figure out how you didn't know how to braid your hair at seventeen."

She nuzzled my cheek as I had hers. "The fifteen minutes in the morning when you were brushing and braiding my hair for me was my favorite part of the day, Tea."

My eyes burned. "I had no idea."

Tania lifted up on her elbow and looked at me, blinking, and touched a fingertip to my cheek below my eye, like ET with his glowing finger reaching for Elliot. "What is this?"

I batted at her hand. "Shut up. Leave me alone, bitch."

She grabbed my hand and bit my finger hard enough that I yelped. "Not nice. I’m just confused. This looks like feelings.”

I glared at her. "So you make fun of me for it?"

She collapsed on top of me in a pile of warm, dead weight. "Not making fun, teasing. The difference is love…bitch."

"Get off me," I said, my words muffled under her chest. "You're smothering me with your giant plastic honkers."

She rolled off me. "Don’t be jealous of my sweet C-cups."

“I’m not."

"I like my new boobs," she said. "And they're not plastic; it was a fat transfer. I heard too many horror stories of implants ending up in your, like, forehead."

She'd gotten a little bit of an upgrade a year ago, as a birthday gift to herself following a particularly brutal breakup. She'd talked about getting a boob job for years but never did. Until that cheating fucknugget Bradley. Who had told her, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of his perpetually and preternaturally wandering peen, that it was Tania's tiny titties that had made him cheat. I told her not to do the procedure just because of him and his one asshole comment, but his statement had sealed the deal on a decision she'd already been strongly considering, anyway. And as much as I liked to give her shit for it, it had improved her confidence and self-esteem, which meant I was happy for her. But I still gave her shit about it. It's my duty as her older sister, after all.

“You know I’m teasing," I said.

She honked my boob. "Yup. I do. But you’re still jealous. Just a little bit. You can admit it to sissy."

"I admit to nothing, and every time you refer to yourself in the third person as 'sissy', I want to cringe into the earth forever and ever, amen."

She sat cross-legged beside me; like me, Tania was restless and could never sit in the same position for long. "You're bantering."

"Hmmm?" I looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"You. You're bantering with me. Usually, you'd just tell me to shut up and stop being cringe. But you said something funny." She poked me in the center of the forehead. "Something happened out there, Tater-Bug. Something significant.

"Because I said a dumb joke?"

"Yup." She frowned at me. "Did he bone a sense of humor into you? Is he funny? Maybe you, like, sucked some of his humor out of his penis and into yourself." She frowned. "Wait, I forgot, you don't like knob-gobbling."

I cackled involuntarily. "Dude, knob-gobbling?"