Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Page A

genuinely pissed off. Like I said, I would have been glad to ignore them completely, if only they had been willing to cooperate. But I really hated it when they messed with my stuff. “One last chance,” I warned Jaden. “Take it off, or I’m gonna smack you into next week.”
    He knew I meant it; it wouldn’t have been the first time. But he was a fearless little bastard. “You’ll have to catch me, snot-breath,” he said, and then he turned and ran, my tiara crooked on his head. He looked totally demented.
    I took off down the brown-carpeted hallway after him, whipped around the corner, and flew down the creaking stairs while he laughed like a little maniac. I caught him at the bottom. I had just gathered his overgrown hair into a pullable rope when I heard Braden call from the top of the stairs.
    “Hey, Carly May,” he said. “Look.” He held my diary up for me to see. “You sneaky little bastard,” I said, giving Jaden’s hair a hard yank. I grabbed the tiara and looked up at Braden. “Give me that book,” I hissed, “or I’m gonna poke your brother’s eye out.” I brought the tiara close to Jaden’s face, aiming one of the pointy ends at his left eye. He stopped laughing, and I saw fear register on his face. I actually saw it; one minute it wasn’t there, and then it was, changing the color of his eyes and the texture of his skin and the rhythm of his little-boy breath. Later I would think back to that expression when I was acting and had to do fear—I used it as sort of an emotional shortcut, a way to access a feeling I didn’t really understand very well. But in the moment what got me most was how easy it had been to reduce my little brother to a shivering puddle of dread. He really thinks I’ll do it , I thought, sort of amazed. For a second I felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I almost let him go—and then Braden started reading from the top of the stairs. “Sometimes I feel like he’s standing in the doorway watching me sleep. Sometimes I pretend he is. I can’t believe I’m even writing this down.” He read haltingly—reading wasn’t exactly his strong point. The clumsy sentences seemed to burn themselves into my mind, and without even knowing it I jerked the tiara closer to Jaden’s eye. I would like to believe that I miscalculated. But there was no thought involved. I saw myself jab the thing in his eye. He screamed. I let go of him and took off after Braden.
    Now if you actually try to picture this, you have to admit that it’s partly comical. If it was in a movie, you would want to laugh, even if you were trying to tell yourself it really wasn’t funny. I was using a tiara as a weapon. But Jaden howled for Daddy, who happened to be coming in from the barn. He showed up just as I caught up with Braden—I was wrestling him to the floor while he kicked me in the knees, the shins, wherever his thick little legs could reach. I’d managed to grab the diary out of his hand, and I punched him in the stomach with it as he went down.
    That’s what Daddy saw, that and then Jaden’s red, swollen eye. He didn’t think it was funny at all.
    I felt awful, of course. I felt awful when I saw the disappointment in Daddy’s face, and I felt awful when I saw little Jaden’s angry, temporarily sightless eye. At the same time I was sort of relieved to notice that I felt awful, since it seemed to prove that I was not an absolutely heartless person, which I did occasionally worry about. I fully agreed that I should be punished, though I felt strangely removed from the endless conversations about what should be done with me. I felt more curious than afraid. What could they do to me, after all?
    Gail was all for sending me away to some kind of home for problem children. This seemed like an awfully risky proposal to make, given my hold over her. God, she must really hate me, I remember thinking. “No more road trips, no more nice hotels and room service?” I said nastily. I saw her