Page 26 of The Way Back Home

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Olivia

“QUIT RUNNIN’ FROM ME,” August bellows from the opposite side of the house. He thunders after his kid sister, shaking the cabinets until the china rattles ominously. I don’t know how he doesn’t lose his damn prosthetic in the process. Bettina tears around the living room and makes a beeline for the kitchen, shrieking all the while and ducking around August’s legs. The brush in his hand goes sailing across the room and whacks off the wall, narrowly missing the television.

“Wivvie, save me.” Bettina barrels into me, chuckling, and I settle my hands on both of her shoulders.

“Woah,” I say. “Where do you think you’re going there, little lady?”

“Auggie’s tryin’ a brush my hair. It’s hurty.”

“Okay, but you know if you brushed it every morning by yourself you could get the tangles out easier, and you wouldn’t need to run away, because it wouldn’t hurt.”

“Auggie does sucky hair.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I’m pretty sure that’s not a word you’re supposed to use.”

“Olivia’s right. You’re not,” August says from the doorjamb. Bett squeals and attempts to burrow between my legs. I awkwardly pat her head and hold my hand out for the brush that August must have retrieved in the time that it took me to lasso the four-year-old wildling.

He stares at my outstretched hand and frowns, setting the brush in it, and following up the movement with two glittery pink baubles. “What if Olivia does your hair today?”

“Will Wivvie be gentle with the tangwles?” she asks, staring up at me.

“Of course,” I say. “I have to brush my own hair everyday too, you know.”

“Auggie isn’t gentwle.”

“You wanna know what I think?” I crouch down before her, taking her hand and tucking the shiny pink baubles into her little palms. “I think August just doesn’t know what it’s like to have princess hair. If he did know, I’m sure he’d be more careful.”

“Auggie had pwincess hair once.”

“He did?” I say with a laugh, smiling up at the man in question.

“Mamma showed me picchoose. He had long, long hair, like Rabunzel only dark.”

“Rabunzel, huh?”

“Yup. He wasn’t cwanky then,” she whispers, conspiratorially. “But I wasn’t here ’cause I wasn’t borneded yet. Mamma said I was here before, but then I left and I was waitin’ all the time up in Heawven, and then when Auggie went off to war, I came back.”

“Wow,” I stare up at August for clarification. Of course I get none. Unless the steely gaze and tight jaw are any indication of an admission, and I guess this is August, so that’s usually all the conversation I get.Life of the party he is not.

“Mamma said I was borneded in the bathroom during a big scary storm, but I wasn’t bweathing, and the angels took me back to Heawven. I was a boy then.”