Page 78 of Fierce-Matt

He gave his sister the condensed version of their dates. “She’s not afraid to speak her mind.”

“I can’t believe she told you that you were boring. I love it.”

He snorted. “You would. The next date I took her to Carowinds.”

“Did she make you puke? She always wanted to when you said you’d go on rides with her. I couldn’t handle it.”

“Are you kidding me? She really said that?”

Guess she had taken it easy on him. He had been turning slightly green and she said they were done.

“Back then she did. She meant it too.”

“We are both different people now,” he said. “And we get along well.”

“I’m glad. I really am. She’s had a hard life. I wish I’d been around more for her, but I didn’t know what was going on.”

“Tell me what I don’t know,” he said.

“First, I’m not sure what you know. Second, that’s a conversation with her. I don’t want to be spreading shit. She got that enough in school.”

“Then tell me about that. Not what was said but why it was said.”

“Matt...”

“Phoebe, do me a solid. I’m trying here. I like her a lot. I will not say where it came from, but I’ve learned from all the shit I did in the past. I don’t want to hurt her. The more I know, the better prepared I can be.”

His sister exhaled a long gush of air. “Fine. Just a little. She was the butt of a lot of jokes. You know she was naïve and believed silly things.”

“Like the bear,” he said. He wouldn’t live that down.

“That was one of many. One of the other girls at the party that night said something at school and it made the rounds. Everyone thought it was a riot that Anya believed it was a bear. They yelled ‘watch out, it’s Yogi, run, Anya, run.’ A few called her Yogi for a short period.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep. I put a stop to it.”

He didn’t want to know how his sister did, but she was loyal that way.

“Her brother is a real asshole,” Phoebe said. “He’d say personal shit about her to people in school and get others to pick on her too.”

“You’re joking.”

Who betrayed a family member like that?

Then he remembered what Anya had said about her brother.

“No. I remember once she was sick and threw up or something. The details are foggy now, but EJ was making it out like she had puke in her hair and pooped her pants and didn’t know, then left the house that way. He was a horrible person.”

“Sounds it,” he said. “I don’t remember him.”

The guy was three years older than Anya, so a year ahead of him in school but not someone he ever associated with.

He wished he had because he would have decked the guy, then shoved him headfirst into a locker for saying shit like that.

“I wish I could forget him. He made her home life hard. There were a lot of fights with EJ and his parents.”

“She told me some of that,” he said.