Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 2 ~ Hollace MacKenzie

The late afternoon sun slanted in through the window, falling on two children who looked so alike they were often mistaken for twins.  Hollie and Adrian were not even sister and brother, cousins instead, but they spent so much time together that they might as well have been siblings.

It was Hollie’s bedroom, a girly bedroom with pastel colors, stuffed animals, and barbies, and it didn’t suit its inhabitant very well.  It had fit her when she was a toddler and her mother decorated the room just the way a little girl’s room should be, but that was a long time ago, in childhood’s terms.  Telltale traces of Hollie at eight years could be found here and there — the books on killer insects and reptiles stacked on her desk, the odd clothing for the barbies which she had made herself out of whatever junk and bits of anything she could collect, an aquarium full of tropical fish, an overturned chair, and the cousin sprawled on her floor.

Hollie sat on the edge of her bed, long thin legs crossed comfortably beneath her.  She bent over a book and read aloud, “Hollace MacKenzie had a round little face, Hollace MacKenzie loved hollyberries and lace, Hollace Mac—”

“You paid thirty dollars for that?” interrupted Adrian from his spot in the middle of an oval rug braided with two colors, white and mint green.  He’d scattered Legos all around, transported from his home to hers in two gallon sized ice cream buckets.

“Twenty-eight fifty,” she corrected him.  “It’s a ‘rare book.’”

“It’s a lame book.”

“It’s a children’s classic.”

“If it were a children’s classic, there’d be reprints and you wouldn’t have to pay twenty-eight fifty for it.  I’ll bet the illustrations suck, too.”

Hollie looked over the top of her book at Adrian as he smugly pieced together Legos.  It was hard to tell what exactly he was making, as it didn’t have any definite shape or apparent logic to it, but it was getting quite big.  Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought that he was just sticking together every Lego he had with him, randomly, but Hollie knew him well enough to understand that there was a design to his creation.  He was just the only person who actually knew what it was.  She thought for a moment about telling him that his Lego creations sucked worse than the illustrations (which weren’t very good) but instead she just sniffed and looked back down at her book.

“Well, I don’t care what other people think.  The main character is me.”

He spoke to his Legos, giving two of them a firm snap together; “It is not, that book was written before you were even born.”

“She has black curly hair and snapping green eyes and snow white skin, see it says right here,” she turned the book around and pointed at the vague watercolor shape of a girl, “‘Hollace MacKenzie had black curly hair, Hollace MacKenzie had snapping green eyes, Hol—”

“Had snow white skin, I know,” he looked up, out of a face that was red from sunburn.  “And that right there is pagerism, stole that line right off of the guy who wrote ‘Snow White.’”

“It’s ‘plagiarism,’ you moron.  And it is not.”  She turned the book back around protectively.  “‘Snow White’ is like ‘sky blue’ or ‘inky black’ and stuff like that.  You can’t copyright that.  And who says a guy wrote Snow White?”

“It was one of the Grim Brothers.”

“Brothers Grimm.”

“Who cares.  You can’t have snapping green eyes, anyway.  That’s stupid.  Eyes don’t snap, rubber bands snap.”  He mimed the launching of a rubber band with his fingers.

“I have snapping green eyes,” she said loftily.

He snorted.

“Anyway,” she shut the book and ran a hand gently over the cover, “my mom used to read this to my Aunt Leona when they were girls, and she’s remembered it fondly all these years and she named me after the girl in the story.  And we happen to look exactly alike.  That’s called fate.”

Another snort.

“I don’t care what you think, anyway.  Mom is gonna love my present, and it’s the first one from me that she didn’t pick out herself,” Hollie swelled with pride.  “Got the idea myself and looked all over for the book my . . . well Elly helped a bit . . . but I used my own allowance.”

“I thought you said your dad bought it for you.”

“Well he ordered it for me ’cause I don’t have a credit card and we could only find it online, but I paid him back.  Every penny.  He said he’d buy it for me to give her if I wanted, but I said ‘No, it’s not my gift if I don’t buy it, because I’m almost nine now and old enough to do that sort of thing,’ and so—” she halted, noticing that his eyes were shut.  “What are you doing?”

“Sleeping,” he said, smiling without opening his eyes.

She placed the ball of one sock clad foot on his forehead and pushed him over backwards.

“Hey!  No kicking!”

“I did not kick, I ‘pushed.’”

“Yeah?”  He grabbed her foot with both hands and shoved her off balance.  Hollie fell back onto the bed, squealing, and kicked her feet wildly.  Adrian let go and backed away from the churning feet.  Hollie slammed her heels down onto the floor and rocked forward to the balls of her feet, propelling herself up, leaping off the bed to dive onto him.  She grabbed his hair and yanked; he hollered and batted at her, boxing her ears.  They fought and wrestled, rolling over the sharp plastic blocks, off the braided rug onto the hard wooden floor.  It didn’t take long for Hollie to gain the advantage, and she loomed over Adrian, one knee dug into his stomach, hands pinning his arms to the floor.

“Say ‘uncle,’” she ordered.

“Uncle,” he puffed.

“Now say, Hollace MacKenzie kicks serious ass, Ade is a great big dummy.”

“That doesn’t rhyme.”

“Say it!”

“Alright, alright, Hollie kicks serious ass, I’m a great big dummy.”

Satisfied, Hollie let go and jumped away before he could get a kick or jab in.  She settled back down on her bed, cross-legged, smugly as if it were her throne.  He sat up, wincing and gingerly checking his arms for flowering bruises.  He sure was a sissy for a boy, Hollie thought.  He was even pretty like a girl, that’s why so many people mistook them for twins.  He had the delicate, soft features, large eyes, and full lips of the fairer sex, and at nine and a half he was a small boy for his age.  He wasn’t involved in school sports, and didn’t do well in PE . . . and was an easy target for bullies.  Hollie could beat him up, easy.

He bent his curly dark head back over his Legos, properly embarrassed that his girl cousin (his younger girl cousin) could still pin him to the floor.

“You’re getting better at fighting,” Hollie said, magnanimously.  “My ear hurts a little where you smacked me.  You just have to try harder.”

“I don’t think it’s right to hit girls, and I wish you’d stop forcing me to just to defend myself,” Adrian muttered, fiddling with a long yellow block.

“Well it’s not just me, you let kids at school push you around all the time, too.  Boys.  Girls.  Don’t think I don’t notice.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.  Just read your stupid book.”

“I’ve already read it.  I’m going to go wrap it,” Hollie declared, hopping off the bed.  “I even bought wrapping paper just for it.”  She rummaged in her closet for a moment.  “You know,” she said, emerging with the paper, “you should ask Marc and Eric to show you some moves, how to slip out from headlocks and swing punches and all that.  Then the next time some big kids tries to give you a wedgie, you just dart in a real quick punch and—”

“Forget it.”

“Whyyyy?” Hollie whined.  “They’d be happy to do it, you know.”

“I don’t want to learn to fight, I just want people to leave me alone.”

“Isn’t this pretty?” she shoved the package of wrapping paper in his face.  “It looks like lace!  I couldn’t find anything with hollyberries, ’cause it’s not close enough to Christmas.”

“Nice,” he said without conviction.

“And you can’t just wish that people will leave you alone and make it happen.  You can’t make yourself invisible, Ade.”

“I wish I could.”

“And hide that cute face from the world?”  She pouted.  “No, no, no.  You’ve just got to learn how to be pretty and dangerous.  Like me,” she posed briefly, smiling fetchingly and twirling her hair, curlier and darker than his.

“You should give that to your mom for Mother’s Day, not her birthday.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.  “Well you’re just giving it to her ’cause she named you after it.”

Hollie paused, counting the months till May, then shook her head in exasperation.  “I’m giving it to her because it reminds her of her childhood, way before she was ever a mother.  So it makes sense to give it to her for her birthday.”  She picked up the book and flipped through it.  “She’s gonna be really old.  Forty,”  She paused to stare out the window, letting that momentous number hang in the air.  She couldn’t imagine being so old, and sweeping her gaze around the room she wondered what momento from today she would like to be given thirty odd years from now.

“It’s finished,” Adrian announced, holding his Lego creation up for her to see.

Hollie looked, and thought that it looked hardly any different from his usual sculptures, and since there were leftover Legos on the floor, she didn’t know how he decided it was “finished.”

“Cool,” she said.  “What is it?”

“Legos,” said Adrian, frowning at her the way he always did when she asked that question.  That’s all his creations ever were; Legos.  She didn’t know what was the point of spending so much time snapping them together, when all he had was what he had begun with.

“Okay,” she shrugged, ripping the plastic away from the paper.  “I’m going to ask Marc or Eric to show you how to defend yourself.  I don’t care if you like it or not, I’m going to and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

He mumbled something under his breath.

“You’ll thank me eventually, when bullies cower and whisper, ‘That’s mean little Ade Boone, he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, man.  Steer clear of him.’”

Adrian snorted.

“You’ll see.”  She nodded to herself, slipping off the bed to take the book over to her desk.  She pushed the insect books aside and fished a scissors out of the desk drawer.  “It’s all very well to be sensitive and artistic,” she said, cutting a straight line through the paper, “but not with bruises.”

“Shut up, Hollie.”

“I’m gonna keep pinning you to the floor and making you say ‘uncle’ until you’re embarrassed enough to do something about it.”  She glanced over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’ll just order a growth spurt from the ‘do something about it’ store,” he said as he swept up the leftover Legos and poured them back into his ice cream buckets.

She laughed, turning back to the desk.