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I make a snorting noise. “Hardly, you dry breadstick.”
Not my best comeback, but I’m trying to be a little kinder with my insults. I follow a nurse on TikTok who shared how she delivers her slights in a nicer way, by taking something that’s good and ruining it by tacking something not so good onto it. For example, a breadstick is yummy, but add dry to the beginning and now it’s not so yummy anymore. Unless it’s one of those Italian crispy breadsticks, but that’s not what I mean.
Well, Ryan is a not-the-good kind of dry breadstick. He’s also an unfrosted Pop-Tart, a stale doughnut, and an undercooked chicken breast.
“Stop,” Morgan intervenes. She’s a well-practiced mediator at this point.
Ryan may annoy me, as younger brothers often do, but he’s not totally wrong here: I am a bit of a loser. It’s New Year’s Eve, my twenty-ninth one to be exact. And I’ve never, not once, had someone to kiss at midnight to ring in the new year. At twenty-nine, I’ve barely even kissed someone, period. I thought I might get a decent one from Mason, the New Year’s Eve date ditcher—four, or was it five years ago? It’s all a big blur. But there was obviously no smooching happening that night.
I wasn’t totally honest when I messaged GothamGuardian5, I did have a date tonight—two of them, in fact—but it was my five-year-old niece, Milly, and my three-year-old nephew, Caden, so they don’t really count. Plus, they’ve already gone to bed, leaving me all by myself.
Now it’s just me, surrounded by family—both of my parents, my oldest brother, Kyle, and his wife, Carrie (Milly and Caden’s parents), my next-oldest brother, Derek, and his wife, Lauren, and my baby brother, Ryan, with his new fiancée, Morgan.
Yes, Morgan, my best friend, got engaged to my brother one week ago on Christmas Day. I introduced them a couple of summers ago thinking Ryan would hate her like he did all my other friends, but they fell in love instead.
I’ve never seen either of them happier, so even though I want to hate it all—my brother basically stealing my best friend and doing weird couple-y things with her like playing pickleball like old people and going out on Friday nights for karaoke (people still do that?)—I’m choosing to be supportive of the whole thing. I understand now why the high road is less traveled. It’s hard.
So anyway, here we are, two hours before midnight, and everyone here has a someone. Everyone except me, that is.
“Just let me go home,” I say, finally wrenching my arm out of Morgan’s grip.
She drops her hand and pushes her shoulders back. “If you stay, I’ll kiss you at midnight instead of Ryan.”
“What?” Ryan says, giving his betrothed the same scrunched face I just gave him. But not quite as good as mine. We may have the same dark-blond hair and hazel eyes (at one year apart, people often ask if we’re twins), but I am clearly the better scowler.
“With tongue,” she adds, giving me two succinct eyebrow lifts, a playful smile on her lips.
My gosh, if her middle school students could see Miss Holman right now.
I scrunch my nose. “As tempting as it sounds, I’ll have to pass.”
Ryan makes a gagging sound. “Thank goodness for that.”
“So what, you’re just going to go home and sleep?” Morgan asks, throwing her hands up in the air, flabbergasted.
“That’s the plan. I have to work tomorrow,” I say.
“Not until three,” she says. I should have lied to her about the time when she asked earlier. That would have been the perfect excuse.
“I need to catch up on sleep,” I tell Morgan.
“That’s not a thing,” Ryan says.
“Actually, as a nurse, I can tell you it is.” I give him my best snooty look. I actually don’t know if this is true, but if I say it with confidence he’ll believe me. Ryan is my most gullible sibling, with Kyle being the most protective and Derek being the peacemaker.
Morgan tucks some of her dark-brown, shoulder-length hair behind her ear, takes a giant breath, and then lets it out. “I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to pull rank here.”
“Rank?” I ask her.
“I’m the boss now, remember?”
I drop my shoulders, taking a sulking stance. She’s not making this up; I did put her in charge of my life.
It was Christmas night, a couple of hours after she and Ryan had gotten engaged, and I’d had a little too much celebratory champagne. I’d been lamenting how boring my life is, and how we’re going into a new year, and I have nothing from the past 365 days to show for it. Just the same stale cycle I’ve been living the last eight years, basically since college graduation. Day in and day out, the same freaking things. I go to work, I spend time with my family, I stream a lot of shows. I rarely go out, and I haven’t been on a date since ... since ... well I guess the last time was with date-ditching Mason.
Wow. That’s pathetic.
The only thing outside of my mundane, daily existence I managed this past year was the move from Carson City up to Aspen Lake so I could be closer to most of my family and closer to Aspen Lake General, the hospital where I work. At least that’s something. If I hadn’t done that, I’d still be living in the same cockroach-infested apartment too.
