point. He had already gotten us yelled at big time twice this summer; many more if you counted all the little scoldings we earned from performing his shenanigans. “Ok, well, I’ll leave you alone then. I did have a really good idea… oh well. Maybe next time.” He got up from the swings and began to walk ever so slowly away from us, knowing very well that his comment had gotten our attention. Nadiya gave me one of her famous side-eye looks and I shrugged back at her. She was older than me, she got to call the shots. Plus, it was her dumb brother after all. “What idea?” Nadiya said. Steven galloped back to our spot on the swings with the biggest grin on his face. Nadiya and I listened to his plan patiently and got to work the second he had everything laid out for us. His plan was perfect. We were giddy with excitement. My best friend and I scooped the sand out of the sandbox by hand. It was so much easier than wasting our time with the stupid toy shovels. Steven watched us, telling us we had to dig deeper or that the bottom was too lopsided or that we were throwing too much sand towards him. Now, my sandbox wasn’t one of those dinky plastic toy ones that were in the shape of a turtle. No, my sandbox was big, and it was plopped right into the ground underneath my playhouse. This meant that if we dug for long enough China would appear right under our feet. Steven egged on our childish delusions and had us clearing out dirt for nearly an hour. Finally, after our fingernails were dark with crud and our heads were itchy with sand and our faces were smudged with mud, he stopped us. “Now comes the fun part.” The smirk on his face said it all. Nadiya and I scrambled out of our surprisingly shallow hole and ran to the hose. We had it pulled halfway across the yard before Steven yelled us to a halt. “That water is going to be cold. It’s going to be a hot tub, right? We need hot water, idiots.” The eye roll was implied in his voice. “Why don’t you do it then?” Nadiya yelled right back at him. I didn’t dare get angry at him. It was her dumb brother after all. Steven frowned at her and then pointed back over in the direction of their house. “Just go get a bucket from dad’s shed and fill it up inside. Use the bathtub or something. It’s not that hard.” I followed Nadiya willingly and after a few minutes of scrounging around, we found a decent sized bucket. Her parents weren’t home,;they must have taken little Chase somewhere, leaving the house completely Page 9
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