“So what’s the deal, twerp?”

                Peter lifted his head, yawning after a fairly exhausting second day of his freshman year, as he reclined in his older sister’s hand on the school bus.  He’d nearly been lulled into a nap by the vibrating hum of the road felt through her soft skin.  After resting his head against her fingers like a pillow, precisely in the way she’d forbid him from doing, for a moment he assumed she was reprimanding him for it.

                “Sorry,” he mumbled, pulling himself into a cross-legged position in her palm.

                “What?  No, I don’t give a crap how you sit,” Erica answered, semi-flustered.  As she had the row all to herself, the seventeen-year-old was able to lean her back against the window and kick her legs across the beaten leather seat, with the hand containing her tiny sibling cradled against her stomach.  “I meant are you going to tell me what you and Lena were talking about at lunch?”

                Peter gulped but ensured not to outwardly react.  His minute actions went invisibly under the radar of most people he encountered, but his mother and siblings had become very skilled over the years at detecting subtle alterations in Peter’s body.  Erica generally played too aloof to comment, but he knew perfectly well she could see them.  Suddenly, despite the sanctity he felt perched in his sister’s unmoving and practiced hand, he became vulnerable.

                “Why?” he asked, hoping it didn’t sound too defensive.

                Erica smirked, raising a playfully disdainful eyebrow.  “Uh… cuz she’s my best friend and she’s just scooping you up and walking you around to talk about secrets?  I don’t know.  I just thought it was weird.”

                That was fair, and Peter knew it.  After his careless mentions of Sharon’s pencil poking to Erica, the latter was probably at least on an orange alert for his general security.  “She just wanted to hear how things went yesterday and this morning.  I guess she was a little worried about me,” Peter responded casually.

                “That does sound like her,” Erica said.  “You were gone a few minutes, though.”

                “She wanted a play-by-play of the classes.  You know how she is,” Peter said with an amiable chuckle.  “I started going on about the teachers and homework and other kids in the class.  Real boring.”

                “Uh-huh.  So why couldn’t she just ask you all that at the table?”

                “It was kind of loud in there,” Peter said.

                “I guess so,” Erica shrugged, cognizant of her sibling’s lifelong struggle to be heard against high volumes.  Her voice dipped as though the questioning was done, but Peter felt a stiffness remaining in the poise of her arm that told him she was still thinking about it.  He patted his fist genially against the rounded heel of her hand, hoping to encourage her to relax, but it didn’t work, and all he earned was another confused look from on high before the pad of her thumb nudged his little hand away.  This conversation probably would’ve been far easier to smooth over if Lena hadn’t had to stay after school today.

                He didn’t blame Erica for a little paranoia.  Their mother had placed a great deal of responsibility on her eldest daughter.  Erica was more than capable of handling it, but the fact remained that in the wild social jungle of their high school, Peter was a burden, and he was sorely aware of this fact.

                Glancing up and over his sister’s shoulder above, Peter could make out familiar houses whizzing by outside the bus window.  Their stop was next.  Once they were home, the odds were far greater that Erica would disappear into her room for a couple hours and forget all about gently interrogating her liability of a brother.

                “Twerp.”

                Peter looked up, suddenly aware that his sister had lifted her hand up closer to her chin without him even noticing.  He could feel a few wisps of her warm breath settling against his face, her lips close enough that he could’ve stood up and touched them.  Though not at all intimidated, it surprised the middle Clark child to be allowed so near to her face.

                “Erica,” he croaked, matching his sibling’s serious tone in an attempt to lighten the mood.

                “You’d tell me if something happened to you, right?”

                Peter gazed up at his sister’s massive, lean face hovering above him, her dark blonde locks sweeping every which way.  Frowning, he searched for some twitch in her expression to indicate that she was just pulling an elaborate gag on him, as her normally omnipresent dose of sarcasm was nowhere to be found.  But he saw nothing.

                “What do you mean?”

                “C’mon.  Don’t try to play dumb with me.  You suck at it.  I know you too well,” she said sincerely, and though the words might’ve sounded cold or dismissive, it occurred to Peter that it was probably the most affectionate thing his sibling had said to him in years.  He swallowed hard again.

                “I’m not playing dumb,” Peter lied.

                “If you got in trouble somehow.  Someone tried to do something to you at school.  You’d tell me.”

                “Well, yeah.  Obviously,” the freshman said with feigned dawning realization, then threw in another chuckle.  “It’s not like I’m gonna be able to do anything about it without my back-up, right?”

                “I’m serious.”

                “Me too,” Peter said.  “Honestly, everything’s fine.  I’m just trying to adjust, you know?  It’s… getting to me a little, yeah, but I can handle it.”

                “Are you sure?” Erica pressed with concern, throwing her brother off with every successive answer.  “Because there really isn’t room here to try and take on everything yourself.”

                “I know that.  And if anyone tries to do something to me, you’ll be the first to know,” Peter said, then added in one of his few actually truthful contributions to the conversation:  “Lena wanted to make sure I knew to go to you, too.”

                “Good,” Erica said, at last seemingly sated for the time being, just as the bus lurched to a stop in a small puff of black smoke out the tailpipe.  Gathering her backpack from the floor with her free hand, Erica slung it over her shoulder and shuffled through the aisle toward the door.

                “Have a good afternoon, folks,” the bus driver said disinterestedly as the Clark teens disembarked.  Peter noted the man’s five o’clock shadow was apparently the exact same length as the day before, as though he was strictly maintaining a look of slight dishevelment.

                The walk back down the sidewalk to the house was a silent one, and Erica already had her cell phone out in the other hand, her thumb busily tapping away at the screen, hardly paying Peter any mind, save for the fact that her hand was as skillfully steady as usual.  It was a treatment the freshman was used to, and even fairly comfortable with.  In fact, he needed the quiet reverie just to try and chew over the little ethical dilemma he’d involved himself and Lena in, as well as his sister on an unfairly ignorant level.

The guilt was already beginning to metastasize after Erica put herself out there in the name of keeping him safe, and Peter had a feeling it was only set to continue growing, especially if anything else less easily resolved should happen to him.

                “Home,” Erica droned loudly into the echo-rebounding foyer of the house to no one in particular as she nudged the door open with a knee, her eyes never leaving the screen of her phone.  Kicking her flats off into the corner of the hallway, she let her backpack slump with a rocky slam to floor and booted it into carpeted area of the adjoining sitting room.

                “Erica, please don’t start an earthquake on my tile,” Suzanne Clark automatically called out from the other room with little urgency, obviously aware of how short a time her daughter would probably remember this decree.

                “Mom, stop trying to make me feel fat,” Erica monotoned back: the closest she ever really got to joking around with their parent.  Peter stifled a cackle with his fist, and noticed the corner of his older sister’s lip curve upward ever so slightly at his enthused reaction, though she quickly straightened up again.  “And that goes for you, too,” she droned without looking at him.

                “Erica, why do you have to throw your stuff around so loud?” Jessica complained as she appeared over the banister at the top of the stairs.  “I thought somebody drove a car into the side of the house.”

                “Everybody around here is awfully worried about the floors, aren’t they?” Erica snarked back with a shake of her head, then glanced back down at Peter in her palm.  “All right, where am I putting you?  I have stuff to do.”

                “Peter, do you want to come with me?” Jessica piped in, dashing down the stairs as fast as possible.  Her golden locks were tied back in two tight braids, which bounced against her shoulders on each step.  Once she reached them, Jessica brought a hand up to Erica’s palm and the youngest Clark gently draped her index finger over her tiny brother’s shoulders: a common alternative to hugging among members of the family where Peter was concerned.

                The freshman laughed, leaning into the friendly embrace of the girl’s finger as it curled instinctively around his frame, and wrapped his arm over the doughy curve of her digit.  He gazed up at his younger sibling’s hopeful expression, her baby blue eyes widened expectantly.  “Sure, Jessie.”

                “Cool.  Open up, then,” Erica said to their sister, extending her occupied hand.  Jessica cupped both palms about an inch below the end of her oldest sibling’s fingers, allowing an easy bridge of smooth feminine flesh for their brother to exchange carriers.

Once his sisters had their hands lined up, Peter clambered over the edge of Erica’s fingers and trounced safely into Jessica’s slightly smaller palm, where he immediately let himself splay out a little further to relax.  His younger sister had always been far more encouraging to use her hand as an easy chair, not-so-subtly offering it as an alternative to reclining on a couch cushion.  It was in humorously stark opposition to Erica’s usually strict set of regulations about laying down, and after such a long day, Peter planned to take full advantage.

“Comfy, Peter?” Jessica asked.  She giggled as the brush of her brother’s clothing, as well as his pattering little feet tickled her skin, and brought the fingers of her other hand a few inches above him once he was settled in to act as a makeshift sunroof.  “Do you have enough room?”

Erica rolled her eyes at the sight of her thirteen-year-old sister’s precocious fussing.  “Oh my gosh, Jessie, relax.  He’s not a freaking prince.”

“I just want him to be comfy, geez!” Jessica fired back semi-seriously, wrinkling her nose and turning her chin up at Erica.  Looking back down at Peter, then, her tone and expression softened immediately again.  “Are you, though?”

“Absolutely,” he said with a grin and a hearty thumbs up, leaning his head with satisfaction against the pad of Jessica’s thumb.

“Wanna see something funny?  Aunt Marcy emailed me a video of some pugs making noises that sound like singing,” Jessica described, trying not to start giggling at the mere mention of it.

“Absolutely,” he said, crossing his legs contentedly over her slender pinky finger.

“Awesome!” she piped happily, regarding her sister one last time as she turned and headed for the stairs again.  “We’ll be having fun watching funny dogs while you’ll be off sending your boyfriends pictures of your-”

“Don’t you even finish that thought!” Erica snapped, earning a triumphant chortle from Jessica as the latter bounded up the stairs, her hands forming a protective carriage for her brother all the way up.

Minutes later Jessica was lying back on her bed in her brightly lit room, which Erica had once accurately termed the Pinkpocalypse, with her laptop between her legs and her brother deposited onto her stomach to witness the performing pug video.

Peter sighed with the relaxation he’d been craving after a day of varying tensions as he settled into the steady rise and fall of his younger sister’s flat abdomen, the folds of her yellow top providing a handy blanket.  He hardly even noticed the dogs, even as Jessica’s laughter caused him to bounce seismically on the surface of her shirt.

Tomorrow he could worry about the veritable juggling act his high school career was shaping up to be.  For now, he could just be.