Peter groggily drifted back into consciousness on Monday morning after a fairly peaceful rest and peered over to the blaring neon readout of the digital clock beside his bed.  Deciding he still had a few minutes before rising from the overstuffed pillow and getting dressed for school, he tugged at the Band-Aid his mother had insisted he keep wrapped around his elbow like a sling “just in case” after the over-dramatized clamor of the Friday night visit from Jessica’s dance partner and former-new-friend Stella.

                The slumber party had ended much more abruptly than anyone had planned, mostly owing to the fact that Jessica had walked in just after the vindictive teenage visitor had stuffed Peter into her sock, positioned him under her toes, and stamped him hard enough to rattle the living room furniture.

                What followed was a theatrical display that might’ve seemed over-the-top even for the laziest daytime soap opera finale, as Jessica had struck Stella across the face and wrestled her miniscule brother out of the gritty footwear, cradling him in her hands and bathing him in a salted pool of bitter tears as she alternately huffed for air and screeched with uncontrollable rage at her violently inventive guest.

                And, of course, once their mother had rushed into the room at the sound of her daughter’s screams to find Stella sprawling over the coffee table with the raw imprint of Jessica’s hand on her cheek, and the youngest Clark herself kneeling on the carpet and shaking as she tried to pet Peter back into coherency, things had only escalated into even more of a sensation.  After Jessica had sputtered out the scene she’d just witnessed and Stella had flimsily attempted to lie her way around the fiasco, it was probably only the threat of legal repercussion that kept Suzanne from clobbering the offending thirteen-year-old with her own tightly balled fist.  Peter heard his mother’s knuckles crack just as much as her voice as she frigidly interrogated the girl, and from the look in her glazed eyes, he wondered just for an instant if Stella was about to be sporting a swollen shiner over her opposite cheek to match the slap mark gifted by Jessica.

                Instead, Suzanne managed to keep herself in check just long enough to refocus on the medical emergency of the moment.  She called out for Erica, who was already curiously poised at the top of the hallway stairs, to call and have Stella’s mother return to pick her up immediately while she and Jessica took Peter to the hospital.  Wordlessly the eldest daughter agreed, flinching at the sight of Peter sprawled in their younger sister’s hand below, her lips turning pale.

                By the time the five-inch victim had been delicately strapped into his car seat and zoomed out of the neighborhood, he’d already mustered enough clarity to insist his barely-conscious appearance was just a temporary effect, like accidentally passing out from dizziness, and he could hardly feel any pain now.  This was more than a bending of the truth, as violet bruises were already sprouting across Peter’s limbs, but the last thing he wanted after his foolhardy quips of bravery was even more of a fuss being made.  Of course, Suzanne was more than halfway to the emergency room by the time he was able to vocalize this wish, careening over curbs and only taking stop signs as laughable suggestions, so it was mostly moot.

                Jessica, carrying Peter into the whitewashed tunnels of the clinic, was still sobbing too hard to relate the story to the confused attendant, so Suzanne repeated back what information she’d been able to glean from her blubbering daughter.  It wasn’t long before they were being ushered into a room for a check-up, with x-rays and bloodwork all on the way.

                Peter babbled out some semi-rational dissent to all this, but after he’d had a chance to look up at his red-eyed mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Jessica most likely running low on bodily fluid given the volume of tears she’d already leaked into her now-sopping shirt, he decided it would be optimal to put their fears to rest as soon as possible.  He already felt guilt even more crushing than the spine-kinking blow delivered by Stella’s treading, and that, indeed, was saying something.  Erica arrived soon afterward, a similar look of stony horror carved into her normally indignant features, and it was then and there that he knew he really had no choice in quelling his family’s shared mortification.

                He was released only a few hours later after several thorough curative rundowns of his condition due in part to his unique specimen but mostly to Suzanne’s squawked insistence that the doctors may have missed something.

                The drive home, and the remainder of the weekend, saw Peter being treated like a glass figurine.  He was quite used to this, having gone through innumerable minor stumbles in his youth that left a mark, many of which involved similar scenarios of foolish children trying to fee-fi-fo-fum their way through an ill-conceived game of trapping him beneath grimy toes.

                Somehow, though, this occasion was different.  Suzanne was often panicky whenever her son ended up with the slightest of scratches, but now she was hardly able to concentrate.  It seemed his mother was lost in a morbid fog, as though the stomp Stella had delivered onto her boy had turned him into a pulpy crimson stain in the carpet rather than just imparting a few lumps, and she was already in a deep vegetative state of mourning.

                Erica, usually with a snarky quip armed and ready to fire, didn’t have a single thing to say to her brother.  Several times he’d caught her peering down at him on his temporary bed in the living room, brow furrowed and whitened lips pursed, but she’d cut swiftly back around the corner if he looked in her direction.  Apparently she and her mother had something in common for once, though Peter wished it could’ve been something other than a comatose reaction to nearly losing a member of the family.

                Jessica was crying enough for three people, of course, to make up for the deficit in her sister and parent.  In fact, the freshman had found it tough to get much complete peace, as his younger sibling tearfully requested to hold him for hours upon hours at a time in the intervening days.  Her arms quivered unceasingly, a constant swelling of salty moisture pouring from her eyes long after Peter assumed she’d dried out her ducts, meaning most of this time was spent vibrating in her clammy palm as a sorrowful shower rained down and puddled around him, soaking his clothes.  Peter, feeling far better now physically but worse than ever emotionally for something that wasn’t at all his fault, didn’t have the heart to refuse his sister even after the thirty-seventh time in a day of feeling her fingers curling underneath him and her quavering words begging to take care of him again, hoping her constant vigilant presence could somehow undo the giggling cruelty of her new-friend-turned-sworn-enemy.

                Thankfully, though, Peter had made it through the gloom-infested weekend, his spirits only slightly dampened now as the lingering positivity of his date with Lisa and the achingly pleasurable sensation of her finger alighting on his shoulder took hold in his mind.  He sat up on his pillow, sinking into the buoyant blue terrain as he rose blearily to his feet at last, and tingled at the sudden conscious realization that he’d get to see her again today.  No matter what anyone threw at him today, that couldn’t be taken away.  It stung to be incapable of sprinting all the way to school on his own to wait for the angelic redhead to arrive.

                God, he felt like a loon.  Was this supposed to feel like this?

                Whatever it was?
                The lullabied tone of small knuckles rapping quickly pulled Peter back to attention as he stumbled down the plush hill of the pillow and scrambled onto the sheets.  Creakily the door swung open, spilling in the hallway light and momentarily blinding Peter as he trekked across the fluffy dunes of his bedsheets toward the customized staircase fixed to the endpost.

                “H-Hi, Peter,” crooned a voice so quiet it probably wouldn’t have caught the boy’s attention unless he was already staring at the meekly advancing form of his younger sister.  Her eyes, still raw and pink from the deluge of tears she’d shed this weekend, were mercifully dry this morning.  The freshman crossed his fingers that this was a sign they could all finally move on again as Jessica padded carefully into the room.

                “Morning, Jessie,” he replied as sunnily as he could, not wanting to risk sending her back over the edge with a less-than ecstatically gleeful greeting.

                “How… are you?” she questioned as she arrived at the end of the bed and leaned in, brushing her hands over the ruffled folds of the bed until they’d arrived where Peter stood.  She arched a finger, stroking the tip along her brother’s minute cheek with the delicacy of trying to touch a butterfly’s wing.  By her ethereal tone, it seemed she only half-knew the boy as her sibling, and he’d instead become some fragile hospice patient hooked up to tubes through every orifice and on the brink of a lung collapse.  Not a good sign.

                “I’m good.  Ready to get back to school, though,” Peter answered just as cordially.  He hoped against hope to avert another breakdown, but he wondered if it was already foregone.

                “Are you going to get off the bed now?” she asked with genuine curiosity, despite possessing full knowledge of the fact that the five-inch teen rose at the same time every morning and descended the miniature staircase on his own.

                “Yeah.  Probably can’t go to school in my PJs,” he said good-naturedly, giving his sister’s finger a playful shove, but this only caused her to flinch and withdraw her hand.

                “Don’t hurt yourself, please,” she requested gravely, lifting herself back to full height and staring piteously onto the surface of the bed again, her head tilted to the side.

                “I… um, sure, sure, okay,” he said, biting back reassurance of his capacity for wrestling with human fingers and decided to just let the girl heal from this haunted weekend on her own terms.

                “Why don’t I take you downstairs?” she said, posing it more as a deliberate suggestion than a request.  “We’ll get you something to eat before you get dressed.”

                “Uhh… yeah, that’d be great,” Peter said, stepping tentatively into the reoffered plush padding of his sister’s palm. He noticed she took even longer than usual to let him get settled in before steadily ascending back up.

                “I’ll come back upstairs and pick out some clothes for you if you want?” Jessica said as she exited the room.  “You wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

                “No, no, that’s fine, really, I’ll… manage.”

                “I was thinking about something,” the girl commented as she took the stairs one at a time, delicately shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet as though the slat of each step might contain an unseen trap and send her precious cargo plunging to his doom below.

                “What’s that?”

                “Your bed is so high up.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t seem safe,” Jessica explained.

                “It’s… well, it’s always been like that.  You know that.  I’ve got my stairs, though,” Peter countered cautiously as his sister’s thumb pulled him a little tighter into her palm for security, something she didn’t usually do while transporting him up or down steps.

                “I know.  But that’s dangerous too.  You might slip and fall off of them.”

                “Maybe, but that’s true of everything, isn’t it?  Anything can happen anytime,” Peter said, chomping onto his tongue and cringing as soon as the words had left his mouth.

                Probably precisely the wrong thing to say.

                “I know,” Jessica answered after a hollow pause, gingerly stepping down onto the hardwood of the foyer and sweeping her tangled golden locks over her shoulder.

                “Well… what I mean by that is-”

                “I want to talk to Mom about it,” Jessica stated, cutting him off in the same frigid timbre.

                “About what?”

                “Finding a new place for you to sleep.  A better place.  Where I can make sure you’re safe.”

                “Jessie, you-”

                “It’s my job to keep you safe,” she croaked, her syllables turning into enough of a sputtered bungle that her handheld brother knew there was no more contesting the matter at this point in time.  “It’s my job, and I messed it up really bad.  And now I have to do a better job.”

                It took all Peter’s willpower to avoid slugging himself in the jaw.  What had he just earned himself with that carelessly callous reminder of his easy mortality to the girl who definitively held the title of Most Overprotective Sibling in the Known Universe or Any Other Still Undiscovered?

                It had already taken a tremendous amount of persuasion on Suzanne’s part to convince Jessica that it was not necessary to sleep with Peter in her hands from now, lest he be snatched away by invaders of either the burgling or extraterrestrial variety.  While this arrangement had been attempted in times past, usually at Jessica’s request after she’d accidentally caught sight of a scary movie on cable and wanted a companion to keep her safe in the night but still didn’t take up much room, it wasn’t ideal.  It wasn’t that the girl wasn’t gentle with him; if anything, Peter had sometimes found himself comfier while sandwiched between his little sister’s protective palms, at least at first.  However, she generally tended to clutch him closer and closer to her chest in her sleep, eventually lovingly hugging him in with a good deal of pressure.  It never got painful, exactly, but it did make it awfully hard to get a full eight hours when Peter was getting cocooned in his sibling’s pajamas while her hands squeezed into him, retaining heat and generating sweat at an unfortunate rate.  Drool trickling out of the girl’s lips in her slumber was also a problem, as it was usually involuntarily wiped away with a hand that then immediately returned to cradling Peter, often dousing him in her sticky toothpaste-flavored juices.

                As they entered the bacon-scented hearth for breakfast, still with Jessica’s fingers fastened defensively around Peter’s limbs, the freshman wasn’t above a light-hearted silent prayer that he didn’t just seal a detrimentally nurturing fate for himself.