None of the four boyfriends I’d had over the course of my life had prepped me for how to deal with two small people who would eventually grow into men. Men who would eventually have responsibilities and maybe even families—decades and decades from now. The thought was terrifying. I’d dated boys and I’d dated idiots who were still boys no matter how much facial hair they had. And I was responsible for raising a pair to not become like them. I was about as far away from being an expert as you could get. Looking back on them now, my exes were like pieces of gum you’d find beneath a table at a restaurant.
While Rodrigo and I had always been close, at five years older than me, I had been too young to pay attention to those careful years between five and fifteen, to see how he’d survived them. All I could remember was this bigger-than-life personality who had been popular, athletic, and likable. If there had been growing pains, I couldn’t remember. And I definitely couldn’t ask my parents about it. I also couldn’t call the Larsens for advice; they’d raised two girls, not two boys, and in the span of no time, I’d figured out that for a lot of things, boys were a lot different than girls. Josh and Lou had done some shit that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, and I had no doubt five-year-old me would have thought the same thing.
What the hell was I supposed to do with Josh and Louie? Was I supposed to discipline them differently? Talk to them differently? Was there a leeway with them that wasn’t possible with girls?
I didn’t think so. I could remember my parents being a lot more relaxed—and that was saying something because they were strict—with Rodrigo than with me. It used to piss me off. They would use the excuse that he was a boy and I was some sort of innocent flower that had to be protected at all costs as their reasoning behind why I would get grounded for weeks if I got home past curfew while he would get a sigh and an eye roll. There had been plenty of other things that my parents had expected of me that they hadn’t of Drigo.
So, as I sat in my Honda with Josh and Louie in the backseat, both strangely silent, I still couldn’t decide how to handle the situation. After I had picked up Josh from school, neither one of us had said a word as I drove back to work and proceeded to go back and forth between color jobs for my last two clients of the day until it was time to pick up Louie. And as if sensing the tension in the car, Lou had been suspiciously quiet, too.
The fact was Josh had punched a little boy in the face.
Now I had been pissed off about it for all of ten minutes until I’d shown up at their school to talk to the principal and Josh himself, to find out that yeah, he had hit someone in his class. But he had punched him because the little shit had been beating up on a different kid in their class in the bathroom. The fact that they were in fifth grade doing this kind of crap didn’t escape me at all. Josh had supposedly intervened, and the little shit had then turned his attention and aggression on my nephew. The slight amount of irritation I’d felt having to go pick him up had disappeared in an instant. But the principal had something up his butt and was talking about how severe the offense was and blah, blah, blah, the school doesn’t condone violence, blah, blah blah.
The asshole then proceeded to try and suspend Josh for a week, but I argued until I got it down to two days with a promise to have a long talk and consider disciplining him.
That was where my problem came in.
Diana, the aunt, wanted to give Josh a high five for standing up for another kid. I wanted to take him for ice cream and congratulate him on doing the right thing. Maybe even buy him a new game for his Xbox with my tip money.
Diana, the person who was supposed to be a parent figure, knew that if it had been me who got in trouble at school, my parents would have beat my ass and grounded me for the next six months. My mom had slapped me once when I was fourteen for yelling at her and then slamming the door in her face. I could remember it like it was yesterday, her throwing my bedroom door open and whack. Getting suspended from school? Forget about it. I’d be six feet in the ground.
So what the hell was I supposed to do? What was the right path to go down?
Sure, my parents had an iron grip on my life back then and I had turned out okay, but there had been problems along the way. I couldn’t count the number of times I had thought that my mom and dad didn’t understand anything, that they didn’t know me. It hadn’t been easy feeling like I couldn’t tell them things because I knew they wouldn’t get it.
I didn’t want Josh or Louie to feel that way toward me. Maybe that was the problem between being an aunt and being a parent figure. I was one, but had to be the other.
So where the hell did that leave me?
“Am I in trouble?” Louie randomly asked from his spot in the backseat on his booster chair.
I frowned and glanced at him through the rearview mirror, taking in that small, slim body angled toward the door. “No. Did you do something I don’t know about?”
His attention was focused on the outside of the window. “’Cuz you’re not talking, and you got Josh outta school early and not me.”
Josh let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re not in trouble. Don’t be stu—” He caught the “stupid” before it came out. “—dumb. I got in trouble.”
“Why?” the five-year-old asked with so much enthusiasm it almost made me laugh.
Those brown eyes, so much like Rodrigo’s, flicked over toward the rearview mirror, meeting mine briefly. “Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because,” he repeated, shrugging a shoulder, “I hit somebody. I’m suspended.”
“What’s suspended?” Lou asked.
“I can’t go to school for a day.”
“What!” he shouted. “How can I get suspended?”
Josh and I both groaned at the same time. “It’s not a good thing, Lou. If you get suspended to miss school, I’ll kill you.”
“But… but… how come Josh isn’t going to get killed?”
Those blue eyes met mine through the mirror again, curiosity dripping from the corners of those long lashes. “Because I’m not going to get mad at you guys for getting in trouble when you’re doing the right thing—”
“But why would you get in trouble for doing the right thing?” Lou blurted out.
What the hell was I supposed to say? I had to pause to think about it. “Because sometimes, Lou, doing the right thing isn’t always considered the best thing for everyone. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Okay, like Josh, do you have bullies in your class? Someone who picks on other kids and tells them ugly, mean things?” I asked.
“Umm… there’s a boy who tells everyone they’re gay. I don’t know what that is, but our teacher said it wasn’t a bad thing and called his mom.”
Jesus. “I’ll tell you what gay is later, okay? But it isn’t a bad thing. Anyway, so that kid tells other kids things to try and make them sad and mad, right? Well, that’s a bully. It’s someone who picks on other people to try and hurt their feelings. That isn’t nice, right?”
“Right.”
“Exactly. You should be nice to other people. Treat them with respect, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, bullies don’t do that, and sometimes they’re mean to people who don’t know how to defend themselves. Some people can ignore those mean comments, but other people can’t handle it. You get what I’m saying? They might cry or feel bad about themselves, and they shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking you, right?”