Not that I knew what his ass felt like, but I could imagine. I'd watched him lift weights all week. Do squats. Bend over on the field when he lined up against the offense. I'd touched a few things on Noah's body back in the day, but his ass had not been one of them.
What a freaking tragedy, I thought through my wine haze.
Isabel stormed into the family room, a bottle of tequila in her hand that had me blinking owlishly at her. Were we at tequila level? I missed it. "Paige deserves to have a paper written about her."
"She does," Claire said diplomatically.
The tequila bottle waved like a flag. "She stepped in when no one could handle you two little hellions."
Lia rolled her eyes. "Like you were a walk in the park, Miss Angry Girl."
"That's the point of this class, though," Claire interjected when Iz opened her mouth with what promised to be a scathing retort. "The structure of the family, as we know it, has changed dramatically. Even the phrase family structure itself holds different weight than it did twenty years ago. The rise in single parent families, homosexual parents, even saying things like nontraditional implies a bias that we need to be careful of. Our family history didn't meet any sort of definition of 'traditional,' even when our parents were married. Dad was so much older than her, but they still fit the definition of a traditional family structure as it’s been historically defined. It implies there's something wrong or nontraditional about Paige and Logan raising us when they filled the parental roles to much better success."
We all stared at her for a beat.
I poured more wine.
Iz unscrewed the top of the tequila and disappeared into the kitchen.
Lia spoke first even though she'd probably be able to stare at Claire and communicate what she was thinking. "So why are you questioning what to do your paper on?"
Claire licked her lips, and her gaze darted to the kitchen. "Because I'm wondering if it's too easy to write about Paige. I could argue that Mom, and her absence in our life, had a greater impact on us. On how the structure of our family changed, and how that played out on our emotional growth and maturity."
Isabel stormed back in. Her hair, unbound and tumbling past her shoulders, flew behind her like a flag, and her eyes were blazing in her pink-cheeked face. "No way, that bitch does not get papers. She doesn't deserve papers written about her."
"Isabel," I cautioned quietly. "It's not your decision."
"Then why is she asking us for our opinion?"
All four of us fell quiet. Claire, as wild as she'd been as a child, had mellowed more quickly than Lia had once they reached high school. She was an observer of life, of the people around her, like Isabel was, while Lia still held that boundless energy that had been a hallmark of their youth. She was like a live wire, always bouncing, always tapping her foot, always seeking an outlet for the force bound behind her skin. Yet despite that, she was quietly watching our middle sister, eyes bright with unshed tears at how quickly she turned to anger at the topic of Brooke.
"I'm asking your opinion because I love and respect you," Claire said.
Isabel relaxed, her shoulders losing a bit of their tightness.
Lia looked at Claire and smiled sadly. "But opinion is different than permission, isn't it? You don’t need our permission to do this."
Leave it to those two. The thought had flowed from Claire to Lia without skipping a beat. Claire nodded. "It is."
My eyes fell shut because we all knew what that meant.
"What do you think, Mol?" Claire asked.
Words crowded my throat because as much as I knew moments like this required me to act as the firstborn, I didn't feel like that was me. But I was.
I'd always been content to let Logan assert his role as firstborn, the big brother and father figure we'd so desperately needed when we were younger. So even though I was the oldest of my four sisters, my feet had never filled those shoes. Not really.
I didn't want to tell Claire what to do because what if I steered her wrong? What if agreeing that doing the paper on Brooke's impact on our family structure was equivalent to setting off a nuclear bomb in our tight-knit little circle? That was the last thing I wanted. Our family kicked ass. I loved our family. Tuesday nights were the highlight of every single week for me.
The idea that Brooke's ghost, though she was still very much alive, could punch through that, filled me with dread. But it wasn't my place to lay the mantle of my opinion on my younger sister's education.
Because it was only that. My opinion.
"I think I've had too much wine for this conversation," I admitted weakly.