OOPS… Snippet Sunday Monday

Oops.  I apologize to the Snippet Crew.  I was supposed to do a Snippet Sunday post yesterday and utterly forgot, which is really NOT like me.

Mea culpa, and I do beg everyone’s pardon.

So here you go…

From CRY UNCLE, by Chrissy Olinger:

We stopped sticking up for Emily around the time she got boobs.  She was a slut.  At a certain point you don't want people to know your cousin is the slut with a beer hidden in her mitten at the hockey game.  You don't want people walking up to you at a bonfire with the charming little tidbit that they'd banged your fifteen year old cousin in exchange for a bottle of Jack Daniels.

But my brothers could be described as mean... yet not as bullies.  Jackie could be positively cruel, but it was an equal opportunity wedgie-and-butt-cheek-taping system. Nobody was immune.  Actually, he was immune... to the knowledge that taping the ass-cheeks of a two-hundred-and-forty pound tackle together with duct tape was not the same experience for the tapee if he's a hundred-and-twenty pound locker room nerd.  It was one of the genealogical hazards of being a Gallagher.  You may not be ten feet tall, but  you were bullet proof.  You never worried about being safe in Crow Point if you were a Gallagher.  You might get a wedgie, but you'd also get revenge, and nobody would really hurt you.  Payback was too terrifying for those who trifled with the Gallaghers.

Gazing at my brothers, piled in a squirming mass of noogie-driving testosterone on the sloping green lawn of my parents' home, I realized with a disturbing clarity how much a part of my confidence I owed to these idiots.  Was that a comfort or a curse?  Maybe both.