"But mom," Zoe whined, "Why do I always have to take care of Jon? Can't he just go to the shops by himself?"
"Now Zoe, dear, you remember the last time Jon went out alone, don't you? Do you want that to happen again?"
Zoe did remember, and didn't want to repeat it. It was a pain in the ass having a brother, having to take care of him, protect him all the time. Her mother said it was the duty of every woman to care for the needs of the 'weaker sex', that it was all part of growing up, but sometimes Zoe wished she lived in a world where men and women were equals.
She knew it was just a dream, a strange fantasy that probably arose from staying up too late looking at internet porn. Of course, she would never voice her thoughts on the matter. Once, a year ago, Susan Thompson, a girl in her social-studies class, had brought something up along the same line-of-though.
"Why couldn't a boy get a job outside of the home?" she had asked. The laughter and ridicule that erupted from the students, no less the teacher, had squashed any discussion. It was, after all, a ridiculous thought. How in the world would any boy be expected to survive outside the home without a woman to take care of him?
Zoe's mind, once again, went to the last time Jon had gone out alone. It had started innocently enough. The paper-girl had dropped the newspaper at the end of the driveway instead of on the front porch as she was supposed to. Jon, being the dutiful boy he was, knew that he was supposed to have it on the kitchen table before their mother woke up, so he snuck out the front door and went to retrieve the publication.
That was the last time they saw Jon for over a week. Multiple phone calls to the police's special "lost-boys" division, a flyer blitz, and a special article on the nightly news finally gained an anonymous tip which led to his location. A retired school-teacher had found him on the sidewalk holding the paper and assumed that he was discarded, so she told him to come home with her.
It had taken months to deprogram Jon from the kinky house-boy the teacher had turned him into, and to that day things popped up that surprised them. The previous week, for example, Zoe had caught Jon going through her dirty laundry sniffing her soiled underwear. How that command had laid buried for all that time baffled the teen.
But that's just the way it is with boys, Zoe recognized. No matter what her kinky fantasies made her dream, they would always be the weaker sex, just like her mother said. And so, resigned to the loss of her afternoon, she called Jon down from his room and told him to get ready for an outing at the mall. She just hoped that the trip would go without any complications.
