Frank comes in like he owns the place, "Hey twerp, have you seen my hoodie?" looking around and touching my stuff
"No, get out! Why would your hoodie even be in my room? And don't call me twerp, you're only like 10 months older than me!"
"That's enough to make you the baby and me the big brother! HAHA!" He shut the door as I threw my pillow at him... Jerk.
I went back to fighting with my finger and eventually went to the bathroom to try a bar of soap... it didn't budge. I decided to call the parentals into the situation with a heavy sigh. I grabbed the other ring knowing they would ask questions because nothing is simple in this family...
I was looking for mom but found dad first and he was just reading the newspaper, so it was safer to bother him with this since he's less likely to overreact or be too distracted to be of any actual use. "Um dad, I have a little problem." "Oh what's that kiddo?" "I can't get it to come off." He finally glanced up, brow furrowed. "Where'd that come from?"
So I handed him the accompanying ring as I explained everything... "And then I went to the bathroom for like the last 10 minutes and couldn't even get it to twist which is really weird because it doesn't hurt or anything but... hey! Did you actually put it on? If its too small for me to remove how did it even fit on your pudgy hand?"
"Hey! My hands aren't pudgy! They're adult sized and when you grow up, you'll have adult sized hands too! Jeez!" He looked at his hand with a look of irritated fascination. "I'm not sure why I put it on though the how is even more interesting. Did you see that!" he held his hand away from his face as though it was trying to spit at him. Then he positioned his hand so we could both look at it, "It glowed."
"What? yours glows? I got gypped! Mine doesn't..." each ring was inlaid with blue and red stones, or plastic chunks, or whatever, and each ring was primarily one color, with similarly patterned accents of the other color. Mine was blue, dad had the red one. Each of our rings pulsed from the edge of the gemstones to the center, lighting the rings primary colors...
Dad grinned... "Aww, this is one of those 'thinking of you' rings isn't it! You got a hot girlfriend you wanna give one of the rings to? Maybe a best guy friend? How does it work? Really tiny battery? Kinetic charging? Some thermochemical reaction?"
"Ugh. What? Dad! No! Focus! We're trying to remove the ring. I just got them becau..." a shiver ran up and down and up my spine, "because... because I could switch between the colors. I liked both the colors and thought is was neat how I could choose red with blue or blue with red. $2.50 each was a great deal."
Dad gave me a discerning look as he grabbed my wrist in one hand and the ring in the other... "Alright, tell me if I'm hurting you." He pulled the ring off no problem giving me a strange look, then he focused on his own which also came right off... he gave me a strange look, "Ya know... you don't need to lie to me to show me a neat thing you found."
"Dad!" I turned beet red and stormed off hearing dad chuckling in the background.
I stormed past Frank preening himself in the bathroom, no doubt counting his chin hairs... in a bad mood for being called a liar I muttered, "Don't worry, nobody will confuse you for a man."
Frank, unused to me actually challenging him called after me, "Don't be jealous, TWERP, you might get here in 10 months, if you're lucky."
