"...What's his name," she prompted. "Your friend. Mono-Man. The sexy guy with the black hair sitting in your section..."
I turned too fast, knocking the coffee filter with my arm. Cass watched it fall to the rubber mat with no reaction on her face. She found the vagaries of our shared profession even less interesting than I did.
She stared openly at the man in the corner booth. "Isn't that the shirt we looked at in Aardvarks? You said you liked it, right?"
I nodded. I remembered.
"That's creepy, Al."
I said, "Where's Jon?"
Cass aimed a finger at the bar.
My brother sprawled over a counter stool like an adult in a child's chair. Catching my glance, he waved a hand sharply for me to come over. I shook my head.
"In a minute," I mouthed. "Chill out!"
When Jon threw a spoon at me, I ducked, smiling, and glanced at Cass. She was still staring at Mr. Mono, her lips scrunched in vague puzzlement.
When she saw Jon motioning us over again, she turned with a grin and started sashaying in his direction. She couldn't help but flirt with Jon. She knew she lacked the requisite, er, equipment, to catch my brother's eye...but she'd had a crush on him since kindergarten.
Watching Jon's knee jiggle up and down, I got a flash of what he'd been like back then, when most people still called him "Bug." Skinny and pale with thick glasses and too-large hands like his father, he'd been mostly a non-entity in high school, despite getting bullied by some of the real turds in his class. He started doing martial arts before Dad died, tired of being stuffed in lockers and covered in ketchup packets for "being a little faggot" by the mentally-challenged of gym class. Now he had the broad-shouldered, sinewy body of a career athlete. His old coke-bottle glasses had been replaced by contacts over green-flecked hazel eyes about ten years earlier, and he'd grown into the hands, too.
His refusal to conform politically extended to his body in the form of streaked blond and black hair and the tattoos he'd started to collect in his early teens. He'd gone a few steps further than me with the barcode, decorating its lines with words about oppression in like six languages.
Personally, I didn't need any more reasons to stick out to the men in blue.
According to Jaden, Jon and I were a little creepy for brother and sister-even adopted brother and sister-in that we hung out so much. But I wasn't about to ditch him as a friend just because his parents were cool enough to adopt me.