The bet is resolved

After getting home from the mall Bailey put away his new makeup and nail polish and stood in front of his vanity. He smiled at the four picture strip of him and Candi from the photo booth. In the last one both of them had leaned in close to the camera as they made fish faces. If, well when Mommy saw it she was going to think it was the cutest of pictures. It was pure ridiculousness and in that second he was having fun, not thinking about how he was trapped and what he looked like. The pictures were just going to be a memento for the two of them, not some twisted game Aunt Megan was playing. Bailey pushed the picture up into the right corner of his vanity, there was a lot he would want to forget and repress, but the purity of this girl was something he was happy to encounter. He wished she didn’t drag him around so much, or would give him more space. The last thought brought up the memory of last night where she decided to put her head on his pillow and snored directly into his ear and when he tried to wake her she just rolled over and pulled most of the covers with her. She could be annoying, but he liked to think the world would be better if more people were like her. Not that he was going to go easy on her on the math bet, she still totally wasn’t his mental equal, but she had a lot more going for her.

Coming out of his bedroom he saw his friend sitting at the table with a green pen and a blank piece of paper, on the other side of the table was another piece of paper with a pink pen and between them was the stupid mathwork book Aunt Megan had given him. “Okay, so like here is the deal. You flip to a page randomly, if the page is like already done I flip to a page randomly and we do that one. Then repeat till we see page you haven’t done yet if that one was done. We both take a photo of the page and will use the photo to work off of and do it on our loose paper. We will have fifteen minutes to do as much as we can and like I’m thinking no answer counts as two wrong, but a wrong answer is one wrong. Because like at least this way we tried and trying should always count.” Pulling the chair out Bailey smiled at his friend, more than happy with the terms. When they both had their phones in front of them, screens off, Candi put her finger to her power button. Raising an eyebrow starring her friend in the eye and trying to make the silly bet seem like something much more important. She wished she had setup some music to increase the intensity, but hadn’t thought of that before. “Ready… go!” She said before bringing her phone to life and picking up her pen. The first thing she did was write the number of questions down the side of her sheet. 1, 2, 3… 23, 24, 25 and then wrote the number forty two next to each. Her Daddy loved a book that had a falling whale thinking oh no not again, talking dolphins and the number forty two was the answer to everything. Then back up to the top and started working on the problems. Bailey ignored Candi and tried to focus on the math problems on his sheet. The second one looked almost exactly like a problem he had gotten wrong yesterday and after he looked up the answer it took him still two more tries to get to that answer on his own. He broke the problem down into smaller problems on the blank paper and then scratched it out when he was pretty sure he was doing it wrong, before starting again.

He was positive if he was struggling on some of the problems then his airheaded friend to fur sure totally stumped. A lot of the problems he just had to remember the formulas in geometry he had been working on and the order of operations. “That's time!” Bailey dropped his pen and through his hands up in the air. He didn’t feel as confident now as when he started, he had gotten through seventeen of the twenty five questions. Little less than a minute per question wasn’t so bad. They swapped papers and flipped to the back of the book to check the answers. The very first thing Bailey noticed was Candi had scratched out an answer to every question up to question nine and in fact looking below that she had a bunch more scratch out, but every spot that didn’t have an answer scratched out and replaced had the same answer, forty two. Everyone of those answers were wrong, but she had done something he did not. Wrote down an answer for every problem. He had finished question seventeen, that meant the eight questions he left blank were going to count as sixteen… yeah sixteen wrong answers and that was before any of the ones he actually got wrong! “Ohh sorry sis, looks like you got only got twelve of the answers correct, five wrong and eight were left blank.” Candi wrote with her pen a dash and then the number twenty one and circled it. “How did I do?” Bailey still had no idea the workbook was made to reteach him math, but in an incorrect way and Candi’s natural poor math skill lined up with how Megan had set the book up. She had taken common mistakes people make with order of operations and made it seem like that was the correct way to do things. So when Bailey looked down at her answers, the things she actually tried to do instead of just writing down forty two, were mostly correct. Writing a dash on the paper, Bailey wrote a twelve next to it. “Looks like I win!”

Glaring at the stupid workbook, Bailey wanted to toss the thing in the trash. Maybe it was because he had been out of school for so long, or maybe he was just distracted with well everything. The pull of the bra straps, the sway of his stupid chest everytime he took a breath, the angle of his feet in his heels. The heels he wasn’t even sure why he hadn’t kicked off the second he was in the door. “Fine… what do you want me to do?” Looking up to the ceiling, Candi put her index finger to her chin, tapping it a few times. “I got it, I have five minutes of you having to do and say whatever I want right?” Bailey nodded, a bet was a bet, he just wished he had done better. He was so confident in his math skills, he had done his family's books for years and he just couldn’t seem to get his head back to where it should be. The statement use it or lose it felt horribly accurate right now. “Then I am going to have you take one minute to tell me how I am the best older sister and you hope to be as smart as me one day.” Candi said that after moving her index finger from her chin to pointing at Bailey and then swept that same hand through her short hair as if to fling it back. “Wait… you can’t like break up the five minutes. That is totally not fair!” Candi shrugged as she got to her feet. “Try not to be a sore loser little sis. I still only get you for five minutes.. Well until I totally win the second bet.” Bailey shook his head, that wasn’t fair and he was definitely not going to paint his nails three times in a week and he needed to think of what he could make Candi do to get back at her. “You are not going to win that other bet.” Walking around the table Candi came up behind Bailey and ran her hand through his new haircut. “I could like easily make you add nail polish to each of your fingers with the other four minutes. It is like enough time to make them look good, but it is enough to make them look bad enough that you would have to redo them. That would be twice in one day, a bad start to a week of trying to hold out.” Pulling away from Candi he narrowed his eyes while pouting in her direction. Thinking this girl was devious! First she used a loophole for the math bet, one that was like totally obvious and now his. She was going to use her winnings from the first bet just to win the second.

“Pwease… pwease don’t wuin my nails, they are like so pwetty and I don’t want to wuin them.” Bailey pouted at her, using the babytalk she had said he should use earlier to get out of being in trouble. If he had done this so that Mommy or really anyone other than Candi he would feel like crawling into a hole, but it was her idea and he had no problem using her own cards against her. “Aww… that is so cute and I totally see what you are doing, but it is still soooo working. Okay, so just the one minute and I will save the other four like I’m saving the favor you owe me for beating you at Marvel vs Capcom.” Bailey thought, and hoped that she had forgotten about that. “Okay, here goes.” Bailey cleared his throat to say the line, but Candi held up one finger so she could bring up her camera on her phone. “Wait, you can’t video this!” Candi lowered the camera and put both hands on her hips as she looked at Bailey. “Sure I can, nothing in the rules said I couldn’t, and I believe Mom put me in charge, but we do need a different setting. Lets do it on your bed with you holding President Bear.” Standing up Bailey started to go to his room mumbling a correction. “President Teddy Bear.” Candi giggled. “Yes, President Teddy Bear.” It was starting to feel like he was being pushed closer to how he was treated at Aunt Megan’s over the weekend, and he wasn’t not enjoying it. “I named him after President Teddy Rosevelt.” Closing one eye as she thought, Candi thought she knew who that was. “That was the one with the mustache and rode that horse in the museum movie right? I think I saw a picture of him riding a moose once.” Opening his mouth to correct her, Bailey stopped and just let it go. “Totally that guy

“You are the best older sister I could like haver EVER asked for and like one day I am totally going to be as smart as you one day and then one day I will be like way smarter.” Bailey said while sitting on his bed cross legged with the stuffed bear in his lap. He was happy to kick off his heels and figured if she was going to make him act the part of a little sister, he should at least actually act the part. He didn’t know if this was better or worse than that time he lost a bed to Chuck and had to drink an entire bottle of hot sauce, but he did know it would be a lot less painful considering the memories of his time in the bathroom after. Tossing her phone on the bed behind Candi, she jumped forward and tackled her friend on the bed, knocking her backwards. Her laughter being way past inside levels of volume as she jumped at her friend. Candi happily started tickling Bailey and immediately having to fight Bailey off from doing the same thing as they tumbled about, and squirmed on the bed. “You are just the cutest little sister!” She declared thinking about what Bailey said on the video. She hadn’t followed the script and made the end sound more like a challenge than an admission of her being the smarter of the two. She couldn’t help, but be happy with the outcome and the pure spunk of her friend. “Stop, STOP!” Bailey yelled between fits of laughter as he tried to pull away from Candi. He had always spent more time trying to defend himself then attack, it wasn’t fair that he was so much more ticklish than her. “Hmmm” The two of them were laying next to one another, both still trying to contain their laughter, but Candi stopped her **** as she considered Bailey’s request. “I will stop on one of two conditions. One, you have to paint your nails tomorrow morning. Or, you can promise to stop correcting people when they say I’m older.” It wasn’t lost on Bailey that she forgot to say two for the second option and it galled him a little that he had lost to her.

He was not, could not lose a third bet to her and didn’t want to start one foot in the grave for their second bet. She still had those four minutes of control over him and that favor he owed her. He didn’t know if she would just use them all to win another round, but he knew he would if he was feeling petty. When he didn’t answer her right away he flinched and let out a giggle as she tickled his side just a little. “Why would I correct someone when they say you are older?” With a huge smile on her face, Candi got off the bed and held out her hand to Bailey. “That is a good question, little sister.” Taking her hand and getting off the bed a bit of worry crept into his mind. “You like arn’t going to make me leave my age at seventeen when I get my permit are you?” Candi’s eyes went wide and her smile grew along with it and a sense of dread filled Bailey. “I could sooo do that! Oh My God that would be… no that like wouldn’t be fair to you, but I like hadn’t thought of that. Gah… you are lucky I love you are would so do that.” Girls used the word love to freely he thought, he thought of her as a friend and even though she was some teen girly girl she was a better one to him than Chuck had ever been. Sugar was she misguided, but that was kind of the point of this being a disguise. “You like me, you don’t like love me.” His parents were gone, the only person he really, truly had left was Mommy and she well she wasn’t his Mommy, but it was hard to think of her as Mandy from all the training. She was the only one that loved him, the only one he had. Candi was right in front of him. He wasn’t alone, but suddenly he felt lonely and couldn’t help it when tears came to his eyes. “No.” Candi said firmly as he felt her hands touch and hold the sides of his head. “I love you Bailey Ann Best, you are like really my best friend and like back home I have friends, but they like aren’t really. I have you and you have me and like no crying. Because if you cry, I’m going to cry.” She said, tears coming to her own eyes as she looked into her friends green eyes that glistened with tears ready to come out. “Now tell me how you like feel, cause I know it, but I think we both need to hear it right now, because you are like totally emotional.”

He didn’t love her, that was crazy, but his heart started to pulse quicker as she talked, and his emotions took more control. She was the one being emotional he thought as he made a sniffling noise. He felt a lot closer to her than he had any friend before, but he also knew he shouldn’t. She was an eighteen year old teen girl and he was… he was lonely and really needed her as a friend right now. “How could I like not love my older sister and best friend. But like…” Bailey sniffled again. “Just like remember I”m the Best.” He added the little bit of levitivity to try and break the tension and when she laughed he did so in return before they hugged one another. The embrace felt good, and no longer was he feeling like he was being washed away in a wave of stupid emotions. His life was getting way out of hand, but at least there were good things along with all the bad. This ditzy girl holding him was one of them and before this day was over he was going to destroy one of the things getting in his way and take home a driver's permit.