"Yep, we do," Kori chimed in with a nod. "If you're nice I might consider telling you my ways." But then, maybe not. It was a little entertaining to think of big, tough Brandon caving to the demands of a preschooler, even as adorable as she was. Kori could usually appease Mari with an array of voices, though sometimes she ended up getting more creative than that. But never crossdressing, she’d learned quickly how to dodge that request.
Kori smiled and laughed softly under her breath at Leah's joke about not being fashionably late. "As if I'm any better!" she exclaimed, waving at her own sweater and jeans. "But at least we both look better than Brandon." She gave her brother a wide grin, the one she used to use when she was little when she was trying to avoid retaliation. In truth, he didn’t look all that bad.
“Denied,” she said under her breath, stretching the word out a little, while mentally she was crossing her fingers that it was just a little friendly back and forth and not something that would spiral into an argument, or one (or both) of them leaving. “Guess you’ll have to make your own cupcakes, Bran.”
Leaning forward, Kori picked up the deck of cards to shuffle them. “You won’t lose at all, I’m the one that’s going to lose,” she stated. “No one ever took pity on me as a kid and showed me how to bluff properly.” Okay, so maybe not the whole truth, but she’d never been any good at it.
“Even if Brandon claims he’s just along for the ride, I’d put money on you or him winning.” Kori had never been very good at picking out when someone was lying either; she wasn’t terrible at it, but she’d never been able to pick up on tells that well. “Unless neither of you remember the rules.” She did. She played it with the older kids once in awhile, even if she also felt like she was promoting lying sometimes.