Re: Marvel: Max & Ella
[Her sister wore her years like she wore her own ability to kick ass and shut the door on whatever ghosts were floating around out there in the past. Ella guessed closer to forty than thirty and wasn't it a trip, life was a mobius strip and however older she got, her sister was always older still.
The rise and fall of voices was low enough Ella wasn't going to shove in. Elizabeth wasn't small, she didn't need her hands held and she wasn't going to tell the kid to lower her voice, to soften, to make it easy to get along: she took the kid to karate to work off some of the worst of it, and she listened for the pitch of sound that said trouble. Elizabeth liked people in the way Ella remembered and she wasn't sacrificing that for getting-along. Maybe that was age. Maybe it was just looking backwards instead of forever forward.
She turned her head over the last couple people and Ella's smile wasn't older and it wasn't any more complicated, but the cheekbones were sharper.] So do you. [She looked at the reddish-dark of Elizabeth's head in the far corner, and noticed the uniform swinging around Amanda's knees. Catholic school, and that fitted, somehow.
The bell jangled, and a young woman entered, cheeks bright with cold and the final two customers left clutching brown paper-wrapped flowers. Ella's sweater was somewhere shoved around her elbows, and her fingers were damp, but she wiped them on the back of her jeans un-self-consciously.]
My kid is a brat. [She said it warm, and fond, no doubt that the brat got hauled into line more often than not.] But I figure Amanda can hold her own.