On the basketball court
"I haven't heard," Kip confessed. "But I think Stroude went to a home, so it's decidedly not hers." He smirked a bit. Sadonna Stroude was a bit of a wack job, in his opinion, and not the kind of person who should be allowed to produce food in large quantities for groups of any size to consume. He wasn't even sure she could safely eat the things she made herself, and he had a feeling that had contributed quite a bit to her removal from her own house and her placement in the care of professionals.
"Eric always looks pretty pleased with himself," Kip pointed out, trying his best to ignore the fact that smug self-satisfaction had been a trademark of his father's as well. He knew Eric wasn't anything like his dad - like Craig, as he referred to his father now, by first name only, stripping him of all connections to Kip himself. But he always found himself trying to impose his own family rubric onto other people's families, trying to find any place at all where the LeClefs and normal families intersected. There weren't many places. In the end, he always wound up trying to warp the happy people he knew into something they weren't instead, and that was just destructive. Kip didn't want to destroy anything else.
"He still thinks I'm a murderer," Kip said after a little while. "You should really tell him not to talk about people where they can read it. Or in The Clubhouse in the middle of the day." He shook his head. It was so hard to understand why a woman like Jackie wanted a man like Eric. He just couldn't see the good in him. All he saw was artificiality and pompousness. And Jackie wasn't like that at all. Jackie was on a very short list of people Kip liked. He thought she was what his mother would have been if she'd been stronger, and less fragile.
Kip took the ball and went in for another basket. "I know his very important position is on the line, but..." The ball went through the hoop with a swish then bounced against the newly waxed floor. Kip grabbed it and passed it to Jackie. "I'm not some cold-blooded killer. And I think he knows that."