Summer Fun Julian was working on her summer Transfiguration homework at the living room games table, having submitted after a week to Mom’s reasoning that doing it now, while she was still relatively fresh with the concepts, was better than doing it later, when Joe halfheartedly tossed away one of his building blocks, which clattered away across the floor.
“I’m bored,” he complained. “Can you and John play with me now, Julian?”
She looked up from the problems at once, then bit her lip. Of course he would want something right now, when she had just settled in for work, but – playing with her brothers sounded so much more fun than sitting with a set of Transfiguration problems. Actually, most things sounded more fun than what she was doing, though she knew that was in part because she had to do them. It was so much easier to read things and do work that she was doing because she wanted to, rather than because she had to. Since John sometimes admitted to the same problem, Julian had concluded that it was a universal thing.
“I don’t know what John’s doing,” she said, putting her quill down. She did, after all, have all summer to do these problems in, anyway, not to mention the rest of the week. There was no need to rush. “I’ll go see.”
She knocked on the door of her own room, which John had asked to borrow, before entering, giving John just enough time to stuff the pieces of paper he’d had in front of him back into a folder. He was being awfully secretive about that red folder, and more than once, Julian had thought about breaking into his box and checking under his mattress to see what it was, but so far, she had respected her brother’s privacy. It was probably not anything she would really find that interesting, anyway. “Joe wants us to play with him,” she told John, who made a face.
“I’m busy,” he complained.
“So am I, but we can do it later,” she said. “We haven’t all played together since Easter.”
“Because you’re old,” John pointed out.
Julian bit her lip. Lately, Joe’s games had started to seem a little more boring than they used to, to go on the same way a little too long, but…Well, it was still fun once she got into it, and he was the littlest one. When Joe didn’t want to play anymore, no one would, and Julian thought that day would be kind of sad. “That’s not my fault,” she said. “Come on, I’ll let you win whatever it is,” she added.
John grumbled a little more when Joe, predictably, picked what was apparently his new big thing, him and John being vampires which had to avoid patches of sunlight in the yard while fighting whichever sibling, today Julian, who had a pretend crossbow and was a vampire hunter. Apparently, Joe had wanted to play this same game every day for the past month, so she could understand why John was getting tired of it, though it was still new to her. He joined in, though, trying to jump at Julian when she strayed into a shady patch trying to ‘shoot’ one of them, and before long, they were all laughing and running around and getting tolerant looks from the neighbors and mixed ones from passing cars, until Mom called them in to wash up before lunch and they trailed back to the house, hot and tired and all three of them very nearly perfectly content with their places in the world right now.