Chicken by Chase Night Page B

hands.”
    My nose wrinkles up. “Seriously? Chewie? That’s a terrible name for a testicle.”
    He smirks. “You’ll soon see that you’re wrong.”
    I use the hand still in my pocket to tug the fabric away from my own junk. I consider telling him how Hannah’s pledge prevents her from touching or even seeing my balls, but did nothing to keep her from naming them Fred and George.
    “Anyway, you’re the one who breaks up fights. You be a conflict revolutionary.”
    “That’s crisis prevention, not conflict resolution, you dumb cowpoke. I keep bad things from happening. You come up with better ways to do shit.”
    He cringes and looks over his shoulder because if his mother heard him say that word, she’d wash his mouth out with lye soap for sure. 
    “You sound like a man who’s been talking with Doctor Sister McKee.” 
    “Yep. You know.” He flicks his straw in the general direction of the trash bins. “For my impulse control issues.”
    He leapfrogs onto the freezer, landing on his knuckles and socked toes. Then he throws back his head, claws at his chest, and lets loose a terrible howl that cracks in the middle when he takes it too high. I brace myself for the pounce, but it still slams my knees into the truck’s sagging front fender. Brant ropes his wiry arms around my torso, jabs his hip bones into my guts, and shakes me from side to side, snarling and screaming, snapping his jaws around my shoulders and neck. 
    I shove him off, hard enough that his butt hits the edge of the freezer. He yelps and grabs at his rear end, takes off running around the garage, knocking things over on purpose. He throws a gas can into the air, and I duck for cover, but it lands on the rough, concrete floor with a hollow, plastic thud.
    He plunges out the door into the rain, does a figure eight around the broke-down trucks, beating on his chest like a monkey but yowling like a sick cat. The beagles join him. Brant snatches up a tri-colored puppy, pulls its floppy scruff between his lips and mimes biting it, or at least I think he’s miming. Surely he’s not wild enough to eat a puppy.
    The screen door squeals and slams against the concrete wall. “Brant Mitchell! You stop acting like a demoniac this instant! Put that puppy down!”
    Brant cringes and drops the wiggling pup into the whirlpool of hounds. He wades back, spitting fur and wiping his lips. Now all of his curls are brown and stuck to his scalp. Inside the garage, he pauses to shake himself. 
    “I was being a werewolf, not a demoniac.”
    “Same thing, Brant David. Don’t open doors you don’t know how to close.” 
    Sister Cindy is a small woman made large by her hair. It rises in a fountain of large, sprayed curls before spilling over in a mass of tightly-coiled ringlets that cascade down her shoulders like two giant poodle ears resting atop her denim-encased bosom. She holds a stack of folded clothes in front of each enormous breast. I take the one she offers me and turn around quick, before she can notice the fading outline of the boner her son’s antics gave me.
    Brant saunters over, his dark wet jeans sliding down his butt in a style definitely not allowed around here. He takes the clothes from his mama, who purses her lips at his cocky grin. She goes back inside, and as soon as the door slams, Brant wiggles his hips and his jeans melt right off his legs.
    I keep my eyes on the clothes I’ve laid out on the hood of the truck, pressing my crotch against the grill and trying to think about awful things. The mangled pieces of the Pitcher boys come to mind, and I wonder why no one tells stories about their ghosts roaming the Ditch, looking for lost souls to take home to Satan.
    “Hurry up,” Brant barks. “It’ll be time for church at this rate.”
    I take off my shirt and toss it on the hood with a loud thwack. I feel his gaze on my back, and looking down at myself, see the softness on me that he’s never possessed. Love handles, Hannah calls them,