“I’ve got a question, Rinnick,” said Finnick.
“What?”
“What’s something you want to do that you haven’t done yet?”
Rinnick opened his mouth but stopped in midbreath. He clearly hadn’t given it much thought. Counting on his fingers, he muttered, “I’ve done that, rode a goose, jumped from the top of a tree, threw a fish and said it could fly . . . and Twipple believed it,” he pau
sed and chortled, “I’ve done that as well and it was kinda boring, stuck a beehive down that potty-face Rocker’s chimney . . .”
Sitting, staring icily, Finnick let his head fall to one side as his brother muttered on.
“. . . let go of a springy tree into someone’s face, then there’s that one thing, oh, wait, that was Flynn, but it wasn’t very interesting, and then there’s . . . Oh I know! Pluck a nose-hair from a bear.”
Finnick stared stupidly. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! How do you even know a bear has hair up its nose, and how are you gonna find out? Stick your head up that snotty gorge?”
“It’s better than anything you could come up with!”
Finnick crossed his arms. “How do you know?”
Rinnick glared. “Prove it.”
“Alright,” he pondered for a moment. “I want to . . . write a book.”
“A what? But you can—”
“Now, now,” Finnick interjected, “remember what Mother use to always say, ‘If you two can’t play nice I’m gonna mark you on the dilly.’”
“How am I not being nice? I think I’ve been plenty nice! All I ever do is help you around the colony with this and that and the other,”—here Finnick took up a quill and parchment and began jotting things down as Rinnick continued—“and not once receiving a ‘thank you’ in return! Why, just yesterday I took the fall for when you left the gourds in the middle of the house, plus I strung up the pelts that Father left YOU in charge of, and . . . what are you doing? You can’t write.”
“No,” said Finnick, flipping the parchment around dramatically, revealing a snake’s nest of squiggly lines. “But I can scribble better than you.”