Quick author's notes:
- This is my first story, so go gentle on me!
- I use Canadian spellings, so there are may be slight differences in some words
- This is very much a prequel/intro: lots of scene-setting, not a lot of action
That said, enjoy!
*****
"Jaaaaake!"
I heard the call from down the hallway and groaned - I'd been dreading it for six weeks, ever since my parents told me they'd bought my sister a laptop for her birthday. See, before I left for college I was the resident 'tech expert' which basically meant I could google any problem that happened to come up on my parent's computer and fix it for them. Before I left for college I locked down their PC: a decent firewall, no UAC privileges, some spyware I trusted and - most importantly - a remote log-in so that whenever they did call me with a problem I could tell them to "just restart it and leave it alone with the screen off for ten minutes" and when they came back to it the problem would magically be gone.
No such luck with my sister's laptop, unfortunately - I'd left for my first semester at State a few weeks before her birthday and my parents hadn't given any warning that they were planning to get her a laptop. So no doubt it was A) an overpriced piece of shit and B) currently chockfull of malware, toolbars and who knows what else. Which - of course - meant it became my job to fix it while I was home for Thanksgiving. As if my stack of readings for the classes I was already behind in wasn't enough, suddenly I was looking at a good two hour chunk of my evening with my sister bitching at me to get her laptop up and running again. Fucking great.
"I'll be there in a minute."
I sighed heavily, shut the lid on my own laptop and walked down the hallway to my sister's room. It felt strangely foreign making the walk - despite the fact I'd only been away for under 3 months - but then it wasn't like she and I had been hanging out loads before I left: I had my life and my friends and she had hers. Aside from the odd night that our mom insisted on a family dinner we had barely been in the same room at the same time for months. I stopped outside her door and knocked.
"Come in, it's my-"
"It's your laptop, yeah?"
She looked up from her phone with a confused look on her face - amazed at my psychic abilities, no doubt.
"Call it a lucky guess. Let me make another one: it's running slow, there's a bunch of stuff on it you don't want and you need your amazing, kindly, wonderful big brother to fix it for you."
She wrinkled her nose at me and just nodded over to her desk where the laptop was sitting, before engrossing herself in her phone again.
"Can I get a pretty please, at least?"
It was a long shot, but I got a melodramatic sigh, a championship-level eye-roll and an answer positively dripping with sarcasm:
"Oh Jake, incredible brother of mine, please take pity on your poor, feeble-minded sister and help her with the scary technology she's too blonde to understand. Pretty fucking please. With a cherry on top."
"You know... you're a pretty sweet kid when you let your tough exterior crack. I'm glad you feel so comfortable baring your innermost soul with me, oh darling sister of mine."
"What can I say, it's that deep sibling bond we've always had. I gotta run, Amber's calling me."
She sat up from her bed and walked over to where I stood in her doorway, leaning against the frame. She stood on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek, the way she always did when I finished helping her with math homework when she was twelve, and headed off down the hall. I looked back over my shoulder, waiting for the moment she got the phone to her ear so I knew the call was active before I yelled:
