A Taste of Spring

A single-year age difference and Summer thought she got to claim dibs on the world.

"You fed me the fricking basics, Two," Summer called out as Spring walked toward the kitchen. "Just tell me already."

"I don't have to tell you anything. I moved here to do me. To do what I wanted and not what everyone else thinks is best for me. And stop calling me Two." Spring hated the nickname. That gift was the only thing she resented from her sweet old grams.

Spring was told on several occasions how "Two" became her moniker. Apparently, she was stricken with the horrible tag on the day of her birth when her mother, "The Witch Who Shall Not Be Named" looked into her face and said "Spring". Her mother never gave a reason why she picked the name Spring, but common sense would suggest that her mom named Summer over a year before and thought they were a matching pair so...

Grams later said that she was so irritated by the Summer/Spring thing that she said, right there in the hospital room, 'You may as well call them Thing One and Thing Two'. It was meant as a joke, at least that's what Spring surmised, but the tragedy was that it stuck like burnt grits. Now everyone in her family called her Two.

"Unlike you, dear little sister, I don't mind my nickname. It is amazing, like me."

look on her sister's face. How she looked flawless despite a red nose and watery eyes was beyond Spring, and honestly it was kind of creepy. Like "Pod-People" creepy, but that was

orange crème ice bar. She shed the wrapper and had the frozen goodness in her

it over with. You know if you don't, I'll just keep bothering you until you do. Remember when you tried to keep your crush on Brett Murphy a secret? How did that work out for you? It

you think something happened?" Spring flopped back down on

my ice cream and you

out on the sofa, twisted and facing her, then to the mass of tissues, a half-eaten dried-up bowl of noodle soup, and the stack of fashion magazines that littered the coffee table. It was a week ago that she stepped in for Summer and

"off" ever since the Dez incident. She couldn't keep her mind from reliving every moment she spent with the man that night. From the first moment she set eyes on him to the last look she gave him as she snuck out of his loft while he slept, Dez was

Spring couldn't purge her mind of him, she was distracted and doing things she normally didn't do, like eating ice cream. Aside from the caloric deterrent, ice cream and Spring

cream," Spring said, trying to sound convincing. She was