sniffed and loaded up the SimWilliams family. It was time to let the Grim Reaper have his way with SimBrother.
“Did you just call me Unibrow?”
“If the unibrow fits, wear it,” I told the computer.
He shook his head and left the library, muttering things about blood tests and paternity lawsuits. I ignored him, of course.
As I told you, Bess has arrived. She made a big deal about it, too, zooming up to the House of Horrors on the back of a motorbike. The guy she was with looked like he was a hippie or Jesus or something—long brown beard, long scraggly hair, no fashion sense, etc. Bess introduced him to Brother as some sort of a monk, but you know Bess—she's as radical as they come. Anyhoodles, after Monk left, and Bess had her hissy fit about me getting the tower room—which I told her came with an underwear-obsessed ghost—she came stomping into the bathroom later and demanded to talk to me.
“Excuse me, do you notice that I'm A) naked, and B) taking a bath?” I asked. She just sat on the toilet and started poking through my trays of makeup.
“I remember you in diapers, squirt, so don't get uppity with me.” She picked up one of my concealers and squinted at it. “Don't you know this stuff is nothing but a waste of money?”
I gasped. Concealer? A waste of money? Well, yeah, maybe for her with her perfect skin and her perfect face it was a waste of money, but the rest of us had to make the best of what we had.
“I hope this is not tested on animals,” she added as she shook the container, then set it down to open up the case containing my 110 different shades of eye shadow. “I don't know why you have to wear so much makeup, Em. It's not like you're ugly. I guess it's just a phase you're going through. When you get older like me, you'll realize that you don't really need it.”
I ground my teeth as I fluffed up my diminishing bath bubbles. I hated it when she got all worldly older sister on me. She was only two years older.
“This stuff will clog your pores if you wear it all the time. You're much better off allowing your skin to breathe. If you keep slapping on the makeup the way you do, you'll look like you're fifty before you're twenty-five.”
I turned on the hot water with my toes. “Thank you so much for the advice, but my skin breathes just fine. Did you want something in particular, or are you just trying to see me naked?”
She rolled her eyes and set down my blush. “I've seen you naked, stupid. It's nothing to get excited about. I wanted to know if you'd like to come with me next weekend. I'm going to Suffolk with a bunch of others to protest the nuclear plant there.”
“No, thank you.” My sister, the radical political activist. She caught me once in that trap, I wasn't about to let her do it again. Good causes are all well and fine, but the people she hangs out with are always so...intense. Besides, I had enough to cope with right now. I soaped up my fwoofy soap thing and prepared to shave my right leg.
“The government wants to build a new generation of nuclear power plant, rather than using renewable resources like solar and wind power.”
“Uh-huh.” I resoaped, then shaved my left leg. “Poop, the razor's going dull. Would you hand me a new one?”
She tapped her finger on my hot rollers. “A recent poll showed that more than seventy percent of the people responding said they preferred renewable energies rather than new nuclear power stations.”
“Yes, well, that's all very interesting, but right now I'm in full crisis mode, and if I have to go to my new school with hairy legs, I'm going to fall right over and die. Razor, please?”
She handed me a new razor. I recommenced shaveage.
“In addition, a recent study found that forty wind farms off the eastern coast of England could produce as much energy as all of the nuclear power plants in Britain put together, plus the creation of such wind farms would generate sixty thousand new jobs.”
I sighed. Once Bess gets going about something, she never lets up. “You're forgetting one important thing.” I raised my arm for pit shaving.
She frowned. “What's that?”
“You're not British. Why should you be telling them what to do with their country?”
She tched