Thank you for clicking on this fanfiction. :) I shake you warmly by the hand.

This is short story I did for writing class (the characters were named differently when I showed it to my teacher). It is about Candace and Phineas, and the family they had before... well, before everything. Before Ferb, before the "best days ever", before their real dad left. It is told by Candace.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything... and this is NOT a told-in-second-person-ish fic (I know those aren't allowed). Well, okay, it is sort of, in some places, but I found a loophole - this isn't really Candace talking to the reader. She's talking to Stacy, her best friend. Dear mysterious people, please don't delete the story! That would make me sad. :)

Hope you readers like it! :)

Dear Stacy...

Sometimes, I wonder why the police don't come and put yellow tape all around our yard. There are real, live wars in our living room some nights. Scary ones. They made us cry, remember, when you came over and spilled tea on the carpet and made me promise not to tell anyone, ever, 'cause we're best friends and we don't tattle. Mom saw the tea, though. Boy, was she mad. Now when anyone yells it's my fault.

But, of course, when I wonder about the police, I know the answer to my question. We're not important enough. They don't care. No one's paying attention, except maybe the neighbors who have to stay up 'till the middle of the night listening to mom and dad yell at each other.

I'm going to run away and become a police girl who cares about little things like parents who snap at their daughters. I should've run away a long time ago, but I can't open my door at nights 'cause there are bombs under the carpet in the hallway. I don't want to believe it, but why wouldn't mom and dad be able to get bombs in the house, if the police don't care about us? Plus, I have to believe in the bombs, because Phineas told me about them, and Phineas is always right. Why is he always right? He's so annoying. Sometimes I want to punch him. Sometimes I do. It's a secret. Don't tell.

Have you met Phineas? I'll tell you who he is. He's got red hair like mine, except redder, a brain like mine except smarter, and eyes like mine except bigger and bluer. And he's got more life left, because he's younger.

Phineas's my brother and I hate him.

He once took out his markers and drew on the carpet, cross my heart it's true. I came in and I caught him, because if I'm going to be a police officer one day, I figured it would be good practice to start busting some criminals right now.

It was really hot, and his hands were all sticky from popsicle. It was on his chin, too, his fat little chin, smeary globs of it like green poison. He got it all over me when I picked him up, in my hair, in my eyes.

Mom thought I'd stolen a popsicle. I told her I did not, and I said come look at the carpet, see what Phineas did.

I still can't really figure out how I got in trouble instead of my brother. But until I figure it out, until the criminal is found guilty, Phineas's not my friend.

It always happens like that, you know. Exactly like that. And Phineas's always got a way to escape. He was so lovable as a baby. The thing is, I'm the only one who knows he really isn't a baby anymore. He can still get Mom and dad to coo over him and cuddle him like he's their only child, but if they'd listen to what I have to say, they'd find out the truth. I bet he's fooled even you, acting so cute and innocent.

One of the worst times was last week. Dad left for work angry again, and mom wouldn't talk to us. She told me to put the TV on and not to bother her.

I stuck Phineas in his high chair and buckled him up nice and tight, then went to watch Beauty and the Beast. I like popcorn, but I don't know how to make it, so I went hungry.

As the first song of the movie wound down, guess what I heard?

Pop, pop, pop!

"Phineas!"

"What?" he came into the room with a bowl of shining popcorn. It was dripping with butter, giving off a smell strong enough to distract me from the Disney Princess on the screen.

"How did you get out of the chair?" I demanded.

"Are you kidding me?" he sat down beside me. "They're just buckles, super easy. Want some?" He held out the bowl.

"No." I focused on the screen, wondering if we had clothespins somewhere in the house so I could squeeze my nose up and not smell the butter and salt. "You're not supposed to have popcorn in the living room."

"Who said?"

He looked at me, waiting for an answer, but I didn't reply. If he decided he was allowed to keep the food, and if he spilled it on the carpet, he'd finally be in trouble. It would make my job a lot easier.

You know what? I think you get the idea. It was like the popsicle incident, except worse. The bowl wound up in my hands just as mom came down the stairs. And in the end, when I blamed Phineas, he gurgled and giggled like a normal toddler, played dumb. Like he always does.

That was one of the scariest nights ever. Mom and dad were telling each other about their troubles at the dinner table, except, it wasn't like they were sharing. It was more like they were competing for first prize at a "top sufferer" competition. And let me tell you, the way mom painted it, irritable bosses had nothing on disruptive daughters and butter-smeared rugs. Dad wasn't going down without a fight, though. And so that's what it turned into. A fight.

Mom and dad never told me to go to sleep. They were too busy snapping and growling like animals on National Geographic channel. So I stuffed Phineas under his covers and told him to go to sleep, then lay on the stairs finding faces in the little bumps on the ceiling, listening to the fight and hoping for a peace treaty. No such luck. Mom was still talking about me.

"Candace just can't leave her brother alone," she said.

"Mom just can't leave Candace alone," I said, careful to keep my voice low.

"She tries to blame everything on Phineas. She probably picked it up at school, that place is -"

"She picked it up from you." Dad's voice.

"I'll show you it's Phineas's fault," I sang, making up my own tune, because that's what princesses do when things are going wrong, and everything always works out for them. "Maybe he'll have to run away and not me, and we can be a family again... Me, family, it rhymes, I'm a genius, I'm smarter than Phineas..."

He was sitting there, in the living room, playing with blocks.

Yeah, right, I thought. Phineas, you're not going to get me with that one, not this time. When does the Empire State Building start going up?

Then the phone rang.

I grabbed it before mom could - it was what I normally did. But it was stupid - mom wasn't going to pick up the phone today, she was majorly down in the dumps. Maybe it was because dad stayed home from work to talk to her. That would get me down in the dumps, too!

Sticking one finger in my ear and squishing the wax around, I leaned my head till it was touching my shoulder and pressed the phone under it, like I had seen adults do - no hands. "Hello, this is Candace's house. What do you want?"

You wouldn't understand. I'm sorry I had to hang up. But I really couldn't come over to your house - I could feel that "today was the day" - the day I got Phineas in trouble. Plus, that crashing sound coming from the living room scared me - I dropped the phone on the tile floor, forgetting to hang up.

Okay, it wasn't the Empire State Building. Nope - Phineas had gone for something a little more cultured.

"It was the Eiffel Tower," he said, mispronouncing the name and shuffling his feet nervously. I looked down at the picture frames that lay scattered on the carpet, and then screamed.

"Phineas, you tried to make something with these photos? What's wrong with you?" I picked up a golden frame and glared at him. "Look what you did!"

It was my favorite picture - the one of mom in her wedding dress, and dad in his suit. They were holding hands, looking happy. The glass was missing - it lay on the carpet in little bits, sprinkled over the other pictures Phineas had tried to use as building blocks.

"I'm sorry." Phineas looked at the mess, little orange eyebrows scrunched up in the middle. "I should've known that the pictures would be unstable -" his tongue stumbled over the word - "when the tower got more than ten feet tall. I guess you need steel to really get the -"

I let out all the frustration and anger in one sound, one word - "MOM!"

Phineas covered his ears, and I tried to kick the volume up a notch, just to make him cry.

That was pretty mean, I guess. But do you know what he did to our family? No, you don't, because I haven't told you yet.

Well, he broke more than picture frames.

It's gotta be his fault, right? It's not my problem if mom and dad didn't like the yelling. It wasn't me that broke all the pictures. But they just threw those photos out, like they didn't care. And then they said -

I'm sure it's Phineas's fault.

Dad sat me down on his lap, and told me goodbye. He didn't smell very good. "Aren't you going to do something to Phineas?" I wanted to know.

"Like what?"

I realized I didn't know. "Lock him in his room? Let me play with his toys?"

Dad just shook his head and kissed me.

I wiped the spit off and watched him leave.

It was when he didn't come back for dinner that I figured something was up.

"Where's dad?" I asked. "When's he coming back?"

Mom put a big spoonful of mashed potatoes on my plate. "He's not your dad anymore."

"Um..." I put my fork in the table and dug up some wood, wondering why dad was gone. I came up with a decent solution - it was the reason Phineas's first remote control airplane had quit working.

"Did his batteries run out or something?"

"Our marriage ran out of batteries," mom said.

"I get half points for the batteries bit," I told her. "So, when is he getting new ones?"

"Candace," mom said, and took the fork out of my hand without trying to be gentle. "He's not coming back."

"Never, ever, ever?"

She shook her head firmly.

That was hard to understand. And it sort of hurt, you know what I mean. It hurt a lot, actually, but I couldn't feel it, not with my little brother staring at me like he knew everything.

"Why didn't he take Phineas away?" I said. My voice wouldn't go higher than a whisper, and mom didn't hear.

See - Phineas's fault. Dad couldn't live in the same house as a boy like that. That's why he didn't take him along on his forever trip. And, just like that, we weren't a family anymore.

After mom went to bed, I told Phineas we were allowed hot chocolate. While he was in the kitchen, I locked almost all the doors in the hallway - turning the little sticking-out bit on the inside of the handle and then closing the doors from the outside. Now no one could get in, not even me.

I left my own room open, though.

When he came up again, telling me we were out of cocoa mix, I locked the door from the stairs to the hallway and went to bed.

He was trapped on the top floor, and the bombs under the hall carpet would get him. There was nowhere to run, not for any of us.

Little did my fiction writing teacher know that this story was actually a fanfiction in disguse, and that with a few name-switchings, it became a Phineas and Ferb story! I know, I'm bad... I am a bad girl... I need to start writing original stuff once in a while if I want to be an author one day... oh, well :D

Review? :) :) Thanks for reading!