Nicky Pike sat outside on the steps of the back porch. It was slowly getting dark out, and it was a little cooler than usual for an October night in Connecticut. This had brought his siblings inside, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He needed this time alone to really process the events of the day. How could his parents be getting a divorce? The Pike family was not the divorce type. At least, he had never thought it was.
When he was younger, he would get into fights with the triplets all the time. He had always wanted to do whatever they were doing. And being two years older, they often didn't want him tagging along. Whenever he would talk to his parents or Mallory about this, they would always reassure him that no matter how the triplets treated him, they would always be his brothers, and they would always care about him. Since then, this had remained at the back of Nicky's mind, and it had comforted him. He wondered if this was at any way applicable to the situation he was currently dealing with. Sure his parents would always be his parents, and they would always love him, but they would never again be his parents together. Believe it or not, that made a big difference. At least to him, anyway.
Sometimes he feels embarrassed when he thinks about his younger self always tagging along after his older brothers. Back then all he wanted was to be like them. He still did, to a point. The three of them were all athletic, smart, and popular. He was benched during the basketball season, and he had to have a tutor for practically every subject just to make it through. He was anything but popular. The only person he could call a close friend was Jackie Rodowsky, and that was because he was in the same sort of situation, only he had only one older brother to be compared to.
It could be worse though. Sure, Adam and Jordan never really paid that much attention to him, but at least they left him alone. Besides, he knew that Byron would always be there for him. Byron was his hero, and everything that he wanted to be when he grew older. He never said any of this out loud, but he was sure that Byron knew what he was thinking. Byron always knows what he is thinking, and does whatever he can to help him out. No one could ask for a better brother.
His sisters were pretty cool too. Mallory was never really home because she went to school in New Hampshire, but she was fun to hang out with when she came home on breaks. He was the closet to Claire out of all of the girls. They were both trying to live up to the expectations that everyone had for them based on their older siblings. He couldn't count the number of times that teachers had returned homework to him, shook their heads, and told him that they expected more. Or how many coaches had asked if he was really related to Adam, Byron, and Jordan. He supposed that Claire had it worse, though, being the youngest. Maybe that was why she was always so discouraged all the time. He was glad that he didn't have to be the Pike kid next in line after Margo, the all time overachiever. If there was anything that needed to be done, she did it, and she did it better than you could ever do it yourself. She was so methodological that it was almost scary sometimes.
Even though his siblings were all a little weird sometimes, and his family one of the biggest and loudest in town, Nicky still couldn't imagine things any other way. Buddy Barrett's parents were divorced, and Buddy hadn't even seen his dad in the last five years. He didn't want to even think about anything like that happening to his family. The Pikes were supposed to stick together, and make it through anything. That is what his parents had always told him. Maybe this was one of those times where the adults didn't exactly pay attention to the things that they had been saying all along, and the kids were just supposed to go along with it. He hated that.
It was almost completely dark now, so he decided to head inside. He passed by the younger girls room; Margo was at her desk working intently on her homework, as usual, while Claire was holding her teddy bear, Ba-ba, and rocking back and forth. He wanted to go inside and act like an older brother, but he really didn't know what to say to them. Truthfully, he was a little scared of Margo; she had a tendency to snap if things didn't go exactly the way that she had planned. That was more Byron's thing, anyway.
Opening the door to the room that he shared with his brothers, he was very surprised to find it empty. Privacy was a rare thing in the Pike household. Normally, this was something that he really appreciated. Tonight, however, he wanted to be anything but alone. He sort of wanted to talk to his parents. He just wanted to hear them say again that they would make it through this, and that though things would certainly be different, they would be okay. Even though they had said that any of the kids could come talk to them if they needed, the door to their bedroom was closed, and he could hear them arguing behind it. Needless to say, he didn't really want to interrupt.
Today could easily be pinpointed as one of the most confusing of his life. And though he knew that whenever his parents announced something, especially of this magnitude, they went through with it, he made a silent wish to himself that tomorrow everything would somehow get back to normal.
