Louds In The Cradle: Chapter 7.
Having just described Luan as a human bomb, Lynn Senior goes back to trying to describe the first day after the big girls-only road trip to Great Lakes City.
"Now, a lot of the reason that my attempt at male bonding failed is that I'd preceded from a faulty assimption. Y'see, I'd thought that Lincoln would have been feigning happiness because he'd realized something horrifying about his friendship group after his class trip to the national park a few weeks back and wanted to be Supportive Dad. I should have known that any hope of his maturity would have been called on account of meat-headed older sister. I just had to figure out which one made sure to keep him immature by shooting off her big, stupid mouth about how friends, they just drift away and aren't driven away by nitwits who don't know when to stop with something stupid."
"I know that it couldn't have been Lori because (despite her not actually telling Lincoln about it) she'd started palling up with an old rival. Leni is too unfocused to draw something like a conclusion from what she sees so it would have to be one of three candidates: Luna, Luan and someone who's actually more like Lynn the Seventh but not really thanks to Anglo-American naming customs."
"Whaddaya mean Lynn the Seventh?", Lynn Junior asked.
"You're not only named after me, you're named after my mother, her father-in-law, his mother, her father in law and so on and so forth. I thought that by naming a girl Lynn, no one would end up marrying a Lynn Something Else and a certain pattern would finally end. It ain't just Post Malone that finds running in circles a drag, y'know."
"Anyway, one of you three must have blanked out on the fact that Huggins decides who bunked with whom and not realized that you never exchanged more than five words with your bunkmate. It's like a glorified version of Mrs Johnson's 'Let's expand our family of friends' thing where they paired off Ronnie Anne and Lincoln with that egg."
"It's also like how you seem averse to realizing that while time might erode friendships, your own over-the-top behavior meant that Father Time had a lot of help from you girls. If what little Lori actually tells me about Ronnie Anne is any indication, it's like how she had to leave town to have friends again after she made a lot of the same mistakes Lynn did in middle school. Sure, her bestie Paula hangs with her but she's kind of the only one that wasn't driven away by the whole wounded animal shtick."
Lynn 'Junior' made a sour face and grumbled about 'lack of gratitude'; this meat that the person haranguing her changed.
This is because Rita said "Funny you should mention that word. You sure don't like wasting in Lincoln, do you? Sure, he does things to get ahead a lot but he sure doesn't get anything for his troubles, does he? He gets a knee to the groin and two months' detention for helping Lana with her frog crusade but the second he tries to help her our by gaming the system, he's Mister Yukface The Cheater….and he gets another sweet one in the yams."
"Then again, Lana doesn't hold a candle to the person who got this mess started,...does she, Luna?"
"Whatever do you mean, mother?"
"You know dang well what I mean. He opens your diary, you don't have the guts to just haul off and yell at him for it and when he, Leni and Luan try to save you from yourself, a real security guard comes along and you end up looking dim. What's more, it's starting to look as if your present self is what he's reacting to….isn't it?"
"Again, whatever do you mean?"
"I mean the fact that he kind of misses the quiet, well-mannered older sister who vanished and got replaced by a rocker chick pod person only he's the only one who ever implied it."
"And what does that have to do with gratitude?"
"Someone grateful for help wouldn't run around and bellow 'Hey, dudes! Lincoln showed me how to bum for money so let's all swarm the 'rents right now!', would she?"
"That's not what happened!"
"It sure looks like it, Miss 'Let's Tell A Rock Singer Our Brother Has Leukemia.', doesn't it?"
This made Lincoln almost jump out of his chair and ask "They didn't actually defraud SMOOCH, did they?"
"Yes. Yes, they did.", Lynn 'Senior' said.
"Crud."
"Anyhow, Champ, that's kind of why I tried taking it slow trying to teach you your game and trying to learn yours that first day. I'd hoped we'd have talked about it. I'd also hoped that you wouldn't have fallen into the trap your sisters did and assume that interests have to be exactly the same for people to relate to one another which shows you how little I know."