Louds In The Cradle: Chapter 9
We're about to see the 'great big secret' Luna thought she was keeping from the her parents and her reaction to their laughing behind their sleeves at what she thought was a catastrophe.
As you might expect, the older four Loud sisters reacted to the bombshell their dad dropped with some measure of disgusted disbelief. It appalled them that they'd had something important hidden from them for nearly twelve years. As you might also expect, the loudest Loud was the first to speak.
"How come you didn't tell us this before he asked about the day he was born? Now we look like idiots!"
"Well, Luna…..you never asked, did you? That's a lot of your problem. Take why you're all up in Lincoln's face about his spilling a great big secret because it's magically his fault you don't think to ask the right questions/"
"I don't have to sit here and take this, you know. It's not fair that I have to absorb abuse for making a mistake?"
"Why? Because that's Lincoln's job?"
"Oh, not this again!"
"Yes, this again. When you and 'your huge secret' were sitting for the McBride's cats, both of them were betting money that at some point, you'd make a thought-free comment about being as incompetent as Lincoln supposedly is. Heh. There's another thing I have in common with him: your Aunt Shirley thinks I'm too stupid to live too because that's the deal with sisters. They look at their brother and see someone more pathetic and stupid than their dad. It's why fanfiction about sibling incest is almost as hilarious as it is off-putting: just as most boys think their sister's boyfriends need locking up for their own good, most girls ship their brothers with someone they see as a glorified baby-sitter. No offense, Ronnie Anne."
"Offense taken."
"Anyhow, it's not anyone's fault but your own that you never once stopped to ask 'What secret were we actually keeping' until about five days ago when your mother made that mild riff about MASH and how you come across as either Frank or Margaret and how neither of them wanted to see that dang near everyone in Korea knew about their fraternizing and how that applied to your girl crush on Sam Sharp. I mean, give us some credit here. We have gay friends. We expected going in that at least one of you would be at the very least bisexual. What do you do? You hide behind the fact that 'Sam' is a gender-neutral name because you're afraid of how we'd react."
"I'd have been more afraid if I'd known that your reaction was going to be 'Isn't Sam the stacked red-head in the green catsuit? I thought that the blonde one was called Clover' like it's a great big joke.'
"No….the great big joke is you somehow magically blaming everything on Lincoln because her kid brother plays video games. Like I said, it's not his fault that you didn't think to yourself "The parentals will be okay with things" because underneath the confident exterior, you're kind of still the timid little thing you used to be before you reinvented yourself. Now, that's something you do have in common with him: planning for a crazy, no-way impossible doomsday scenario which leaves you worse off than planning to exploit some minor advantage. You're blind to the outside world either way but you bring trouble on yourselves by ignoring the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The most annoying example of that happens to be why Luan is doing community service at the senior's complex."
"Wait...I thought she'd volunteered."
"Remember those 'mysterious' appointments she had after the nonsense with Lincoln scamming us and ending up in a costume for a couple of weeks. Turns out that she got a tad peeved with being jerked around when she had to deal with Lynnster's rituals too and tricked him into thinking we'd banished him to the back yard with one of Lisa's superscience toys. Turns out you can't do that because the legal system has more say on who belongs in a house than you do so to keep a roof over everyone else's head, she'd volunteered to cop to being a crazy-pants paying evil unto evil."