Anyway, it’s Winter Being Badass, as requested.  

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The room felt wrong.  His sisters, Winter thought, might have said that it was creepy or oogy or sick, although sometimes sick was a good thing.

(Having three younger sisters go through teenage-hood a couple years apart had been approximately a decade of confusion and headaches for Winter.  He wondered how actual fathers did it. )

What it felt like to him was cold, and not in his namesake way, and broken.

“I think,” his contact – no, friend.  Normal people, his sister Summer kept telling him, had friends.  And someone he played chess with every week and sometimes saw a movie with was, if not a potential SO or lover – and this one was not – a friend.  His friend in the FBI cleared his throat.  “I think that what’s going on in these situations is that someone has cut their Stands.  That’s the correct word, yes?  I read  Ernesta Roundtree – she’s your mother, correct? – I read her paper on the Strands last year.  They told me I needed beach reading,” he added with a wry smile. Continue reading →