Brie eventually found herself outside, playing catch with her dog. The squirrel had neglected to make a reappearance, which was disappointing to Brie, but soon she forgot all about it. It had given her an excuse to go outside and get some fresh air instead of watching TV all day, and Maxie was certainly enjoying the attention. When throwing a ball repeatedly got boring, she eventually took him on a walk around the block, and let him pick up a large stick to take home as a present. Soon, closer to mid-day, they got home, and Maxie bolted straight into the backyard.
“How do you still have so much energy?”
Rather tired out herself, Brie went to the kitchen to grab a cold drink of water. She went out to the back to keep an eye on her dog a few minutes later; for a moment, she couldn’t see him and began to panic, before she caught sight of his movement and laughed.
“There you are!”
Maxie was hiding in the far back corner of the garden, behind some strawberry bushes that nearly hid him from sight from the back door. Brie ran over towards him, and as she got close, the golden retriever bolted back out, as if caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. He ran straight back into the house, which only piqued Brie’s interest as to what he was doing in the garden. Her jaw dropped when she found out; he was in the middle of burying the stick, and in the large pile of churned-up dirt, she also saw a shoe of hers that had been missing for a couple weeks. And at the bottom of the hole, barely sticking out, she saw the handle of one of her mom’s combs.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding stuff!”
She had found Maxie’s secret stash. Returning with a small shovel, Brie went to work in the back corner and began unearthing what she assumed to be years worth of horded objects. Forgotten treats, a bone, sticks, shiny rocks, those were all fine. But she also found an old hat, some magazines, an amazon package they assumed had never arrived, and even an old Barbie doll of Brie’s. She had been missing the doll for ages, and had assumed that Tina had stolen it. After an hour of tickling information out of her older sister yielded nothing, she had then gone on to interrogating Hillary, who eventually laughed out that she must have accidentally thrown it away. Brie chuckled to herself as she remembered the images of her sister, and then her mother, with their feet trapped in the Barbie dream house and her running her other dolls’ hairs across their soles. She was starting to lose focus, but snapped back to reality when her shovel hit something hard.
“Hm?”
Kneeling down into the dirt, she scraped away the bottom of the hole, revealing a small golden surface underneath. Excited, she sped herself up, before pulling out a large wristband, golden in colour, with a wavy design engraved on it. It had a jewel on one side, shining blue with a hint of green on the outside, that almost struck her like the eye of a peacock’s feather. She didn’t remember ever seeing this, or hear Hillary or Tina complain about having lost it. Maybe Maxie had picked it up on a walk somewhere? She set it aside while she repaired the hole, tossed out any trash, and began to bring the uncovered “treasures” back into the house.
As she did so, she slipped the bracelet on; it was too big for her arm and slid around loosely, but at least wouldn’t fly off her wrist. She seemed to feel a bit lightheaded once she put it on, which felt a bit curious.
“Doing some gardening, Brie?”
The young redhead looked up to see Elise, her next door neighbor peering up from over the fence. Elise was a kind woman who had babysat Brie and her sister multiple times when they were younger; she still had an inviting smile on, which today was accompanied with a wide straw sunhat and her curly brown hair tucked into a ponytail.
“I found Maxie’s secret hiding spot. Now I’ve just got to fill in the hole again.”
“Aw, that little rascal! Well, if you want any flowers to pop in there while you’re putting dirt back, I have some spares here!”
“Thanks! I’ll be right back.”
After she brought the next load of junk back into the house, Brie went back outside to the fence, and hopped up the branches of the tree in her garden so she could look over into Elise’ yard. Elise was kneeling down in her own garden, planting some new flowers, and Brie extended her hand to wave at her. As she did so, the jewel on the gold bracelet caught a bit of sunlight within it, at least that’s what it looked like to her; it began to glow, and a light wind picked up, causing some of the plants in the garden below to bend and sway in the breeze. It just so happened that the wind also blew the bottom of Elise’s shirt, causing it to flap up and expose her bare skin for the flowers to brush against. Elise yelped out in laughter, and fell down into the dirt.
“WhOHOHOP! Ah ha hah… well then…”
It was a rather strong reaction for something that should have been so light; an experienced tickler like Brie knew that.
“Still ticklish, Elise?”
“And here I thought you two had tickled it all out of meEHEHE!!”
Brie had moved her hand again, and another small gust of wind rippled the leaves of the plants Elise was laying in; having not fixed her shirt, the woman’s sides were brushed and she spasmed out of the garden back to her lawn.
The coincidence was not lost on Brie, who could pick up on clues when she wanted to. She took the bracelet off, and accepted some spare flowers from elise once her neighbor had picked herself up. They chatted through the fence for a bit while Brie fixed up her own yard, and then she said goodbye as she went back in. The first thing she did, was plop the bracelet on the counter and stare at it intently. What exactly was this thing, and did it help tickle her neighbour? Where did it come from? Did it have any magic powers? Did it explain her family’s… tendencies?
A quick internet search came up with nothing except shopping ads for other bracelets. It took ten minutes of thinking, and a sandwich, for Brie to make up her mind on what to do next.
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