Lincoln and Leni put a dollar into the washing machine to try and get paint off it.
Lincoln: "Did it work?"
Leni: "No"
Lincoln and Leni sand the dollar with a sanding machine.
Lincoln: "Did it work?"
Leni: "No"
Lincoln sprays acid at the dollar.
Lincoln: "Did it work?"
Leni: "No"
Lincoln begins hitting the dollar with a baseball bat.
Lincoln: "NOTHING'S WORKING!"
Leni: "Wait Lincoln. We're not cavemen."
Leni walks Lincoln to a computer and puts the dollar on the table with the computer.
Leni: "WE HAVE TECHNOLOGY!"
Leni smashes the computer onto the dollar repeatedly until the computer breaks. The dollar is still covered in paint.
Lincoln: "It didn't work"

They say that with age comes experience.
That the older a little kid became the more he or she began to learn that life wasn't just a game and that he or she had to take responsibility for his or her own actions since all actions had their consequences whether good or bad.
The more they were supposed to realize that pitching a fit in front of their parents wasn't the solution to every problem.
The better and more dependable a role model you were meant to become, and thus the more control was handed to you with the assumption that you had already learned that with great power came great responsibility.

This might have explained why each time Lynn Senior and Rita left the house, their eldest child Lori who was by now almost an adult herself was put in charge of everything to the point where she could easily shunt all her siblings to bed while she hoarded the television and snack collection entirely to herself.
Why although Lori did indeed call meetings with her siblings to decide what the next meal, the next trip or the next you name it was, it was always her that ultimately got the last say in the matter.
When Lynn Senior and Rita had no objections to her suggestion of course, but that was incredibly rare with how much they loved each and every one of their children.

And even barring all that, Lori was the only one lucky enough to have a driver's license, and let's just say that you did not want to get on bad terms with your ride under any circumstances.
And with hobbies so diverse and grand, each one of Lori's younger sisters and her one younger brother all had places to be.
Lori knew this and was beyond overjoyed to exploit and capitalize on this dependence which had her family practically eating out of the palm of her hand.
She loved being the one who had to do the least chores in a big house that got closer to falling apart every day despite being the oldest. She adored the way her siblings practically begged on her knees as they beseeched her desperately for her services like a Christian prayed to their god.
Being the only sibling whose booming voice was enough to silence all others so that she always got her word in at every family discussion.

Lori loved it all and vowed not to let anyone deny her the privilege that the eldest of the house was heiress to. "Keep well back from taking what's literally rightfully mine and maybe I won't literally turn you into a literal human pretzel" in her own words.
Which might have explained why one evening long ago when she overheard a cheerful and jubilant conversation where Lincoln and her sisters sans Leni were whopping for joy as they happily discussed how as soon as the second oldest child of the family, Leni finally passed her driving test, there'd finally be no more extorting of ridiculously unfair favours from that Cheapskate Lori.
Leni wasn't greedy or selfish and she'd give them the rides they so badly needed unconditionally and with no strings attached as any good older sister ought to be doing.
Sure they'd repay Leni for her kindness every now and again unconditionally to show their gratitude, but from now the Loud house was going to be a very different place.
Different in the good way, that was.

It was as Lori heard the words "Won't need Lori anymore" that years of learning self-restraint, the value of nonviolence and the importance of family togetherness and responsibility quickly begun to collapse to the level of a whiny toddler breaking her toy while throwing a tantrum over not being played with for one measly minute while her mother was forced to rush to the phone to call an ambulance for their father who was dying from a sudden heart attack.

First her teeth begun to clench together as her hands balled together into fists.
Her heart seemed to race quicker and quicker with every second to the point
where she felt sure it would burst from overexertion.

Lori didn't need to hear another word of this conversation as she slunk away to her room to wait for night to fall. She had heard enough and she knew what needed to be done to prevent this awful tragedy from happening.
She took out a tape recorder and pressed record as she began to ramble off all the bad advice concerning how to pass a driving test that she could think of.

She faked sleeping and when she took a sly glance to the bed beside her to see her sister Leni fast asleep, she drew out the recording she had made during the day from a drawer, pressed play and set it beside Leni.

Leni would never pass the test tomorrow now.
Lori had made sure of that.
Now she would stay the sole driver of the Loud House for a long, long time.
Which meant a long time of more favours from her younger siblings and having full reign of Vanzilla the family van all to herself.
Lori grinned a devilish grin as she settled herself back to sleep after plugging her own ears with two pieces of cotton It seemed Luan was not the only one who could rig up elaborate pranks in this household. Had she become Luan's pranking protégé of sorts?

It was not necessary to describe the epic fail that the budding driver in the stylish driving outfit she had prepared just for the occasion was forced to suffer the next day.
A cursory apology was all that was needed to pacify the angry Lincoln and the still confused Leni who even years later would never come close to learning how to drive.

Those were events of the past that Leni Loud, the relative sweetheart of her family had largely forgotten about. Only a vague recollection of a certain day in the past where she was certain she had been driving normally like a normal person with Lincoln and her other little sisters helping her every step of the way.
To Leni, this day had become all but a dream.
A dream of a beautiful fantasy that she would always have but never accomplish since she had always stood in shock and awe of how well her older sister and roommate drove.
Her sister Lori dismissed Leni's mention of the vague memories she still had of this day, as being little more than a nice but not real dream and Leni had been satisfied with this answer for a long while.

It was only after Lincoln left that the second oldest yet most naïve child of the Loud family was about to realize that those fantasies were far more than what she supposed them to be and that she wasn't crazy at all.
And with it, the knowledge that she had not simply failed her duties as the second oldest, but failed them miserably. But not

The changes in Leni's behaviour were much more-subtle at least when compared to those of her siblings.
Perhaps the old saying that ignorance was bliss really had its place in explaining why even in these bleak times, Leni seemed a lot less derelict at least in comparison to the rest of the house.

Still speaking with a flighty voice that seemed on the verge of bursting into song with every word and still walking with the air of a carefree schoolgirl with her head in the clouds with her head held high.
It would seem at first glance, that Leni was not awfully bothered by her brother' sudden departure from her life.

While her siblings were continuing to divide themselves apart from each other further and further as they rushed to blame each other for who exactly drove Lincoln away, Leni spent her days trying very hard to keep her cool as difficult as it was now.

Ironically this meant that she went to the mall less, strange considering that it was once her favourite place for a day out and that she stayed in her room more, especially when the oldest sister of the family Lori was out of the house.

There came a saying in life that sooner or later however happy you were, one would enter into a phase known as "midlife crisis". A phase that came without warning, foreshadowing and often seemingly without reason. A time when you locked yourself in your room wondering what might have been. How even if you had felt just yesterday like you were the happiest, luckiest man or woman on the planet, you now wonder if you could have done just a little better had you not made that one stupid mistake that you had tried and failed to ever really forgive yourself for.
A hatchet that you'd hidden out of site but never buried, so to speak.
A hatchet you yourself built to be used against yourself.

Leni lay on her bed, her eyes blank and looking nowhere in particular.
She needed for the first time in her life, to think.
To take a long and hard look at herself and to wonder what exactly went wrong.
Her white haired little brother had seemed like such an optimist, always quick to forgive her and his other sisters no matter what they'd done to him.

So what exactly happened?

For the first time in her life, Leni felt the stresses of being the second oldest in the family crawling onto her back, weighing down onto her like a ton of bricks. The feeling was almost suffocating
She remembered every one of the instances she had refused to lift a finger to stop her sisters when they treated Lincoln like a pariah.
The time when Lynn had said he was bad luck for instance. She hadn't done anything but look on blankly when Lincoln hadn't been allowed to come to the movies with them and when his furniture was sold and he was kicked from his house, Lynn stubbornly refusing to let him back in when he came clean with his motives about why he had allowed Lynn to accuse him of being "bad luck".
He was the one rightfully calling out Lynn for her wrongdoings, she was the one grasping at straws with no remorse whatsoever over what she had persuaded her family to do to the poor boy.
And Leni believed Lynn.

She believed the sore loser who pitched a destructive and hissy fit over even the smallest of losses, and not a reasonable and rational little brother who did his best to always hold his temper back regardless of the pain and humiliation he was put through.

Lynn wasn't perfect and neither was Lincoln.

But it was the intentions, and the genuine remorse that Lincoln felt for his actions as well as how he was much quicker to see his own faults before others that made him the glue that had been holding this household together all this time.

It had taken Leni all this time to realize this, and the knowledge that this long due epiphany came far too late to make any sort of difference made Leni feel like the entire world was collapsing around her every day that Lincoln wasn't here anymore.
"Though I did my best not to show it, I can assure you that back then my heart was breaking" Leni would later reveal when she reminisced about these days.

Leni might not have been the brightest bulb in the box, in the words of her young savant sister Lisa.
But even Leni knew that a large part of why her family weren't smiling or talking or playing with each other anymore was that Lincoln was gone.
And as optimistic as Leni's simple mind made her, it hadn't blessed her with enough ignorance to ignore that as "nice" or "friendly" as she tried to be, she too had crossed a line along with the others in her family that caused this calamity.

Leni never spent as much time with her little brother Lincoln as she would have liked.
It was Lori after all who had spent most of the baby boy's infancy holding him, feeding him, telling him stories that made him stop his crying and fall into a pleasant sleep.
Leni had chosen to spend most of those years often away from the home with her friends from outside the family, going to the places any generic teenage girl into "fashion and style" would have made a beeline for.

As Leni would very reluctantly attest later in her own part of her family's memoirs (which would go on to become a global bestseller that put even William Shakespeare to great shame)
the Lori of back then had a very different personality.

How Leni wished she'd had some of those years back now, knowing full well even as she made that fantasy, that she was asking the impossible and simply making petty excuses.
The feeling Leni felt as she watched her family collapse around her like a king watching a great fire destroying his castle, was not sadness. The time to mourn had long past and dwelling on what had already happened couldn't change the past.
It wasn't anger either. It would be hypocritical to call her sisters out when Leni knew she had been no better herself. Lynn may have been the one to call Lincoln bad luck and the others may have had a more active role in kicking him from the house but if there was one thing Leni as a simple minded simpleton had gleaned from this experience, it was that choosing not to do anything was a choice as well, be it a good or bad choice.
That, and another far more important lesson that Leni very nearly pinched herself over.
A lesson that she should have learned a long time ago when she was but an infant along with Lori, watching as a house originally meant for just the two of them became fuller as first baby Luna and then Luan and the others were born so that soon the four rooms next to the bedroom that she and Lori shared were converted into other bedrooms designed to house their new younger siblings.

Leni was the second oldest child in the family after all, her age falling just short of Lori by less than a year.
And by that logic at least, Leni had failed the second hardest in her responsibility to provide a good role model for poor Lincoln and by extension all her other siblings sans Lori who she had always viewed as being so clever and knowing that Leni dared never question Lori's choices and suggestions instead standing in awe at how much more her one older sister seemed to know compared to her.

Two things began to resonate more and more loudly in Leni's mind, every day as the days seemed to rocket past.
Two things that Lori could do so well that Leni had tried and failed several times to emulate despite her greatest efforts when she poured heart and soul in trying to remotely copy her older sister.

To take charge and to drive.
To take over supervising her younger siblings when mum and dad were away without the house collapsing to the level of a total warzone where furniture all over the place got badly wrecked and mess got thrown everywhere.
And to be able to guide Vanzilla on a drive to anywhere so that the final destination for the family van was not another one way trip to the local garage, and for its subpar driver a one way ticket to the emergency room in a wildly speeding ambulance.

Only Lori could do those two things. And Lori was not even more than a year older than Leni.

The feeling blazing inside the ditzy blonde's mind now as the day for Lori to leave the family home and move in with her long-time boyfriend "Bobby boo boo bear" fast approached, was irony.
Irony in its most concentrated form.

How could the second oldest member of a family who was meant to have the second most amount of life experience, common sense as well as the second most rational mind also be the one who had contributed the second least to the family.
Second least may even have been an understatement since even as young as Lily was, she was already quickly learning the key skills like walking and speaking while Leni was still being continuously being told by Lisa that she was "simple minded" and Lori scolded her that "Leni, you'd lose your head if wasn't screwed on properly".

Leni couldn't be part of planning a surprise party without spoiling the surprise, Lily could.
Leni couldn't stop her sisters from refusing to do their chores, just because Lincoln was rightfully tired of having the worst chore in the house, but Lily could.
But most of all, one thing bothered Leni the most.
Which was that she clearly remembered a day where she had very nearly learned to drive properly but hadn't for a reason she couldn't quite put her finger on despite trying very hard to remember.

Leni alone knew that she was both blessed and cursed with an incurable condition, or talent depending on which perspective you looked it.
It was not Asperger's, nor was it autism as many would guess it to be, but a much simpler thing called selective memory.
A memory that remembered some things with photographic accuracy and perhaps better while completely not registering others even if they were things she had seen a mere few seconds ago.
The problem came from how Leni had absolutely no control which things she'd go on to memorize to the letter years later, and which things she'd keep forgetting no matter how many times she was reminded about to the point where most of the people she knew simply stopped trying to remind her and left her to her own device.

Not unlike the proverbial game master who despite memorizing every line, paragraph and piece of punctuation in his video game manuals who was still banging his head on the table at the sight of so many F grades.
It wasn't his fault that one thing seemed so easy while another one made climbing Mount Everest look like a cakewalk by comparison.
Nor Leni's bad intentions that made it easy for her to assemble a brand-new bed from scratch but still fail to realize that "making a bed" for Lori to get a ride to the mall simply meant that she had to fold a few sheets and she'd be done with Lori's request and at the mall long ago.

The bottom Line, Leni supposed after she had long lost track of the time that passed since Lincoln left and a lot of soul searching, was that meaning well and doing well were two very different things.
And that one of the worst beliefs still held by a lot of "stupid" people herself included, was the silly thought that ignorance was bliss.
It was this belief that made her refuse to let Lincoln back into the house when Lynn accused him of something as silly as being bad luck for anyone he came near.
This belief that made her spoil the surprise party which was meant to be a surprise.
And what made even talking to her difficult since she would almost always respond in a way that made the person she was trying to speak with angry or tired that they were not being listened and responded to in the constructive way they had wished.
No wonder her sisters and Lincoln didn't talk to her very much and no wonder they kept ignoring her suggestions as if they didn't trust her.
They were only trying to be pragmatic, not cruel since she wouldn't really have helped much anyway if she couldn't even keep a surprise party a surprise.

But that one memory she had of the day where she tried and failed to pass her driving test.
Where she nearly crashed the family van and narrowly escaped being rushed to ER in the back of an ambulance.

She remembered something about having to build a bed for her older sister Lori just for a ride to, possible the mall.
She remembered playing a racing game of some sort with Lincoln and failing spectacularly.
Everyone in the family, sans Lori trying to talk to her in a way she could understand so that they'd get through to her. "Leni speak" she thought they called it.
And then… Lincoln lecturing Lori and Lori sadly apologizing to her when she didn't pass the test and…
Lori…

It was all coming together now, Leni thought as she struggled not to cry at the prospect that the older sister she had been so proud to have all these years could do such a terrible thing.
Lori didn't want her to learn to drive.
Lori wanted her and quite possibly the others to keep doing favours for her and to keep mooching off of them because otherwise no one would be getting anywhere they needed to go.
"It was like she went and bought the dress she knew you wanted" Lincoln's words echoed through her head as clear as a record player.
A poor metaphor but it still got the point across.

Lori betrayed her.

The next day Lori walked into her and Leni's room with a jovial spring in her step at a fairly normal day with no mishaps for once.
She had found some very nice dresses and shoes in the mall that day and couldn't wait to try them back on again. Some nice clothes really took her sad mind of the state of her now very unstable family.
The goofy smile soon vanished when she ran into Leni standing near the doorway of their room, not looking pleased at all with arms crossed.

"Leni. What's wrong?" Lori instinctively asked. Leni hadn't said anything, but it was clear that something very bad was troubling her favourite little sister. And it was Lori's duty as the big sister that promised to always take care of her to find out what that very bad thing was.

Leni didn't answer. She seemed to be averting her gaze to meet Lori straight in the eyes. Almost as if, almost as if she was considering Lori responsible for whatever was ailing her.
But surely Leni couldn't feel that way since Leni was the gentlest and forgiving person in the Loud family.

"Is something the matter?" Lori asked again. "You literally don't look like you're doing so well and I need to know what's wrong so I can help you."

After a few long tense seconds, Leni finally did respond. Though when she did, her voice didn't sound right at all. If you put Lisa's flat and condescending monotone voice together with dad's disapproving voice when he was giving a lecture and being serious instead of fun loving because someone had done something really bad, then you'd have a good idea of the voice that Leni spoke in.

"I'm not happy with something you did Lori. And even if some time has passed since then, I think you know why I'm upset."

"What even are you talking about?"

"It has to do with my driving test, which I didn't pass."

"What about it?"

Leni took a few silent seconds to carefully process her choice of words in her mind. She didn't want to sound stupid like she usually did.

"Did you try to stop me from trying to pass my driving test, Lori?"

"Leni!?"

"Did you purposefully try to make me fail my test so that you could keep getting favours from me and Lincoln and all of us?"

Leni's usually very confident complexion seemed to wither away almost instantaneously.
Her eyes were darting back and forth suspiciously quickly and Leni swore she could see her big sister's hands shaking very nervously.
Leni may not have been the brightest tool in the shed but when it came to reading even the most complex of emotions, even Lincoln stood in awe at Leni's immense levels of perception.
And Leni realized right away that as uncomfortable as she was making Lori, she needed to push harder still with the questions.
It was all coming together now and Lori needed to know that what she had done that day was sick and inhumane, not to mention very dangerous.

"You put a tape next to me when I was sleeping and that's how you stopped me passing the test, isn't it Lori?"
One by one, the memories were rolling back into place where they belonged, piecing themselves together like pieces of a perfectly fitting puzzle almost as quickly as Leni remembered them.

"I wouldn't do that Leni… I wouldn't." Lori managed to say in a slightly shaking voice.

"I crashed the car really badly. I could have been killed!" said Leni, her voice almost coming in a sob.

Lori opened her trembling mouth to talk further but Leni cut her off. It was time for the good girl shtick to stop since Lori had done a great wrong.

"You're saying that you didn't do it. But. Are you prepared to say that with your hand on a stack of interpretive dance quarterlies!".
Leni's usually gentle and mild dulcet tones became akin to that of an impatient judge as she looked the older sister she had grown to respect so much in her life, up and down.

"What are you literally talking about?" Lori stammered after a few long seconds.
Kind and innocent Leni, the family's equivalent to a sweet cinnamon roll was backing her into a corner and she didn't like where this conversation was going at all.

"I'm not saying anything that would matter if you went over to Lisa's room right now and took a LIE DETECTOR TEST!"
Leni's furore at this point had well since barrelled out of control, her blood racing at speeds that would make a hyperactive Lynn running in a footrace immediately after drinking double her weight in strong coffee seem sluggish as a turtle.
An unprecedented level of rage that would make a Lola that had lost a beauty pageant and had her entire stack of fashion trophies seized from her, look like Martin Luther King in terms of nonviolence.
But Leni didn't need to ball her fists or raise her voice to get her disapproval across to her now extremely frightened older sister who was practically pinching herself in the hopes that this was some terrible nightmare that she'd soon be woken from by the real Leni.
The nice Leni.

The one that never held a grudge against anything or anyone.
Not capable in the slightest of making such grand accusations or harbouring anger over something so little that had so long passed.
Surely one little mistake couldn't mean so much after so long?

But if there was one thing Lori had to give this "Leni" any credit for, it was that she had indeed made a very valid point succinctly that Lori could indeed have killed her that day and that the budding new driver had been lucky to escape with no injuries save a very long lasting blow to her pride and self confidence.
Had Lori really gone too far in her attempt to steal Leni's thunder?

"So here's what I think happened Lori, and correct me if I'm wrong." Said Leni, clearly realizing Lori's reluctance to speak.

"You wanted to keep making us do lots of favours for you and so you deliberately sabotaged my test because you know that if I learned to drive, you couldn't keep making us do all your chores for you and so you wouldn't have to share Vanzilla with anyone."

Lori couldn't respond to that. Everything Leni said was the absolute truth that she had been reluctant to admit even to herself.

"I can't prove you did it. And even though I'm not happy with what you did, I'm sorry if I've upset you Lori, but you need to understand that what you did was wrong too.
And now I'll probably never learn to drive."
Leni's voice softened but still not enough for Lori to feel safe that her sister had returned to her usual happy go lucky self.

"Please, don't do this again when Luna, Luan and Lynn start trying to learn to drive as well. You'll put them in great danger".

Lori could only very shyly nod and murmur a very afraid "mm hm".
She might have been the oldest and bossiest but even she knew at times that it was wise to hold her tongue.

"I'm sorry. Please forgive me." Lori eventually managed on the verge of crying to reply.
"I didn't mean for it to go that far. Please. I'm sorry. I really am."

Lori waited with her head hung down expecting Leni to outright reject her pathetic apology attempt or at the very least to give a cold shoulder.
She even wouldn't have been surprised if Leni got angrier and insisted she was lying even about her apologies now.

But Leni seemed to buy it and though she didn't look Lori in the eye, she was surprisingly calm and composed when she next spoke.

"I forgive you Lori. Of course I forgive you.
But that doesn't mean that I trust you as much as I used to. My trust is something you'll have to earn back."

Then Leni turned away and slowly left the room without looking back.

Little did poor Leni realize that the date on the calendar mounted on her and her sister's bedroom wall read March 31st.
And even less did she notice that a certain brown haired prankster was laughing quietly but very maniacally in a room right next to hers.

Was the old saying that ignorance was bliss, very true after all.
Or had the guy who made that up drunk and hungover when he said,

Since the next day, something was about to happen to the happy go lucky blonde in the blue dress.
A wonderful miracle or a shocking tragedy depending on your viewpoint.