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by Tish Cohen

  “You broke a few major rules today, so I’m not sure you want to bring up rules just now. Reality is, we’re clear out of space.”

  “No, we’re not! Brayden has his room and the girls have the other. The babies are with you. We’re fine.”

  I watch her roll the cot to where my desk sits, along with my bulletin board and adored bookshelves I worked so hard to make out of plywood and bricks left over from the patio Dad built.

  “Mom, you can’t do this! It’s the way I keep sane. My room is all I have and—”

  She stands up and frowns at me. “I think we can do without the dramatics, darlin’. Your life looks pretty good from where I’m standing.”

  My wind comes fast and furious and I fight not to stop breathing altogether. “What are you talking about? I’m an afterthought around here!”

  “Have you ever been left in your crib while your crack-addict mother went out to score? Have you been hit? Starved? Left with a pervert uncle?”

  I can’t help but make a joke here. “Well, Uncle Jimmie likes to watch his pornos. One time when I was staying over, I snuck down to get some cookies—”

  “I am being serious, Andrea. These kids come from garbage situations. They’ve had garbage lives. You know that. I sincerely hope that temporarily sharing your room is the very worst thing that ever happens to you. I sincerely do.”

  This silences me. I watch as she starts sliding books from my shelves and stacking them on the floor. Above her, pinned to my bulletin board, is the letter from the Stanford recruiter, Mortimer Wolf. Be patient for now, I tell myself. It’s less than a year until September. I drop to my knees and help her, cradling my Judy Blumes and my Harry Potters and my Bellas and Edwards close to my chest, trying not to cry. “Who’s moving in—Samantha or Cici?”

  “Neither. I have a bit of news.”

  “Oh no.”

  A bit of news is never good, not when it’s coming from my mother’s mouth. The first time she told me she had a “bit of news” was when I was about five. The news, which she assured me was all good, concerned Joshie and Drew, my six-and eight-year-old brothers, as I’d always known them, with whom I’d lived as long as my young memory served. Joshie and Drew helped me build a good-dreams-only tent over my bed when I was afraid of nightmares. They taught me early on that it wasn’t cool to watch Teletubbies. They showed me how to wiggle my ears. And they were being adopted into a “loving home.”

  I just sat in the bath that day, stunned. Adopted? Into a loving home? What was wrong with our home? Did we not love them?

  Mom tried to explain but I was inconsolable. You can’t fling terms like “temporary situation” and “long-term childcare agreements” at a five-year-old covered in Mr. Bubble. Words like these mean nothing to her.

  My brothers—with whom I’d shared every cold, every game of tag, every Disney movie, every trip to Laguna Beach—were leaving and I was never to see them again. It was the last time I ever thought of the fosters as my real siblings. Mom can call them whatever she wants, but the truth is they aren’t related to me. The truth is, each and every one will go away.

  Tell me you wouldn’t start to distrust “a bit of news.”

  Mom gives me a sad smile. “We have a new girl coming tonight, very last minute. It’s a terrible situation.”

  “They’re all terrible situations. We don’t have room for any more kids!”

  “Sometimes you open your door anyway.”

  “My door. Aren’t there laws about this? Foster kids sharing rooms and stuff?”

  “Kids have shared rooms since the beginning of time. Anyway, there’s nowhere else for her to go right now. While she’s with us, she’ll be the number-one focus of our lives.”

  Number One? With my room gone, with the Mom/Lise, Dad/Gary rule shattered, wasn’t that all I had left?

  Last summer, a reporter showed up from the Orange County Sun. Brought a photographer, even. Wanted to do a human interest piece, so he interviewed Mom, of course, and a few of the kids. But mostly he was interested in me. Freak-show me. “What’s it like to be number one of thirty-eight kids?”

  Oy, I thought. Where to start?

  See, when you’re me, you’re never really me. Me is stained by what’s around me. And by “what’s around me” I mean the other kids in my house. This is how I explained it to the guy.

  All the houses in our neighborhood look pretty much the same. The ranch bungalows might come in a few different shapes, but most have the same tan-and-brown trim color, same taupe stucco, same white concrete driveway, same tropical leafery leading up to the walk, same three-car garage, same leafy eucalyptus trees lining each street. They’re your typical Southern California tract homes, and whoever constructed our subdivision built quite a few others around town using the exact same plans. Someone might make the mistake of thinking the houses are the same inside, too. But they aren’t. The lives inside make each house very different, and a few years ago ours became notorious. It became “the house with all the trouble.”

  And as the number of kids who moved in and out grew, it wasn’t just the house’s reputation that changed. Mine did too. I became a local curiosity. A smash-up on the side of the freeway. Whenever I passed the white-haired couple at number 8414—the ones who wore golf pants and matching visors, who pruned their trees so they never grew taller than the house—one would start to nudge the other and, together, they’d give me these stony looks. Extreme disapproval. Like it was my fault the police cars pulled up when Brayden ran away, or like it was me—not Samantha or Cici, now twelve and thirteen—who got caught shoplifting sparkly blue nail polish and Dentyne and magazines from the drugstore, to be chauffeured home in the police cruiser yet again. Like I was the delinquent.

  The reporter pushed his glasses up his nose. “But what’s it really like? On a day-to-day basis, being Number One?”

  I looked to see if Mom was out of earshot and pulled my chair closer. And I told him.

  I told him about the lineup for the bathroom in the morning—so long sometimes that I’d sneak out into the yard to pee.

  I told him that every time Brayden or, before him, Marky or Kyle or Daniel, ran away, the police would search my room—my diary, even!—for clues to his whereabouts.

  I told him that my allowance was ridiculously low because the fosters need money for comic books, T-shirts or forty-ouncers of rum (the reporter thought I was kidding about that, but he’d never seen Marky’s fake ID).

  Very few of my comments made it into the paper. What did make it onto page seven was Mom’s proud story of how my training bra was worn by thirteen girls other than me, and counting. I got teased at school for a whole year.

  The piece was called “Child One of Thirty-Eight.” I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be interviewed for an article with this title: “Child One of One.”

  Stanford University, Palo Alto, California … here I come.

  The grandfather clock beside Dad’s chair bongs eight times and he pushes back the sleeve of his shirt to synchronize his watch to the clock, which is set to Universal Time, a time scale based on the mean solar day—and what he believes to be the most accurate measure of time in the world. Things like this are important to fathers like mine. As he stabs at the tiny buttons on his Seiko, he glances up at me and Brayden, side by side on the sofa where Mom placed us, and half smiles, his mustache spreading across the lower half of his comfortably drooping face. When his watch is all synched up, he rubs the top of his reddish-grayish buzz cut and sits back to wait.

  “They’re calling for clouds tomorrow,” he announces to fill the silence.

  Brayden and I nod politely.

  There’s another rule in the Birch house. If you’re home, if you’re over five, you put on some clean clothes and sit in the living room like a respectable person when a new child arrives.

  “Either of you two know where Samantha and Cici are?”

  Brayden grunts. “Probably knocking over a liquor store.”

&nbs
p; Dad squints his disapproval. I elbow Brayden, who’s busy examining his feet, just to make sure he knows he’s being scowled at.

  Just then, a clattering like thundering hooves comes down the hall and Cici’s long, fuzzy red hair appears in the doorway. Her tank and shorts show off her long, lanky muscles (which she doesn’t have to work for, by the way—the most exercise she gets is running out of the drugstore after having shoplifted a package of fake eyelashes). Sam, who appears beside her, could easily be on her way to a roller disco. Her short beige hair is pulled back in a gold headband and her purple stretch shorts are so skimpy they could double as undies.

  The familiar smell of cotton candy lip gloss wafts toward me. Sure enough, both Sam and Cici are smacking freshly glossed lips—glossed with my lip gloss. From my room.

  “You might as well keep it,” I say.

  “Keep what?” says Sam.

  I motion toward my lips. “I’m not going to use it now.”

  “Sweet!” she squeals, and trots back to my room to pocket her latest score.

  “We’re just going out for ice cream,” says Cici, flipping her hair. “Sam’s dying for some rocky road.”

  Sam is back, reapplying my gloss. “Yup. Rocky road. Can’t get enough.”

  Dad checks his watch again. “Not this late, you aren’t. It’s after eight. Besides, we have a new girl coming in a few minutes. You know what that means.” He motions toward the empty sofa across the room. “All bottoms on deck.”

  “Just this once, Gary,” says Sam. “Please? We won’t even stay long.”

  “There’ll be plenty of rocky road left tomorrow,” Dad says.

  Sam nudges Cici with her elbow and Cici blurts out, “Yeah, but there’s this guy who works there and Sam totally has the hots for him and he only works ‘til—”

  “Don’t go and say that, idiot!” Sam glares at her.

  “What? I’m not going to lie about things like you do!”

  “Oh, but stealing deodorant is fine?”

  Dad stands up and guides the two of them by their elbows to the sofa. “Nobody in this house needs to steal deodorant. There’s plenty to go around. You’ll both sit here and welcome the new girl, just like the others greeted you when it was your turn. This is a rule that doesn’t get bent.”

  Sam pouts as Dad points at the seat cushions. She makes a tragic face and falls onto the couch, dejected, then whispers, just quietly enough that Dad doesn’t hear, “Thanks for ruining my life.”

  So here we sit, all five of us, cleaned up and staring at each other like goons, and wait for Mom to finish up out front with the woman from Child Services. The one with the flowered pants.

  Brayden has our fanciest pillow on his lap and starts braiding the gold tassels. I poke him in the thigh because one of the tassels is starting to unravel and it’s important for a family to have at least some nice things.

  “Low pressure front moving in,” says Dad. “Should be gone by Thursday.”

  “Thursday, huh?” says Brayden, trying not to smile. “Swee-eet.”

  I pinch him.

  The front door creeps open and we all lean forward to get a good look. Only it isn’t Mom with the new girl; it’s Gran, looking fierce in her spiked blond hair and black hipster reading glasses. She smiles at us. “Well, look at you people, all shined up like brand-new pennies.”

  Dad says, “Lise is bringing in a new—”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I’m here. Terrible what happened, isn’t it? When I saw it on the news, I nearly cried. Just last night—and right in front of Disneyland!”

  Dad shakes his head gravely and nods toward the rest of us, clearly hoping to shut her up.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Yeah, what happened?” says Sam.

  “Lise wants to keep it quiet,” Dad says. “You kids don’t need to hear every gory detail about every person who crosses the threshold.”

  Brayden sits forward. “We sure do!”

  “No, Gary’s right,” says Gran. “Forget I said anything. I’ve got some prezzies for you kids so you don’t feel displaced by the new girl.” She sets down a large gift bag that looks like it’s been re-gifted a few times too many, pulls out two pink tubes and tosses one to Sam and the other to Cici. As they start to squeal in delight, I realize it’s cotton candy lip gloss.

  “Thanks!” says Sam.

  “Awesome, Gran,” says Cici.

  In case you’re wondering, there’s no rule about Gran’s name. Gran’s Gran to pretty much everybody.

  “I’m glad you like it. The salesgirl told me it will give you lips that are devastatingly kissable.”

  “Now, now,” says Dad. “Sam and Cici don’t need any encouragement.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Gary. Young girls love to primp.” To Brayden, she tosses the latest issue of Spin magazine.

  “Sick!”

  “You’re welcome,” Gran says, frowning. “I think.”

  Next she pulls something black and floppy from the bag and hides it behind her back. Uh-oh. I don’t like the way she’s beaming at me. It’s making me think my gift is going to make me anything but devastatingly kissable. “And I have something extra-special for my granddaughter.”

  She drops a pair of crazy rubber gloves on my lap and takes a step back to wait for my reaction. And, honestly, I don’t know how to react. Not only did she gift me with something made for doing menial labor, but the gloves are black with long silver nails painted on each fingertip, swirly crystal bedazzling up the wrists and all these freaky feathers at the top. I glance longingly at Cici and Sam, swiping yummy pink gloss across their already glossy lips.

  “They’re for doing dishes,” Gran says. “To make it more fun. Try them on.”

  “Yeah, um …”

  “I brought them all the way home from Africa. Don’t you just love them?”

  I slip my hands into the gloves and force a smile. “What’s not to love?”

  “I knew it. As soon as I saw them there, in the market, I thought of you.”

  “For sure.” I mean, why would Andrea Birch want to be kissed?

  “Of course, there’s a wonderful story behind them.”

  With Gran, there’s always a story. She found my sherpa hat on a ski lift in the Himalayas (“Can you imagine? Someone left it behind!”), she bought the batik skirt that comes down to my heels and is covered in teensy sequined butterflies at a bazaar in Malaysia, and the hand-carved wooden box she gave me for my jewelry (if you look really close, you can see the wavy pattern is actually two people humping, but Gran doesn’t believe me) is from a pawnshop in Des Moines. She bought it because it was rumored to have once belonged to Rosanna Arquette. Which it probably didn’t.

  Gran sits across from me and winks. “Take real good care of them. I picked them up in Africa just after my safari …”

  Let me explain. Gran is a wild one. She takes cruises around remote parts of the world with her bachelor friend, Mr. Marcus. Two years ago, she received a bit of spam via e-mail. It was an ad for a river cruise through the jungles of Guatemala with a guide named River Jack, meals included. Mom and I begged her not to go—she knew nothing at all about this River Jack guy except what she’d read on his website. We told her he could be unstable, she could be killed. But Gran, being Gran, went anyway. River Jack did take Gran and Mr. Marcus through the jungle alright, and the meal was in a mud hut, prepared by his wife, Windy—a French woman with long, grizzled black hair who offered Gran a reading from the Guatemalan gods on a straw mat outside the hut. The night Gran returned home, she phoned to tell us: a) she’d had a great time, b) the Guatemalan gods told her to take valerian root to clear up her arthritis, and c) Mom and I should try to be a bit less paranoid when it comes to strangers because we’ll wind up missing out on life.

  The very next day, River Jack was actually on the news, right there on CNN. His boat—the very same leaky pontoon Gran and Mr. Marcus had been on the day prior—had been stormed by guerillas. The Swedish tourist
s on board were kidnapped, all five of them, and were being held at machete-point in an abandoned barn which was, at that very moment, surrounded by Guatemalan police.

  Gran’s response? Crime happens everywhere.

  I’m spared Gran’s latest crazy story when we hear Mom’s voice from the porch.

  Footsteps grow louder, then the door clicks. Creaks open. Mom walks into the living room so cautiously it’s as if she’s walking across a swinging bridge. In her arms, with bare arms and legs wrapped around her for dear life, is a small girl.

  She’s about six or so, wearing an old-fashioned yellow dress with puffed sleeves. It probably came down to her knees a few years back, but now it barely covers her underpants. Long grasshopper legs with freshly skinned knees dangle down, ending in frilled white socks and black party shoes. Her face is tucked into Mom’s shoulder, but atop her neck, white-blond braids are coiled on either side of her head like Princess Leia’s. One thing is certain, this girl isn’t from around here.

  “Everybody,” Mom half whispers, as if the child might break if she speaks in a real voice, “this is Michaela. Michaela, this is Gary, Brayden, Andrea, Cici and Samantha. And Gran. You’ll meet the little ones tomorrow.”

  “Oh my,” whispers Gran, her eyes tearing up. “Just precious.”

  Without lifting her head up, Michaela steals a look at us, exposing an angry bruise above one eye, then tucks her chin into her cotton collar. When she doesn’t make a sound, Mom motions me to follow her into the dim light of what used to be my room.

  “She’s exhausted” is all Mom says.

  I want to know, but I don’t want to know, what happened that was so bad it made it into the news. I mean, here’s this kid with her fancy shoes and her hairdo and this bruise. Whatever went down, it wasn’t good.

  See? Luck of the draw. It’s what our entire existence is based on—stupid, stupid luck.

  Only a lamp on the wooden chair beside the cot is lit. When Mom shows Michaela the carefully made up bed, the girl clings tighter to her neck. After Mom nods her approval, I loosen the party shoes and set them side by side on the floor, then Mom sits on the thick duvet and lowers Michaela onto the pillow. She tugs the covers out from under the child’s legs and I pull them up to Michaela’s chin. In the grainy darkness, her eyes open wide—I can’t tell whether from fear or lack of light. Maybe both.