“So that’s everything.” I poke a log and send up a spray of sparks.
We’re sitting around a fire pit in the clearing beside Jimmy’s trailer. Sherry is inside, gone to sleep by now, probably, because it’s nearly midnight. Did I ever see midnight before? Pete pitched two tents, one for girls and one for boys. But we’re not tired yet.
“Hate to break the news,” says Lucy, “but your grandmother is a bitch.”
We all laugh, because it’s hardly news. She’s the villain in my story, as wicked as any witch or aunt or stepmother in any book.
“It’ll be easy to find out where she lives,” says Jimmy.
“What should we do to her?” Lucy leans forward, her face aglow in the firelight. “You deliver the groceries, Pete. We’ll put rat pellets in her Raisin Bran.”
“Powdered bleach in the flour,” Pete says.
“We’re not going to kill her!” says Abby.
“Why not?” Lucy wants to know. “Look what she did to Malou!”
“We’re not going to kill her,” I say. “She just has to suffer.”
“True,” says Pete. “Suffer is better.”
“We can’t break the law,” says Jimmy. “So extraction of toenails is out of the question.”
We go into a whole laughing scenario of kidnapping old Mrs. Delaney and tying her up in Pete and Lucy’s basement, feeding her peanut butter with nothing to drink, pricking her bulgy white calves with thumbtacks and using Pete’s hockey socks to gag her.
“Except now we’re back to murder,” says Lucy. “Pete stinks!”
Pete pulls Lucy’s face into his armpit, and it takes a while for us to hush again.
“All I really have to do,” I say, “if I want to torture her”—this is coming to me slowly—“is introduce myself.”
And then they’re all hooting and cheering.
“Yesss!”
But a few seconds later, I know I’ll have to wait. If I barge brazenly into Eve’s mother’s life before Eve has a chance to tell her husband, it won’t be only Mrs. Delaney that I’m embarrassing. And if I mess things up for Eve, maybe she won’t forgive me. I just met her. I don’t want to make her mad already.
So I tell the others to stop talking. I’m not going to knock on her door, and they’re not going to sit on the public sidewalk next to her tidy lawn, like a row of dark-skinned garden gnomes.
Revenge will be a treasure that I hold in my pocket, waiting for the right day to show the world.
So far, I’ve got two new brothers and two new sisters. Plus Eve’s other kids, Michael and Alexis. That’s six. Plus me makes seven. The new Seven.
But there are still more names, kids we haven’t found yet.
“And don’t forget,” says Abby, “this is just one hospital in just one town. If Andy Bannerman did this, uh, sharing thing everywhere he went, there could be way more. Think how many siblings we might have in Baltimore!”
Who knows, right?
Got brothers and sisters this way.
Jimmy’s mom has a sister with two kids.
Deb Munro’s brother has four!
This family just keeps on growing.
“I’ve known you,” says Jimmy, “since the day we were born.”
I’m going to stay with Judy and Preesha until the end of the summer. I have that much time to decide if I want to move with them to Toronto and go to school there with Abby for one more year. A real school! They tracked down Mrs. Hazelton and spoke to her on the telephone. She said that she would happily help with arrangements to have me placed officially in twelfth grade.
I spoke to Mrs. H. too. She has had a good rest, and her illness is subsiding as she recovers from the fire. She gave me news of the other Sevens, and now she has news of me to pass along back to them.
I told her that I’ve found some siblings, but I didn’t say how exactly they’re related. I’m not grown-up enough yet to talk to old ladies about sex stuff. I also confessed that I haven’t read a single book since all this started, and she suggested that I get a library card, so I’m going to do that tomorrow. I’ll have to think of a new theme for my reading though.
I’m not an orphan. Not even half.