ONE

Morgan’s head was pressed against her pillow. The alarm on her phone had just been snoozed again, and her plan to leave early for school was slipping away each time she reached forward with a groggy hand to silence the incessant beeping. Still, she refused to poke around the screen lower, where a simple touch would shut the alarm off permanently. She had good intentions to wake up, stay awake, and get out of bed.

The thing was, she was so darn comfortable.

A rhythmic, crunching sound replaced the alarm with this last strike of the snooze button, and a scene of a blizzard came into her mind. Morgan was walking through it, across a seemingly endless field. There was a square light in the distance, but she never got closer. When she tried to move faster, her body wouldn’t allow it. She kept taking the same heavy steps that led nowhere, her feet crunching through the snow.

Morgan tried to imagine something else.

She should have been able to. It was not a dream. She knew she was awake. She pressed her eyelids shut so tightly that her entire face scrunched together like a raisin, to force something else into her mind, to force herself back to sleep and into an actual dream. But she couldn’t get rid of the image, or the crunching.

Then it dawned on her: the crunching sound had been in time with her heartbeat. With her ear pressed against the pillow, her pulse announced itself forcefully and unrelentingly. All she had to do was lift her head. It was a cosmic design to get her out of bed.

Morgan kicked off her sheets like she was in a karate class, sat up, and the sound went away. She stayed like that for a minute, staring at the white walls, the blizzard stubbornly following her even now, until the alarm jolted her into movement. She silenced it again, then checked the time. Good. It was still early. Morgan set about the task of getting ready for school.

After all, this had been the plan all along.

Morgan’s bedroom had a tall, narrow window that faced the street. Opposite the window, in the back corner just above the floor and beside the headboard, were two pipes protruding from the wall. They were cut down, capped off, and out of the way. She guessed that her bedroom used to be a bathroom, but in the two months she’d been here she had never bothered to ask, because the answer felt obvious.

Where else would you stick the oldest foster kid?

The room had thin carpeting that didn’t quite match the hallway carpet, which made Morgan think that it had been purchased at a discount carpet store. She had hung clothing, mostly hoodies, on a series of hooks at the back of her door, and taped a modest collection of posters to the walls. Finally, there was a floating shelf for her books. Fantasy books mostly. Old ones, because Morgan liked how books used to be written. She liked the worlds that authors imagined and how she could imagine herself in them. She would read books on her bed, facing the window. She’d lie on her stomach, kick her feet in the air, and get lost. Other times, she would just sneak to the attic. There, she could really be alone, and she could really escape.

Escaping was the plan this morning, just not into another world. Rather, Morgan intended to get out of the house and on her way to school solo. It would be a peaceful walk on her own for once, without Eli, the new foster kid. Over the last week, since he’d arrived at the house, it felt like she’d become a glorified babysitter, even though, at twelve, Eli was only a year younger than her.

Morgan got dressed in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black hoodie, and tied her black hair into a loose ponytail. She pulled the door open in slow motion to prevent any squeaking from the hinges: success. Halfway there. Now there was just the matter of the hallway. She took one soft step, then another, all without even a whisper of a sound.

Morgan felt like a ninja.

To her left was Eli’s bedroom. She could see the mound of his body underneath the Star Wars comforter their foster parents had bought him prior to his arrival. The only personal touch in the room and it wasn’t even his. At least Morgan had her things on walls and hooks, and even clothes scattered on the floor. If Eli hadn’t been sleeping in the bed right now, you’d never have known that somebody was living there. There was only Eli and the oversized drawing pad he brought everywhere, like Linus and his blanket.

More ninja steps followed.

The only thing that worried Morgan was Katie and James; their bedroom was directly adjacent to the stairwell, as though they’d known beforehand that they’d have to contend with a teenaged girl sneaking around. Luckily, the door to the stairwell was open. This meant all she needed to do was continue on her improbable run of silent steps. She could already picture herself walking to school alone. The sun would be shining, the grass emerald green, the birds chirping. There’d be no snowstorm, no square light in the distance that never got closer, no crunching footsteps.

She was almost home free. She put her foot down quietly. If I did want to sneak out one night, I could totally do it, Morgan thought. She’d run away before, which wasn’t quite the same as sneaking out. Not from Katie and James’s place, but from her last foster home. More than once. That was what had brought her here.

She took another step.

Creak.

Morgan stiffened. Maybe nobody would wake up. The peaceful, isolated walk to school could still happen, right? She wouldn’t have to look back to ensure Eli was still with her, lugging that drawing pad with him. He was a small kid for his age, so the drawing pad looked comically big wedged between his arm and his torso. She wouldn’t have to try to make conversation with him, because he hadn’t said much since arriving here. She could just put her earbuds in and take her time.

“Morgan?” James asked from the bedroom. “Is that you?”

Morgan sighed. Why did James have to have superhuman hearing?

“Yeah.”

On the plus side, at least now she could go back to sleep for an hour.

---

When Morgan got up again, having, ironically, slept in, everybody was awake and breakfast was waiting for her. Arranged neatly on her plate, as though James was competing in a cooking show on the Food Network, were scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, hash browns, and a perfectly quartered orange.

Morgan’s stomach grumbled so loudly that everybody must have heard it: Katie, sitting across from her; James, sitting to her right, watching to see how Morgan would react to the food; and Eli, to her left, looking down at his own plate.

“Wait a minute.” Morgan inspected the plate of food more thoroughly. The scrambled eggs resembled a mop of curly hair. The bacon strips were decidedly fat lips. Two orange slices were ears, and the final two were eyes.

James snorted, trying to stifle a laugh.

“Are you serious?” Morgan buried her face in her palms.

“Too bad he doesn’t have a nose, because the food smells great,” James said with a guffaw.

“You know I’m thirteen, not three, right?” Morgan asked. “I think you forgot about the, you know, one in front of the three or something.”

“James thought it might…” Katie gave him a deliberate side-eye. “Cheer you up?”

“Cheer me up,” Morgan echoed.

“You’ve been…you’ve looked upset since moving here, almost all the time,” James said, glancing at Katie for approval. “I…we…just want you to feel at home here. Comfortable.”

“But this isn’t my home,” Morgan said. “The last seven places weren’t my home either. Do you think”—Morgan took a deep breath, a technique she’d learned to remain calm—“a breakfast made into a face is going to change any of that?”

“It’s just what families do.” Katie dabbed at her mouth now as though she wanted to wipe away the words she’d just blurted out. She tried again. “We’re new to this, Morgan. This is our first family.” She reached across the table and put her hand on James’s. “It was always just us before you came.”

“I thought the breakfast was an egg-cellent idea.” James bit his lip.

“A pun? Seriously?” Morgan, although her stomach had been roaring, pushed the plate away and crossed her arms. She took more deep breaths. If she blew up, they’d want her gone; then it would be eight homes, not seven. As ridiculous as James was, as annoyingly earnest as Katie was, they weren’t awful. Not the kind of awful she’d had before. Okay, her breakfast had been made into a face. It was better than finding a note on the kitchen table telling her to “Eat what’s left” and sitting alone with a bowl of dry cereal because there was only expired milk in the fridge. Cereal from the bottom of the box, crumbs that only milk could save.

“Puns are what dads use,” James said. “It’s like their language. I was trying—”

Morgan saw Katie give James a short, subtle slap on the hand she’d been holding.

“You’re not my dad!” Morgan said.

“We’re trying, Morgan.” Katie’s voice was quiet, as though this might temper Morgan’s outburst.

“And you’re not my mom,” Morgan said. At least she hadn’t raised her voice. That was a considerable feat, because her blood was at boiling temperature. “Stop trying so hard, and just, I don’t know, lay off.”

“And do what? What do you want us to do?” James asked.

“I don’t know. I’m the kid here!” Morgan stood up. That’s when she noticed that Eli’s meal, too, was shaped into a face. They had breakfast-face twins. “Really!?”

“Well, he hasn’t been…”

“Why do you expect him to be just, like, happy? He got here last week! Let him be sad. He’s going to be sad, okay?” Morgan, for the first time, felt a connection to Eli. “Come on, kid, we’ve got to get to school.”

Eli had been sitting there quietly, unmoving, probably in shock. His brown, almond-shaped eyes were staring at the plate as if he, too, had just noticed the food face; his lips were pursed as though he wasn’t going to utter a word, even if he’d wanted to say something; and his feet seemed glued to the floor until, at Morgan’s urging, he got up from the table and came to stand beside her.

“Morgan…” Katie started.

“Sit down,” James said. “Finish your breakfast at least. I know you’re hungry.”

“Do you want me to do something with your stupid breakfast?” With trembling fingers, Morgan took one of the slices of bacon, broke it in two, and positioned a piece over each eye. She made the other bacon slice into a frown, then pushed the plate towards James. “There! You’ve looked too happy lately; I’m just trying to help.”

“That’s not fair,” James said.

“You know what’s not fair?” Morgan asked. But she stopped, even though Katie and James seemed attentive, ready to hear what she had to say. Unlike the plate of food, they did not look angry. They looked concerned. The only person that Morgan’s plate looked like was, well, Morgan. She shook her head. Her planned speech about moving families, houses, about not even remembering her real home (if she wanted to remember it at all) was abandoned. She just shook her head. “Never mind.”

She grabbed Eli’s hand and brought him with her towards the front door. They got their shoes and backpacks on, and Eli took his drawing pad. Morgan worked very hard not to slam the door, and didn’t.

This was also a feat, but she took no pleasure in it.