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her to care for a child than a cold beer and a hot date. Unborn babies should be afraid, very afraid, of whom they’ll meet once they scrabble their way out of the womb.
    It’s the kind of thing that hits me at three in the morning. The randomness of it all.
    Mom crosses the room and pulls one of the bottles from the pan, shakes formula on her wrist to check the temperature. Satisfied, she takes both bottles over to the chortling babies, who’ve caught sight of their treasures and are reaching out with tiny saliva-covered fingers and bopping up and down in their seats. In unison, they push silicone teats into red mouths, closing their eyes and sighing with relief as they start to suck and swallow. If Mom weren’t so mad at me, it would be the most delicious moment on earth.
    Brayden appears from nowhere, all braces and bouncy yellow curls and buffalo plaid shirt. He grins as he pokes me in the gut. “So, Enderby, huh? He once did it with a lunch lady. Nice score!”
    “How did you even hear?”
    “How could I not hear?” He thumps me in the chest. “The whole school knows, MANdrea.”
    I shove him backward. “Yeah? Well, check your facts next time, Bray!”
    He loses his footing and falls against the oven, then lets himself flop onto the floor where he fakes his death. After a moment, he puffs out his mouth as if he’s hiding a strawberry in there, but what he’s really hiding is laughter because the whole tumble was staged. He groans in Mom’s direction. “See what she did to me?”
    “Don’t play people for sympathy, Brayden,” says Mom. “You never want to wheedle love out of anyone. You’re better than that.”
    Bray ignores Mom and throws a useless kick in my direction. “She’s verbally abusing a foster child. Didn’t you tell her I was born a crack baby?”
    Mom leans down to pull him upright. As her hand caresses his hair, he winks at me. “You are not your history, Brayden Jacob Green. Don’t ever use it like that, not even as a joke. You are loved. Do you know why?”
    “Why?”
    She squishes his face between her hands and kisses his nose. “Because you are a wonderful human being and you are worthy of affection.” She spins him around and swats his behind. “Now go take your turn in the shower before the girls get home and hog the bathroom.”
    He walks out slowly, letting each leg stomp out in front of him as he passes me by, grinning. “Okay,
Mom.”
    I look at Mom, appalled. Brayden has broken the Mom/Lise, Dad/Gary rule. Only I—as Number One of thirty-seven—am allowed to call Mom and Dad “Mom
    and Dad.” This, besides being the only one who has her own room, is my one privilege as a full-blooded Birch. The others have to say Lise or Gary. They
have
to say Lise or Gary. It’s a rule.
    “Mom,” I say. “He didn’t call you Lise!”
    “Sorry, Lise.” Brayden turns around at the doorway and makes sad puppy eyes at her. “Sometimes I forget I wasn’t born to you.”
    “I put in an order for you, funny boy,” Mom calls out from the stove. “You just came to me a different way.”
    Ugh. For a moment I debate telling Mom I saw him smoking as Joules and I whizzed past the shop buildings, but I figure it will only incriminate me even more.
    Mom turns back to the high chairs to release the toddlers into their playpen, conveniently missing Brayden mooning me from down the hall. I stomp threateningly in his direction and he disappears, the bathroom door slamming shut behind him.
    “As for you, Andrea …” She motions for me to follow her down the hall, where she tugs a rusted metal cot from the closet, complete with a blue-striped mattress folded inside. Then she pulls out a stack of sheets and plunks them in my arms. “Come with me.”
    I do, as she pushes the squeaking cot all the way down to my bedroom door.
    “We need your room.” She bumps my door open with her hip and announces, like it’s a good thing, that my furniture needs to be pushed to one corner.
    “What?