Theodora Twist Read Free Page B

crack of dawn. Hang on, Soph, I’m coming. We can cry together.
    But before I even hit the steps, my mom is coming down, Sophie in her arms. My mom looks exhausted. I love my baby sister, but if the government or schools or whoever is looking for a way to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy, a baby brother or sister at age fifteen will blast the idea of unprotected sex right out of anyone’s head.
    My mom yawns. It’s just after eight p.m. on a Saturday and she can barely keep her eyes open. She’s wearing sweats—fun pink ones that I bought her for her birthday three months ago—but they’re stained with spit-up and sweet potato puree. She’s lucky she has gorgeous straight light brown hair—it always looks perfect. “I thought I heard Zach’s voice before I fell asleep,” she says. “But when I passed by your room, I heard Belle and Jen talking.”
    I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t even want to talk about it.
    “Em?” she says. “You okay?”
    I want to fling myself into her arms, but Sophie starts fussing. My mom jiggles her a bit. Sophie is now screaming her head off.
    “Emily,” Stew calls from his den. “Can you go soothe Sophie back to sleep? Your mom’s taking a nap. Thanks, hon.”
    No, you’re taking a nap, I want to yell. I roll my eyes at my mom, and she gives me the “you just don’t understand how hard he works/how exhausting it all is” look.
    I try to understand. I really do. But I don’t get any of it. What happened to being happy, which was the whole point of marrying Stew in the first place? For months after meeting him, my mom walked around with a sappy smile on her face, saying for no reason at all: “He makes me so happy, Emily!”
    Which made me happy. In a previous life, my mom, Stephie Stewarts, was a high-powered Manhattan corporate lawyer named Stephanie Fine. She was always busy, but always happy. Then my dad (a high-powered corporate lawyer named Alexander Fine) died, and my mom’s entire world came to a screeching halt. She took leave from her job and just cried. All day. All night. My grand-parents (both sets) tried to get her to join a bereavement group, but she wouldn’t.
    I did, though. A guidance counselor at school told me that a senior had formed an after-school club for grieving students. She called it the Lost and Found club and noted on the flyers that anyone suffering a loss was welcome, whether that loss was a parent, a friend, or even a pet. What you were supposed to find was simply support. And thanks to the two girls and three guys in the Lost and Found club when I was twelve, I wasn’t too much of a mess. And I was able to help out my mom as much as she’d let me.
    Almost three years later, she met Stew. A friend dragged her out to a book club meeting, and Stew Stewarts took one look at her gray sweats and the dark circles under her eyes and fell madly in love. Go figure. They dated; she started smiling. Singing in the shower. Walking around commenting on how happy he made her. If she was happy, I was happy, even if Stew wasn’t my dad and never would be. Several months later, they were crib shopping, making lists of baby names, and spending their evenings saying, “Madison and Grace are so last year. How about Hermione?”
    What was I doing? Strangely enough, I renewed my membership in the Lost and Found club, which I’d stopped going to after a year and a half. I thought I was doing okay. Handling my grief. But when my mom and Stew sat me down (I would have rather heard it from my mom first) to tell me I was going to be a big sister (as though I were a five-year-old) and that they were getting married and had made an offer on a big old Victorian across town, I went to a Lost and Found meeting the next day and cried for forty-five minutes to six strangers, which is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in the club. You can also yell, throw things (at a certain section of the room), or not say a word. In the year and a half since my mom and Stew’s