CHAPTER 1
It wasn’t a morning in the Carmichael household unless one of the siblings was screaming.
Some mornings, it was me.
This morning, it was Junie.
“Open the door, Ivy!” Junie’s shriek made me wince even from all the way down the hall. Several heavy bangs followed. “I have to brush my teeth!”
Muffled, Ivy’s smaller voice shouted back, “You already had your five minutes in the bathroom!”
Junie let out a screech. “Daaaaaisyyyy!”
I closed my eyes against the decibel squeal of my name. My two youngest sisters beating down the door of our only working bathroom was not the most pressing issue, believe it or not. No, my attention had to be on the form slumped, unmoving, under a mauve duvet cover.
“C’mon, Penn.” I kicked the foot of my fourteen-year-old sister’s bed, pain flaring in my toes. “Get up. You’re going to miss the bus.”
“Five more minutes,” she grumbled, burying her face into her pillows.
“Nomore minutes.” I kicked the bedpost again, hard enough that her body jostled and my foot ached worse. “If you miss the bus, you’re walking. I’m not driving you separately again.”
That was Penelope’sthinglately. Squeeze out a few more minutes of sleep—or, really, just shut-eye, because no way she could keep sleeping with the near-brawl happening out in the hall—and force me to take the extra car to drive her to school. It was a good thing Mr. Taylor was understanding—miraculously, the Dead Dad card still worked almost five years later—or else I’d have detention three times over now.
“Penn, I?—”
She cut me off with an obnoxious, fake snore.
I stared at her, trying to breathe through my nose, wondering if Mom would ground me for taking a pillow and smothering Penn with it. Mom had three other daughters. Would she really miss one?
Another heavy thud came as Junie pounded on the bathroom door. I could’ve sworn I heard something crack. “Ivy, open thisfreakingdoor!”
“Hey!” The word wrenched out of me in an instant, and I practically flew out of Penn’s room to glare at the ten-year-old down the hall. “Juniper Carmichael, watch your mouth!”
Junie’s cheeks were red when she turned around, but Icouldn’t tell if it was from anger or embarrassment from being caught swearing. Her strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail I’d put up ten minutes ago, exposing the scowl of her tiny features. “Ivy won’t open the door, and I have to brush my teeth!”
Sighing, I turned back to Penn. “Last chance, Penelope.”
She gave another fake snore.
Gritting my teeth, I ducked out into the hallway. “What were you doing when you had the bathroom earlier?”
Junie folded her arms across her chest as I came closer. “Pooping, if you have to know.”
Ugh. I’d asked. “Ivy,” I called, rapping my knuckles against the door far more gently than Junie did. “What are you doing in there?”
“Pooping!”
I closed my eyes and let out a slow breath through my nose.I am losing my mind.
It was the same every morning, just different things to scream about. With four kids, it was alwayssomething. Yesterday morning, it’d been because Ivy left her waffles on the kitchen table and Theo, who’d finished getting dressed first, helped himself to her plate. The day before that, Junie couldn’t find her tie for her uniform. The day beforethat, it’d been stomps and screams from all four of them, not wanting to go back to school after the weekend.
Now it was Thursday, the day before my last day of my senior year, and I was going to lose my mind.
The door to the bathroom swung inward, revealingeight-year-old Ivy. I’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail earlier after she’d gotten dressed, but the blonde hung down like a curtain around her shoulders now. “Here,” she said with all the sass of a first grader.
“What did you do to your hair?” I asked her as Junie stormed into the bathroom.
“It was too tight.” She used her palms to smack it out of her face. “I want to leave it down today.”
