I open my contacts, pull him up, stab at the edit button, then rename him again. “Stephen-the-Leaver.” It almost rhymes, but doesn’t, which is disappointing, but I can’t think of anything better right this minute, so it’ll have to do.
The voice-mail message notification pops up just as I hit save, and I delete the stupid thing without listening to it.
Right, it’s his weekend with the halflings. I can’t be here when he shows up. He might ask me to join them again.
If he wanted me to join them, maybe he should have sought custody of me, too, instead of telling the judge that I’m not his real daughter. I saw the papers in Mom’s desk. He didn’t ask for custody or even for any time with me at all.
I’m too ADHD, too stupid, too not-his-own-blood for him to care about me.
I flick through my phone contacts again. Maxx, who I went to junior high with, would probably know where there’s a party tonight, but he doesn’t answer when I call. Neither does good old Greggles, who works down the street at the 7-Eleven. Finally I give in and call pot-smoking, boring Alexis, who of course has a party to invite me to. Praise Her Majesty the Queen.
I’ve been to parties with Alexis’s friends before, and like Alexis, they’re all potheads who sit around doing nothing, but at least I can do nothing somewhere else instead of here. I grab a pen and scribble down the address on the back of my hand, then run the pen over it a few more times.
A car door slams outside just as I’m hanging up the phone. Mom and the halflings.
More doors slam, and then I sit up as the frizzy-haired bundle that is three-year-old Kenzie barrels into my room, onto my bed, and into my lap, still-shoe-covered toes smashing into my knees as she throws her arms around my neck. Halfling #1.
“I just magicked you into a goober,” she says. Her natural black curls, which puff out of four little ponytails, blend with my own.
“Why thank you, Kenzie dear. I’ve always wanted to be a goober.” I pull off her pink Mary Janes and throw them onto the floor, and she rolls off my lap and starts jumping on the bed in her stocking feet, her only-slightly-ripped pink dress flapping up and down with each jump.
“Hi, Meg.” Nolan’s quiet voice drifts in from the doorway, where he stands with his backpack hanging off one shoulder and his tiny glasses slipping down his freckled, dark-brown nose. Halfling #2. He pushes his glasses up with a single finger. At six years old, he is already pure nerd. In the best way.
“Come here,” I say, and he sets his backpack down carefully in the hallway before plodding across the room. As soon as he gets close enough, I scoop him up into a bear hug, and then Kenzie launches herself on top of us, and we are a jumble of arms and legs and Kenzie-giggles.
My half siblings. The miniature-sized spawn of my mother and Stephen-the-Leaver. Nolan with skin just a shade lighter than earth brown, like our mother’s. Kenzie with skin just a shade darker, like our respective fathers. And mine. I should ask them if they’re packed for tonight. Should ask them what they’re all doing this weekend—if he’s taking them out for pizza like last time.
But I can’t bring myself to ask any of that.
“You guys want to watch LumberLegs with me?” I ask instead once we disintegrate. No, disentangle. Mom always says that if I took more time to think before I talked, I wouldn’t mess up words so much. But how can I take time to think before I think? I point at my laptop. Kenzie crinkles up her nose and flees from the room. Nolan blinks up at me with a look that says, “I don’t really want to, but I will if you want me to.”
“Get out,” I say, smacking him on the bum with Kenzie’s shoe. “Go play with your books or whatever.” He smiles gratefully at me and ambles away.
No one ever wants to watch LumberLegs with me.
My friend Larissa, from my friend group before the friendship bracelet girls (or maybe the one before that), introduced me to LumberLegs around the time Stephen-the-Leaver left. She kept telling me about this YouTuber who does play-throughs of this super-popular video game, Legends of the Stone—aka LotS—and posts the videos, and it sounded dull as heck, but then she showed me this video where Legs is trying to reach this golden crown but is so terrible at jumping that he constantly lets out these ridiculous screams that are more squeals of terror than roars of frustration as he plummets into the lava below. By the end of it we were both laughing so hard I peed myself just a little and had to spend the rest of the evening with my legs daintily crossed.
I started watching all the time, but apparently my preference for losing myself in Legs’s hilariousness over actually playing the game meant I wasn’t a real LotS fan, so she made a character for me and then couldn’t understand why it bothered me that the brown of the character’s skin was so much lighter than mine. She called me picky and went off on her “not a real fan” lecture again, so I called her racist or something and that was the end of that friendship. But I kept LumberLegs, so it was a fair trade.
I pull my laptop closer and roll over onto my stomach.
I don’t get why no one ever wants to watch with me. LumberLegs is hilarious and thoughtful and has like five million subscribers. Plus he’s drop-dead gorgeous, so even if they’re not into games and hilarity, at least there’s that. Since he’s a guy who plays video games for a living, you might expect him to be pale and pimply, with greasy hair and glasses, but he has sleek black hair, sharp green eyes, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. I think he’s white, but he could be mixed, like maybe his grandpa is East Indian or something. Each week he does FaceCam Fridays, and I curl up on my bed with my laptop and laugh my pants off. Not literally, of course. Other girls don’t get it, though. The one time at a sleepover when I convinced everyone to watch the lava video, only one girl laughed the way I did, and she moved away three weeks later.
I wink at Legs on the screen, then grab my mascara and green shadow from off the floor beside Kenzie’s shoes and start smoothing on my makeup while Legs fights a venomous wereboar. There’s no time to do anything with my hair, so I fight the curls back into a ponytail. My cousins have gotten their hair relaxed since they were maybe three years old, but Mom has ranted so many times about the years it took for the frizzy straightness to grow out when she decided to stop relaxing it and go natural, and I don’t have that kind of patience. Besides, I like my curls. I just wish they weren’t so much work.
By the time Mom calls me down for supper, I am fully decked out and ready to go.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Mom asks when I waltz into the kitchen, though she can’t really complain. I’m decent by anyone’s standards. Strappy black dress that reaches more than halfway to my knees, lime-green leggings, my favorite black cardigan with big purple buttons that cloaks my shoulders and arms, and my green high-top Converses. I can take the cardigan off when I get to the party.