“Pike is talking to the police,” she says. “They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead!”

I shake my head, unable to understand any of this. “But they can’t be dead, April. They don’t die, this doesn’t happen. It isn’t happening. It isn’t…” I try to swallow. “Who shot…who shot them? I don’t get it.”

“They’re dead!” she screams and then breaks off into loud sobs that seem to shake the phone and then there is silence.

In the silence I realize I’m not breathing.

My heart is barely beating.

I feel outside of my body and inside my body all at once, reality of whatever this is refusing to set in.

“Hello?” someone says into the phone. I forgot I was even holding it to my ear and it takes me a moment to recognize the voice.

“Pike? Pike, what’s going on?” I manage to say.

He clears his throat, his voice shaking as he says, “There was a guy, from the prison. He’d been out for a few months, I guess he hated dad. He, uh…he came into the house and shot him. And mom. As they watched TV in the living room. We were all at the fair, the neighbor heard the shots and called me.”

To hear it from Pike, quiet, dependable Pike, suddenly makes it real.

“I can’t believe this,” I whisper. Because I can’t. “Dad would have shot back. Dad has his guns, how could he have walked in, wouldn’t Walter have barked?”

“He shot Walter too.”

Our beloved dog.

Somehow this is making it hit home, suddenly this seems like it could be real. An ex-convict broke into our house and shot our dog, our wonderful dog.

But how could he shoot my parents? How could they be dead?

This isn’t happening.

“The guy was arrested not too far from here,” Pike says and I’m wondering how he’s staying so calm. I guess he has to. Our parents are dead and I’m not there. He’s the oldest.

But I’m their legal guardian.

“They’re gone, Maggie,” he says. “Gone.” He takes in a deep breath and a small whimper comes over the phone. “I think you need to talk to the cops. Hold on.”

Hold on.

Hold…on.

To what?

What is there to ever hold on to again?

What in this world will ever be solid and stable and good again?

“What happened?” Sam whispers as she sits down across from me, placing my drink in front of me. The drink. She bought me a drink. I would give anything in my power to go back in time, just five minutes, to that moment where my biggest worry was my lack of love life and money. To that time where my parents were alive.

“They’re dead,” I say to her, voice barely a whisper, flat, dull. “My parents are dead.”

My world, my wonderful, crazy, hopeful little world, was forever gone.

Gone.

Gone.

“This can’t be happening,” I tell her, the shock starting to wear off, letting in tiny slivers of pain that I know will rip me apart, never to be put back again. “This can’t be happening.”

But it is.

PART ONE

Chapter One

Maggie

One Year Later

Tehachapi, California

* * *

“Where the hell are the Frosted Flakes?”

“Rosemary, don’t say hell.”

“We just have Cornflakes.”

“Okay, who drank the last of the orange juice and put the carton back in the fridge?”

“Why don’t you just sprinkle sugar on the Cornflakes, it’s the same as Frosted Flakes.”

“These aren’t even Cornflakes. They’re called Flakes of Corn. We can’t even afford real Cornflakes.”

“Did you know that Cornflakes were invented to stop masturbating?”

“April! Not in front of Callum.”

“What’s masturbating?”

I close my eyes and try to will myself back into the happy peaceful place that the yoga and meditation YouTube videos have been telling me about. I’ve been using them for months now to help my stress and anxiety, and I think I have to face facts that my happy peaceful place just doesn’t exist.

“Guys, everyone shut up,” Pike says in his deep voice, making everyone in the kitchen hush. “You’re going to give Maggie an aneurysm.”

A brief pause.

I can hear the grandfather clock in the hallway tick on.

Finally, Callum asks. “What’s an aneurysm?”

I open my eyes and can’t help but smile at my youngest brother. He’s only seven but he’s bright and always asking questions. Always getting into trouble too, which I’ve been discovering lately.

“It’s what I’ll get if you guys don’t behave.”

“Then what’s masturbating?”

“It’s what you do when you can’t get laid,” April says under her breath.

“April,” I reprimand her, but she doesn’t shrink at all from my glare. She never does. Pisses me right off.

I sigh and mix up some instant oatmeal into the boiling water on the stove and the kitchen dissolves into chaos again.

I never asked to be the legal guardian of my siblings. I never asked for my parents to be brutally murdered in the very home that we’re all in. I never asked to give up my dreams of a career and a better life to come back here to Tehachapi and pick up the pieces of all the lives that were completely shattered.

I never asked for any of this. None of us did. But I’m here and I’m doing the best I can every day to ensure a brighter future for my brothers and sisters.

But…shit. It is hard as hell. I was close with my mother, though we had many years of ups and downs as all mothers and daughters do. But I never once thought about how hard it must be to raise us all. I knew she worked her ass off, I knew my father did too. I knew that we always just scraped by. I grew up in a world where if something broke, you either fixed it or waited years for a replacement that wasn’t much better. Where bargain bins and thrift stores and generous neighbors were our only real source of goods.

But I never realized how emotionally tiring and complex it is to actually raise a family, especially one of this size with so many different, and often times conflicting, personalities.

There’s Callum, who is the youngest. But when I say he gets into trouble, I mean the moment you tell him not to do something, he’ll do it. And as bright and curious as he is, he’s struggling at school and getting in fights with kids. He may smile a lot and have big sparkling blue eyes but I can see the pain and frustration underneath.

There are the twins, Rosemary and Thyme (yeah, yeah I know), who are eleven years old. Despite their names, which makes many eyes roll, the twins are smart, hard-working and diligent. They don’t “match” either–Rosemary is a jock-in-training, Thyme is a goth-in-training. Contrary to what you might think, Thyme is the outgoing one and Rosemary can be competitive and sullen. But other than Pike, they’re the biggest help to me in this house.

April is fourteen, boy-crazy, pretty—and she knows it—but angry too. All of that combined makes for a lethal force. My biggest fear for her is that she’s going to get pregnant at some point, or maybe start doing drugs if she hasn’t already. Maybe something worse. I worry about her the most and she seems to hate me the most, so I guess that’s kind of how this relationship works.

Then there’s Pike. Now eighteen and out of high school, Pike is old enough to be their legal guardian, so we kind of share the duties. He was all set to go to university on a scholarship except our parent’s death threw his last bit of high school out of whack and he pretty much bombed all the classes he needed to ace. He won’t even try again. He now has his sights set on being a tattoo artist instead of the paleontologist he originally wanted to be. Talk about a 180. He’s quiet, doesn’t talk much, and spends a lot of his time smoking cigarettes and putting ink on himself.

My family was always kind of complex before my parents died, so you can imagine that everyone here, including me, is still deep in the thick of it, each trying to deal with the loss the best we can.

“Hey,” Pike says, coming over with some papers in his hand. “R and T are going on a field trip to the air force base and need a signature. Oh, and Callum’s teacher wants us to have a meeting with her.”

I sigh, stirring the oatmeal vigorously. “Why are we doing this now? Where were those papers last night?” I glance at the clock. I have to drop them all off at their schools before I head into work.

“Rosemary forgot,” Thyme speaks up, looking sheepish.

“Oh and you didn’t?” Rosemary says snidely.

I don’t even bother looking at Callum. I know he’s got a mischievous grin on his face. Don’t know why he loves being in trouble so much.

“You know you can sign these,” I tell Pike, snatching the papers from his hands and, oh jeez, I think he just added knuckle tattoos. “What are those?” I gesture to the fresh tattoos.

“Ink,” he says simply, handing me a pen. “And they’re hieroglyphics.”

“Of what?”

“What are hieroglyphics?”

“Oh come on, Callum, don’t be a dummy, you know what those are,” Rosemary says to Callum.

“Rosemary, don’t call him a dummy,” I tell her and then raise my brow at Pike. “Just promise me you won’t start tattooing your face. You have a nice one.”

He gives me a rare smile. “I do?”

“Don’t get a big head about it but yeah. You’re the only hope this family has to go off and marry a sugar mama. Or daddy. We won’t judge as long as you pass the coin down our way.”

“What’s a sugar–?”

“Callum, stop asking so many questions!” someone yells.

I quickly sign the forms and then stride over to the calendar on the fridge where I make a note of an after-class meeting with Callum’s teacher.

“Do you want to go or should I?” I ask Pike. “It’s in the evening.”