A lot changed in that time –some of it sudden and obvious, and some so subtle that nobody noticed until much, much later.  The biggest change, at least at first, came two years in, when the family moved to a new house, and Cade and Melisma started at a new elementary school.

***

“New school, no sweat!”  Ten-year-old Cade flashed an encouraging grin at nine-year-old Melisma as they trundled together towards the bus stop. 

            “Easy for you to say,” Melisma moaned.  “What if everyone hates us?  I wish Mom let me bring my bow.”

            “You won’t even need it.  Listen, if you don’t make any friends in your classes, come sit with me at lunch.  We’ll be losers together.”

            Melisma nodded.  “Thanks, Cade,” she whispered.

            A mud-spattered bus pulled up to the curb, and the door slid open with a grinding wheeze.  Melisma took a deep breath and followed her brother up the stairs.

            There were no empty rows left, so Cade shoved in next to a first grader near the front of the bus.  Melisma approached a girl hunched by herself a few rows back.

            “Uh, mind if I sit here?” she mumbled.

            “Sure,” the girl nodded.  “Are you new?  I haven’t seen you on our bus before.  My name’s Lakshmi.”

            Cade flashed his sister a huge thumbs-up as she settled into the row.  “No sweat,” he mouthed.  Melisma smiled gratefully and turned to meet her new bus partner.

***

Two more years passed, and the Sullivan girls grew taller.  Melisma’s legs stretched long and thin like ships’ masts, until her arms and torso struggled to keep up.  She and Lakshmi joined the school track and field team.  They got to be pretty good.  Doria’s chub-fat turned into muscle as she stretched from toddler to kid.  By second grade, she was the strongest girl in her class, boiling with unreleased energy that she tried to funnel into self-taught gymnastics.  Soon, she spent more time upside down, bent over backwards, or balanced on one leg with the other foot above her head than she did standing normally.  Lyddie grew in every direction all at once, erupting from a tiny baby into a full-fledged six-year-old.  Even though she no longer crawled, she was still somehow always underfoot, asking for help to open something, or close something, or tie something, or to flush the toilet after she’d used it.  It wasn’t that she was helpless; she just liked the attention.

            And then there was Cade.

***

“It’s nothing to worry about.  Everybody knows that girls mature faster than boys.”  Erica Sullivan squeezed her son’s shoulder on the morning of his twelfth birthday.  

            “Yeah, okay, Mom,” Cade replied.  He pulled a sock from his bedroom floor and inspected it.

            Erica resisted the urge to tidy things up or straighten the bed.  “I’ve got a meeting with Payables this evening, so I may be home late.  What type of cake do you want me to pick up?”

            Melisma jogged through Cade’s door and pushed past her brother.  She now stood only a centimeter shorter than him, though she was a full year younger.  “Oh, there you are, Mom,” she said.  “Can Lakshmi come over tonight?”

            “No.”  Erica frowned at her.  “It’s your brother’s party.  If he’s not inviting a friend, you shouldn’t either.”

            Melisma groaned in exasperation.  “Well, if that’s the rule, I’ll never have a friend over!”

            Erica shot her daughter a warning glare, and Melisma took the hint.  She stalked grumpily toward the door.

            Cade frowned.  “Actually, I don’t mind if….”  He trailed off.  His sister was already gone.

In her place, his father stormed through the door.  “This is outrageous,” Andrew Sullivan declared, brandishing a brightly colored greeting card festooned with holographic superheroes.

            Cade He frowned in confusion.  Wasn’t he supposed to open his own card?  He read the card’s cover.  “To an awesome nephew: I hope your birthday is a day worth saving.”

            Dad flipped the card over and unfolded a paper note tucked inside.  “Which Hero Are You?” he read.  “Take this short quiz to unlock your Personality Superpower!”

            Cade and his mother stared blankly back.

            “It’s a personality test!” Andrew shouted at his wife.  “Your sister’s still trying to cash in on that insurance policy!”

            Cade sighed and slipped through his bedroom door while his parents argued.  It was getting way too crowded in there.

***

In the years after Aunt Delilah left, the Sullivan girls experienced personality spurts to match their growth spurts.  As she outgrew her diapers, Lyddie abandoned her all-purpose “ba” and branched her vocabulary into new phrases, like “Ball,” and “Bad,” and “Stop it, Doria!  I’m gonna tell!”  As soon as she learned to speak in full sentences, she fell in love with talking, until she often forgot to stop once she’d started.

For Doria, “The Blob” grew from a simple nickname into a totem and a passion.  She fell in love with what she called “the forgotten animals,” the blobby ones without bones or skeletons, like slugs and jellyfish and leeches and squids.  She received a stuffed pink octopus for her fourth birthday, and she wrapped it in her baby blanket and carried it with her everywhere, until the blanket finally disintegrated a year later.

Melisma began to find her way in the world.  She had Lakshmi now, and, with one good friend by her side, she quickly began to make more.  It turned out the world was a much less scary place than she’d thought as a seven-year-old, and it wasn’t hard to find things in common with the kids around her.  She found herself looking forward to the start of each year of school, eager to meet the cluster of unfamiliar faces that came along with every new class.

And then there was Cade.

***

“What is your brother doing?”  The metal bench wobbled slightly as Lakshmi Delacourt leaned across the outdoor cafeteria table and pointed.  She and Melisma had been planning for a mall crawl they’d embark upon that weekend, but Cade now captured her full attention.

            Melisma turned and followed Lakshmi’s gaze.  Her brother wandered across the far end of the campus, near the entrance to the athletic field, muttering to himself and waving his arms in tiny circles.  From the way he repeatedly puffed out his cheeks, fanned his fingers and ballooned his hands up and away from each other, it looked like he was telling himself a story, with lots of gunfire and explosions.

Melisma felt a pang of sympathy for Cade.  He brother looked so tiny out there by himself, like someone slipped an elementary schooler onto the middle school campus.  The rest of his eighth-grade class now towered over him, even the girls.  That must be rough, she thought.  On the other hand, he wasn’t making things any easier for himself.  After all, he chose to wear hiking boots and corduroy shorts to school.

Against her better judgment, she decided to throw him a lifeline.  When he circled within earshot, she called out. “Hey, Cade, come sit with us!”

Lakshmi’s head jerked up in surprise.  “What are you doing?” she gasped.

Cade’s head rose as well.  He squinted at Melisma and trudged a few steps closer.  Then he noticed Lakshmi sitting behind her with a panicked expression on her face.  His cheeks turned beet-red.

“Nah, I’m good,” he called back.  He turned away from his sister and resumed his pacing and explosions.

Melisma sighed as she sat back down.  “Okay then,” she said, annoyed.  “I guess if he wants to be a weirdo, there’s not much I can do.”

***

When Cade entered high school, his parents could no longer deny he had a growth problem.  Their son was unquestionably measly.  They sat with doctors and studied x-rays and growth charts as if they were maps to sunken treasure, searching for the precise barren island of hormones on which their son had been marooned.

The doctor gave Cade a series of shots.  Nothing happened at first, then his body finally spluttered into action.  His bones grudgingly lengthened.  His voice wavered, cracked, then dropped completely out from under him, stranding him three-quarters of an octave lower.  Angry blotches of acne exploded across his high cheeks and pointed nose, and no amount of ointment or exfoliating cream could drive them away.

But as Cade’s body grew, so did his temper.

***

Fourteen-year-old Cade threw himself into his bedroom, slamming the door fiercely behind him.  A moment later, his father barreled down the hallway after him.  “This isn’t funny, Cade!  Your bat’s in the car; now grab your mitt and get out here before we miss registration!”

            “I’m not going,” Cade shouted from inside.

            “Yes, you are!   Your mother pulled a lot of strings with her boss to get you a spot at his son’s summer camp.  If you flake out now, think how bad you’ll make her look!”

            Cade snorted.  “I’m sure she’ll just work an extra fifty hours to make up for it, like she always does.  I hate baseball!”

            Andrew’s jaw clenched and his pulse raced.  “Oh no, you don’t!  You don’t get to hate baseball.  Not after already hating basketball, soccer, camping, swimming, and everything else I’ve tried to teach you!  Honestly, Cade, the money I’ve wasted on equipment….”

            “Nobody ASKED you to spend money!” Cade screamed.  “Just like nobody’s asking you to waste MORE money registering me for tryouts we both KNOW I’ll fail!”

            Andrew wrenched the doorknob so hard, he almost twisted the metal.  He flung the door wide and barged through.  Cade stared slack jawed as his father yanked open the closet door, retrieved a baseball mitt, and shoved it hard into his chest.

            “Car!  Now!”  Andrew roared.  Cade stalked, seething, from the room.  Andrew took a moment to collect his breath, then slammed the door and followed.  He’d find a sport for his son to love if he had to drag him kicking and screaming.

***

After Aunt Delilah stormed out, Andrew Sullivan spent weeks haranguing the insurance company.  He ran through endless bureaucratic circles to get there, but, eventually, Suleiman Kruld documents stopped arriving in the mail.  Andrew counted that as a victory and let the matter rest. 

Even so, the relationship between the Sullivans and Aunt Delilah never totally healed.  Whenever things started to ease toward normality, one of Delilah’s poorly timed gestures would send Andrew through the roof.  Cade’s birthday card was just the beginning.  One Christmas, she bought memberships for all four children at an online website called “Know Your Brain, Know Yourself!”  After Melisma opened the first envelope, her father grabbed the other three and tossed them in the fireplace.

            The year after that, he interrupted Doria’s birthday phone call.

            “Hi, Aunt Delilah!” Doria beamed.

“You’re getting so big, Doria; you sound all grown up!” Aunt Delilah gushed.  “Now, would you say you’re more of an introvert or an extrovert these days?”

Click.

            Erica wanted to give her sister another chance, but it was hard to convince her husband when he saw everything Delilah did as an attempt to probe at the children’s brains.  At the rate things were going, they would never see their aunt again.

Then their father broke his leg.

***

It’s funny how a person can do something they’ve done a thousand times before, but, this time, it suddenly turns out disastrous.  Andrew Sullivan set out on his bicycle for an early-morning grocery trip and ended up in the hospital instead.

The cause of the accident was almost too stupid to mention.  As he coasted down a gently-curving stretch of sidewalk, Andrew swerved one way while his path swerved the other, and physics did the rest.  He flew over the handlebars and ended up sprawled in a pile of cartons and eggshells, his shinbone snapped clean through.

Andrew fished his cell phone from his pocket.  It still worked, although the screen was cracked. He dialed the first number on his speed dial.

***

Halfway across the country, Erica dozed through a seminar about asset amortization.  She jumped from her seat and raced from the hotel conference room as her phone began to vibrate.

“Why did you call me instead of an ambulance?” she asked her husband.

“Oh yeah, that’s a good idea,” Andrew said.  “I should call an ambulance.  Hang on just a second….”  The line disconnected.

Erica sighed and moved to a couch with better phone reception.  If Andrew was out of commission, she had work to do.

***

“Yes, Mom.  Got it, Mom.”  Melisma’s eyes were wide with panic, but she worked to keep her voice steady like her mother’s.  She set the phone down and reached for her socks with trembling fingers. 

            “What’s going on?”  Cade slouched in her bedroom doorway.  He’d heard enough of the call to know that something big had happened, but not enough to know what it was.

            “Dad had an accident,” Melisma said.  “He’s at the hospital now.  Mom wants me to go get his bike and whatever’s left of the groceries.”  She pictured a mangled bike lying in the street somewhere, and her jaw began to quiver.

            Cade’s eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open.  “I can come help you,” he said.

            “No,” Melisma responded.  “You’re the oldest.  Mom wants you to stay here and take care of Doria and Lyddie.”

            Cade’s face fell.  “Whatever,” he grumbled.

            Melisma set off anxiously to pick broken eggshells from the sidewalk.  Cade reluctantly stayed behind, allowing Doria and Lyddie to pull him into an argument about whether the sea sponge was an animal, a vegetable, or, in Lyddie’s words, a “stupid fart-bottom fathead.”  

***

Back at the hotel, Erica dialed the next number in her address book.  Her seminar would last another three days, which was much too long to leave the children in the care of a moody fourteen-year-old boy.  She needed to get a responsible adult to the house as soon as possible.

            She didn’t have much luck.  Their regular person was on vacation, which was why Andrew had been home with the kids in the first place.  The sitter before that had left on bad terms, and the girl before that had moved.  Erica dialed neighbors, classmates’ mothers, even their physician’s daughter!  Everyone had something going on.

            In desperation, she dialed one last number.  Andrew wouldn’t be happy, she knew, but there really were no other options.

***

            Forty-five minutes later, the Sullivan family’s front doorbell rang.  Lyddie swung the door wide and found herself face-to-face with a smiling Aunt Delilah.

            “Who are you, lady?” Lyddie grunted.