We should have been talking about the outfit I’d hung in the hall—some soft cotton leggings that would stretch while I stretched. A long flannel shirt. A belt. Some combat boots. Or maybe we’d talk about my book bag, stuffed to the brim with fresh notebooks and clicky pencils and pens. Or maybe my three AP classes: English, Calculus and Biology! But no, instead we were going to blow right by my first day of senior year at a new school and go straight to Babytown.

“We need to discuss Serendipity’s situation,” Mormor opened with. The three of us were seated at the dinner table around a platter of gravy-slathered meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and homemade rolls. Mom and I had been more casual about dinner back at the apartment, but Mormor insisted on family meals every night. If you were silly enough to walk by the kitchen around five, she’d assign you sous-chef duties, making you cut onions or some other god-awful thing because she didn’t want to do it.

“What about it?” My mother doled out her potatoes and handed me the bowl. I doubled up on it because I was ravenous. The nausea was still hanging around in the mornings, but by late afternoon, I’d become a walking, talking food vacuum.

All the food for the food hole!

“The baby. We have it on our fridge. Look at it. It looks like a Larssen.” Mormor pointed over her shoulder at my black-and-white fetus photo, held up on the freezer by alphabet letter magnets Mormor bought me when I was three.

My mother frowned. “No, it doesn’t. It looks like an insect.”

“They,” I corrected both of them. “They look like an insect.”

“Don’t be pedantic, Serendipity. Answer the question—do you still want to sell it? Them? Sell them?” Mormor sniffed. “I think we deserve to know.”

My mother rolled her eyes. “She’s not selling the baby to a circus, Ma. She’s looking at maybe putting them up for adoption! And we talked about this—lay off.”

“So why hang the picture? To taunt me?” Mormor’s fork stabbed into her meat loaf, spearing it like she’d spear the cow itself before butchering it with her bare hands. Her ferocity knew no bounds. “To show me a baby that will not live here?”

“It’s not about you,” Mom singsonged. “We’ve been over this. A thousand times.”

Which, if they had, they’d kept me out of it, and I was grateful for that. Their bickering made them sound like those two angry old men from The Muppets.

I crammed a dozen green beans into my mouth and focused on my plate, pretending my grandmother wasn’t staring at me from across the table. Every clink of her fork striking china, every one of her sighs seeming exaggerated.