“No problem,” I say, and head toward the children’s room with Lucas.

“Bam!” he shouts, and pretends to shoot a bad guy and then ducks behind a chair. Why can’t he be normal—and quiet—for once?

“Put the books you want to take home on this table,” I tell him.

“Bam!”

While he rummages through the bins of picture books, I wander around, glancing over every once in a while to make sure Lucas isn’t destroying anything. And then a book display on a shelf catches my eye. Ramona Quimby, Age 8. Ramona the Pest. Beezus and Ramona. I smile, remembering reading those books when I was about nine or ten. There’s a movie, too. I love how Beezus is the cool older sister and Ramona is a pest. Those books made me wish I wasn’t an only child. I peer around the bookshelf and see Lucas the Pest amazingly piling books on the table as instructed. I guess I’m not an only child now. I have two stepbrothers. And a sister. Well, half sister. Who would be Beezus and who would be Ramona?

Just as I’m wondering this, I hear a small voice say, “One more.”

There, in a cozy reading nook under a poster of an alien jumping out of a book, I spot her. Mercedes is with a little boy about Lucas’s age. The boy has blond hair and long eyelashes. He’s curled up in Mercedes’s lap. She leans forward, reading aloud to him. Her face is calm, quiet, with half a smile on her lips. This is nothing like the loud, show-off, popular Mercedes I’ve seen at school. Nothing like the cool and aloof Mercedes she is with me. This is a completely different Mercedes. Somehow, I know she wouldn’t want me to see her like this.

I silently reach out and grab Lucas’s pile of books, add Beezus and Ramona to the stack, and motion for him to follow me. Luckily, Lucas does the most un-Lucas-like thing: he quietly follows me to the checkout desk.

CHAPTER 20 Mercedes

Your mom just called,” Cristina says when she picks up Tristan and me from the library.

“Why didn’t she call me?” I ask. I pull my phone out of my pocket. Dead.

When we get home, I go into Mom’s office. It has a glass desk facing the ocean, and her orchids, ferns, and other growing stuff frame the windows. She says she loves her plants, but Cristina is the one who has to water and feed them. Mom left a schedule printed out on the windowsill. Cristina doesn’t know much about plants, but she manages to keep them alive.