“Please tell me it snowed a foot and we’re having a snow day,” Thomas said to her.

“I don’t think it’s ever snowed a foot around here.”

Sara might not have been a lot of things, but she was smart. And like her brother she could be a bit of a smart aleck.

He still had wet hair from the shower. “What do you want?”

She shrugged in a way that said she wasn’t going anywhere.

“What?” he asked again.

“I saw.”

“You saw what?”

“I saw—the Web site. The Facebook page.”

“Who told you?”

“Pretty much everyone.”

“Pretty lame, isn’t it?”

She shook her head as she glanced his way.

“So, what is it, then?”

“Aren’t you going to get it taken down?”

“By who? The Facebook police?” Thomas picked up his backpack that had only one good strap left on it.

“Did you do anything?” his sister asked.

“The bus is going to come soon.”

She blocked the door, so he paused, not wanting to make a bigger deal out of this.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The whole thing is stupid.”

This was not only irritating, now it was really angering him. For a moment he thought of the things he wanted to tell his sister, but then as he looked at her he could tell she was starting to cry.

“Why’re you doing that?” Thomas asked.

She shook her head and looked down. Thick hair hid her face from him.

“Sara?” He faced her so she would look at him.

“What?”

“Why are you upset?”

“I’m not.”

Girls.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

Thomas couldn’t say anything to his sister. Yeah, it was embarrassing. But he’d never really realized anybody but him was actually being embarrassed. Then it hit him.

She’s part of my family. She’s just as poor as I am.

“It’s going to be gone soon,” he told her.

“I just don’t get it.”

“What?”

“Why don’t you stick up for yourself?”

She looked at him.

“Look—it’s really just—”

But Sara was already gone.

He had asked Carlos to borrow his laptop again during lunch. Just like last time, he didn’t want to do this on one of the computers in the middle of the computer lab where others could see. He wanted to do this in the back of the library where nobody would bother him.

As Thomas logged onto his Facebook page, the one that never had much of anything on it, he thought of Sara.

Why don’t you stick up for yourself?

He’d thought all morning about the page and about Vic and about why he would do something like he’d done. But then something shifted inside of him. He wasn’t sure why or for what exact reason. Maybe it came from what was going on with Mom, what was happening to them, the idea behind the gifts for the Angel Tree. And right then and there he just knew. As with other ideas he’d had, Thomas knew it the moment the idea came to him. He wasn’t trying to be anything he wasn’t. It just felt like a pretty cool idea and he thought, Why not? What was the worst thing to happen?