Downstairs, the sweet smell from the kitchen is even stronger.

“Go back up and get dressed, Rachel,” my mom says, pushing me away before I can go into the kitchen to see what she’s made. She has on a red apron that’s covered in flour. There’s some on her face, too.

“We need to take a pie over to welcome the new neighbors, and it’s almost finished. I want you dressed so we can all go over together to introduce ourselves.”

Pie? So that’s what was baking. Not my birthday breakfast? I hope she didn’t make an extra pie for my birthday cake. Pie is good, but not for birthdays. I want a tall layered cake with thick frosting and fourteen candles because you always have to have one to grow on. Licking syrupy fruit off a candle just isn’t the same as licking off frosting.

I wait a minute before going back upstairs. I look around for the familiar birthday banner my mom made, which she hangs from the ceiling on the morning of our birthdays. It isn’t in the usual place above the kitchen table. Maybe because this is a special year, we’ll eat in the dining room, which we only use to celebrate big holidays. The rest of the time, the dining-room table is piled with mail and newspapers and bills and homework and lots of other junk.

“Go on!” my mom says, still not wishing me a happy birthday.

I turn away from her slowly and take my time walking back to the stairs, just to give her a chance to remember.

“Hustle your buns!” she yells at me.

Sheesh.

From my bedroom window, I watch the new owners boss the movers around. They don’t seem very promising. They look too old to have kids our age, which is fine with me because I don’t really feel like having to make new friends with someone who lives in a house like that. Just walking around, peeking in the windows and being that close to something so nice made me feel crappy about my holey sneakers and cutoff shorts. Micah said maybe they’d have older kids and I’d get their hand-me-downs. Whoop-de-do! It’s bad enough I have to wear the things family friends hand down to us, or cheap clothes my mom finds at the local thrift store. I get itchy just thinking about it. Micah says I sound like a snob when I complain. I tell him I’m just a clean freak, and he says that’s what washing machines are for, which is a good point. But still. I’ll never like wearing other people’s old clothes. They have all these memories in them that I don’t know about. Sometimes I wonder what interesting places they’ve been to. But mostly I try not to think about it.