“I heard you were fighting Derek McGuinness after school last week.” Cayenne was looking carefully between each of her toes, but Roo assumed she was talking to him anyway since he was the only one in the room. And since he had been fighting Derek McGuinness last week.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah you were?”

“What do you care?”

“Guys who fight are sexy.” Cayenne shrugged. “Not like guys who fight with knives or wrestling or if they just go around beating people up. But guys who fight just sometimes.” She paused to consider. “I bet Ben never fought anyone in his life.”

“He fights me all the time,” said Roo.

“Who wins?”

Roo snorted.

“I heard he called you gay and that’s why you kicked his ass.”

Roo wouldn’t look at her. “I didn’t kick his ass.”

“Did he call you gay?”

“Among other things.”

“Are you gay?”

“None of your business.”

“You can tell me if you are, you know. I don’t care. I have an uncle who’s gay. And I’m good at keeping secrets.” Roo looked up at her. “If you’re not though, you should tell me that too.”

“Why?”

She raised her eyes from her toes but not her head so that she was looking up at him through her lashes. “It opens up some options. For both of us.”

When everyone came back downstairs, bedecked dogs included, to watch the movie Rigel and Orion had finally settled on, Cayenne wanted to play Spin the Bottle instead.

“Uh, no?” Roo and Ben said together, their voices rising at the end as if there were a question. Roo’s was: Is this girl serious? Ben’s was: Why does she want to kiss anyone but me? Instead of working that out, he tackled Roo so they could wrestle out the jinx. Roo won.

“Why not?” Cayenne looked incredulous that anyone would deny her anything.

“Kissing is gross,” said Poppy.

“There’s four of them and three of us,” said Cayenne. “We can sit boy girl boy girl. It’s perfect.”

“If you’re heterosexist,” said Ben mildly.

“Or incestuous,” said Roo, less mildly.

“You can’t have everything.” Cayenne shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and your spin will land on me.”

“I don’t want to make out with you,” said Roo.

“More than you want to make out with anyone else in this room,” said Rigel.

“True,” Roo admitted, “but not by much.”

Aggie and Poppy didn’t really understand Spin the Bottle and weren’t interested in anyone kissing anyone, blood-related or otherwise, so maybe it was topical or maybe it came out of nowhere when Aggie turned suddenly to Poppy and said, “Do you think it’s weird your parents only had boys?” And Poppy’s heart stopped. “I mean until you.”

“Your parents only had girls,” Poppy managed.

“Yeah, but there’s only two of us. Your parents have tons. They must have thought they could only make boy babies.”

“Fifty-fifty,” Ben said quickly and loudly, so quickly and loudly everyone stopped and looked at him until he made himself explain coolly, “Every pregnancy there’s a fifty-fifty chance the baby will be a boy, no matter how many boys have been born already. Even with four older brothers, when Poppy was born, there was a fifty-fifty chance she’d be a boy, and a fifty-fifty chance she’d be a girl.”

This was true, so the Walsh-Adams clan tried to look believable.

“What if you were a boy?” Aggie moaned. “That would be the worst.”

“Why?” said Cayenne. “Boys are awesome.”

“If you were a boy,” Aggie said to Poppy, caught up in the horror, “we couldn’t be rival princesses, we couldn’t have sleepovers, we couldn’t make the dogs make a play, we couldn’t paint each other’s toenails.”

“Why not?” Orion wiggled his alternating green and black toes.

“Yeah but you’re a zombie,” said Aggie.

“A yachting zombie,” Orion corrected.

“Boys could make dogs make a play,” said Rigel.

“We couldn’t be best friends.” Aggie flung her arm across her eyes. “If your parents didn’t beat the fifty-fifty and you were a boy, it would be the worst thing ever.”

Poppy opened her mouth, and everyone waited. Roo looked at his feet. Ben looked at his feet. Rigel and Orion looked at each other’s feet. Cayenne narrowed her eyes at all of them. But Poppy swallowed and agreed wholeheartedly: “It would be the worst thing ever.”

Annus Mirabilis

Penn found himself thinking a lot about John Dryden. Dryden was one of those poets you read in graduate school but not in life. No one’s email signature was a Dryden quote. Anyone whose email signature was a Dryden quote hadn’t read the rest of the long, dry verse it came from. But Dryden had a poem: “Annus Mirabilis.” The year of wonders. It was a poem about England in 1666. England in 1666 was decidedly not having a year of wonders. England in 1666 had war, plague, and a three-day fire that destroyed most of London, plus Isaac Newton invented calculus, thereby making the lives of mathematically ungifted students immeasurably worse forever. But Dryden’s poem was about what a great year it was because it could have been worse. They lived to see 1667 after all. At least, everyone who read the poem did.