Born That Way by Susan Ketchen Page B

smiling at me and waving. “Goodbye! Have a nice day!”
    I reach for my clock and switch off the alarm. I lie there for a while, thinking, wondering if I should phone Taylor, but it all seems too dumb. And then I remember that it’s Saturday. I never set my alarm for Saturdays. What’s going on? I’m almost ready to believe some weird explanation involving powers from my dream world turning on my alarm, when I come up with a more practical possibility which spurs me out of bed and into my clothes in record time.
    Mom must have set the alarm after I went to sleep. I need to escape the house before she captures me for another mother-daughter bonding experience. I have a quick drink of juice (okay, I admit it, I drink straight out of the carton, drain it and put it back in the fridge empty. I know I’m not supposed to but I’m in a serious hurry. Besides, Dad does this all the time, so Mom will think it was him.) I leave a note on the table, grab an old pickle jar and ride my bike down to the beach for some replacement water for the barnacle family. Once I’m out of the house I slow down and take my time, so that when I return home Mom has headed off to an aerobics class, and Dad is reading the newspaper at the breakfast table.
    â€œHey kiddo, I saved you some porridge.”
    I lift the lid on the pan and there’s a grey shiny lump piled in the middle. I stick my finger in it, and it’s not very warm.
    â€œThanks, Dad. I think I’ll make myself an egg. It’s a better source of protein anyway.”
    Dad doesn’t say anything. I see he’s deep into the business section which reminds me of what Stephanie told me about self-promotion.
    I use a louder voice than usual. “But I better take care of my pet barnacles before I feed myself.”
    Dad grunts.
    I retrieve the barnacle family from my room and put the Pyrex container on the kitchen counter. I tip it up and pour most of their water into the sink, then add half of the water I got at the beach. The rest I can keep for Sunday, which will give me a day free from biking. I figure I can keep the water in the refrigerator, but the jar has dirt and mud on the outside, so I remember the juice carton, rinse it out, pour in the seawater and tuck it into the back of the top shelf.
    I check out the barnacle family, and they are obviously enjoying their breakfast. Their tentacles are out and waving around, picking up bits of food. At least I hope they are tentacles. I hope I haven’t got five boy barnacles here, all with long penises looking for someone to mate with. I wonder how to tell the difference between a barnacle tentacle and a barnacle penis, and since I definitely don’t want to talk to Mom or Dad about this I decide to check back on Google.
    I slip off to the family room. Of course I can’t have a computer in my bedroom because Mom and Dad need to monitor my access to make sure I’m not in some chat room hooking up with a seventeen year old boy from out of town who will talk me into running away from home with him and living off the avails of prostitution on the streets in Vancouver.
    The news from Google is not good. Apparently barnacles are hermaphrodites, meaning that one barnacle is a girl and a boy at the same time. So my barnacles all have penises, among other things. This is difficult to understand. Actually, it’s difficult to believe, and if I wasn’t reading it on Google I’d think it was a ridiculous made-up story.
    Maybe a hamster would have been simpler.
    Which makes me wonder if the same thing can happen with other animals, whether they can be both sexes at the same time. So I Google hermaphrodite. Obviously this is a mistake. I peek into the kitchen to make sure Dad isn’t watching, and he isn’t. There are some very strange photographs at the top of the screen that I really don’t want to know anything about, so I scroll down quickly and then click on a