Wicked Sweet by Mar'ce Merrell

plastic blocks off the couch, sat on the middle cushion. Ollie buried his face in the curve of my neck. I’d given up on the snot, smeared from my collar to my earlobe. His breath began to soothe my splintered nerves and I tried to match his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Until I was calm enough to think. Evaluate.
    Everything I know about real families, about yelling and screaming, and mistakes that are quickly forgotten—everything I know about
blending in with the rest of humanity—I’ve learned at Jillian’s house. I can’t handle it all the time or for very long, but I get the best of both worlds with Jillian.
    My mother is a perfectionist and my house is a petri dish for my future success.
    It’s no wonder that I got frazzled, that I yelled, that I fell apart. It’s what I do now that matters, I tell myself. But I can adapt. I can make things better.
    First things first, though. I thought I saw a package of mini-cupcakes in Jillian’s fridge. A bit of chocolate cake would settle my nerves.

Jillian
    Home .
    I tiptoe into a dark house on princess toes, knowing exactly how Cinderella felt. I slip off my muddy shoes, reach for the light switch, stop. I imagine what his kiss would have been like, the soft lips and the slightest scratch from his facial hair. Oh. A rush of I want warms me.
    “Jillian?”
    “Chantal?” I snap back to the real world. A light beam shines from the top of the basement stairs. “What’s going on?”
    “Unnatural disaster.” The headlamp she’s wearing is mine, bought for our camping trip last summer. I thought it was buried in one of the hall closets.
    “The breaker went?”
    “After the flood.” She nods. “And every time the machine gets going too fast. I was about to go down and throw it again.”
    “Huh?” I’m stunned. I follow Chantal down the basement stairs, over to the breaker box. She stands on a step stool and throws the switch.
    “ Voilà! Lumiere! ”
    Now that the light is on, I see Chantal’s splotchy red cheeks and wide pupils, the T-shirt that’s stretched and dirty, and the wild hair scrunched like a muffin top by the headlamp elastic. “What have you
been doing? Where are the boys?” I press my hand against her forehead. No fever. But she looks … I’m going to have to help her.
    “You’re not going to believe it, Jillian. I am almost too good to be true.” She tells me the evening’s events starting with a frenzy of cookie eating, through to the flood, and her meltdown.
    “Oh, Chantal. I’m so sorry.” And if Will doesn’t go for Chantal, where does that leave me? On the curb. Annelise will be drinking the other bottle of water.
    “No. No. It’s okay. Because I was sitting there, doing my times tables in my head and then, it came to me. I could fix this.”
    “You could fix what …” All of this seems so unimportant. My real life must be outside all of this ; this house, my family, even school. My real life doesn’t belong here. At least I don’t think it does. If only I can convince Chantal we fit in somewhere else.
    I follow her up the stairs and she begins the tour of how she’s washed the main floor (the result of sopping up a lake of water) and, what’s more, gone on to improve upon my system of shoving everything in closets by sorting the toys into piles of Trash Now, Trash Later, or Probably Trash Later. Plastic garbage bags wait by each pile.
    “And Jillian …” she continues. “Before the power went out I was on the Internet and I downloaded the application for Extreme Home Organizer. You totally need to do this. I mean really, a set of triplets, a set of twins, and a baby, and they’re all boys! If they pick you they send you off to Disneyland while they clean and organize your house for you.”
    “We can’t go on a reality TV show. If my mother saw how pitiful we were on TV, she’d move away and I’d have to raise the boys by myself. Seriously.” I sit at the kitchen counter, spotlessly clean, and wonder what