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halfway down the stairs before the thought occurred to me, Why do I always have to do everything Quinn decides? But instead of dealing with that, I grabbed Phoebe and dragged her noisy self up.
    She is the loudest thing. She kept asking questions until I almost had to punch her in her button nose. We had trouble hearing much more, especially with Phoebe there, and then they were walking back through the kitchen, so we scooted out of the guest room and across the upstairs den to my room and shut the door so we could talk about what was happening.
    Phoebe was all You guys have to tell me , like Quinn and I had all kinds of secret knowledge between us. I wasn’t about to blow it by badgering Quinn, too, so I was just acting like I was holding back my incredibly vast knowledge of what the hell was going on instead of lacking it. In reality, I was just as anxious as Phoebe to hear Quinn’s theory.
    We were all sitting on my bed about to hear it when Mom and Dad opened my door and announced they were going for a ride and that our tennis instructor wasn’t showing up again. Whatever.
    Right after they left, Phoebe’s boy-toy called on her cell phone, and she switched gears seamlessly from family-crisis mode to flirty-girl mode. Her voice got all feathery and sweet and, just like Jade, she was literally batting her eyelashes. Despite being on the freaking phone with the boy. He can’t see you, dim bulb! Ugh. I almost puked all over my bed, which she and Quinn had demolished anyway with their squirming around on it.
    Then on the way downstairs, Phoebe had to twist the knife by asking how it went with Tyler Moss. I explained to her as calmly as I could that Tyler Moss was an obnoxious jock whose name I never wanted to hear again. During the explanation, I may have left a permanent bruise in her flawless upper arm with my vise grip on it.
    As the devil had said, alas.
    And then things got really fun when at dinner Mom announced that she had been fired.
    So it was all over, apparently.
    Though exactly what was all over I had no idea, and wasn’t about to ask, with Quinn, Phoebe, and Dad all silently eating their dinners. I pushed mine around and stood up as soon as Quinn did and followed her up the stairs.
    “Fired,” I whispered.
    She closed her eyes slowly and opened them even slower.
    “Like some shoplifting checkout bagger at the Food Emporium,” I whispered. “Not promoted, or decided to take a job at another firm, like a normal parent. Fired.”
    Quinn, paler than ever, turned to me at the top of the stairs and said, “You’re an idiot.” Then she went to her room and closed her door softly.
    Phoebe was coming up the stairs behind me, so I went into my room and closed the door, too. I taped the Eleanor Roosevelt card from Jade up on my bathroom mirror and reread it: Do one thing every day that scares you. I thought, Just one thing? Is that a dare, or a limit?
    I surfed the Net for a while, then read, then just listened. Nothing going on. Was everybody really going to sleep at ten? Peeking out my door, all I saw was everybody else’s closed doors, so I snuck back down the stairs to retrieve the baby monitor. Not so stupid for an idiot, huh, I was thinking. A big cardboard box blocked the study door. It was full of Mom’s stuff: the portrait of the five of us in the silver frame, her Orrefors vase. So they’d made her clean off her desk and clear out, box of junk in hand, right in front of everybody. How humiliating.
    I was just seeing what else was there when Mom suddenly sprang up behind me and screamed that I’d better get my hands off her belongings and get myself up to bed; the last thing she needed right then was trouble from me.
    Great. Well, that killed my sympathy for her pretty fast.
    I said some nasty stuff about her not needing to take out her work stress on me, and as much as she liked to blame me for everything, I was not the one who got her fired. She yelled back, but I wasn’t listening, so I don’t