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able… It had really deserved to win. I was the first person Kirstyn showed it to, of course, and it almost made me cry, the pain and beauty in it. My poem was all about how peanut butter glues your mouth together. There was a mean little voice inside my head during the poetry ceremony saying, How would Kirstyn know anything about a child in the ghetto? Her life is just as comfortable as mineand I knew almost for a fact that she wrote the poem sitting on one of the new top-of-the-line leather recliners in their new media room downstairs. So it seemed sort of, well, cheating, to write about a child in the ghetto when the closest she’s ever come to even knowing a child in a ghetto is listening to some rap music on her iPod.
    But maybe that’s where I would live soon.
    Maybe I would be a child in the ghetto and have really, really clean floors. Because that would be all that was left for us to be proud of. I would hold my head up and make something of myself, if that’s what happened, just like the child in Kirstyn’s poem; I would dream of a better day.
    Yikes, I thought. I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to be that noble. I like it when today is a good day.
    Maybe I am totally overreacting, I told myself, and forced myself to smile. Of course, I thought, I am so blowing it completely out of proportion. Mom is not losing it, she’s just in work-mode. I normally don’t see her in the middle of the day, is all. It’s nothing.
    I tiptoed from the dining room into the gleaming front hall, where nobody but the pair of cherub statues on pedestals flanking the front door ever goes.
    “Agnes?”
    No answer. She had to go, Mom had said. No. I had to let her go . Well, she sure seemed gone. I wandered over to the living room, the family room, the sun room, the den—nobody around. I am fourteen years old and perfectly fineat home alone, that’s not the point, it’s just, honestly? I think this was the first time I ever was.
    “Where is everybody?” I yelled. Nobody answered. I headed up the front staircase but stopped partway up and sat down. I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t want to go up, I didn’t want to go down. Usually somebody was yelling at me to Come downstairs! Or, Go to your room! I might not always do it but then I knew at least where I was supposed to go.
    I sat down, waiting, either for somebody to come tell me what to do or for an idea of my own, whichever came first. I leaned back against the wall and stretched my legs across the step.
    If Mom told me something was wrong at work, she had definitely told Quinn and Allison, too. First. Right? Definitely. They’re older. If I were her, I would have told them way before I’d tell me.
    I dug my fingers into the navy carpeting that ran up the center of the steps as I listened to the grandfather clock tick in the living room and wondered when everybody would get home.
    It’s probably nothing, really, I told myself, and decided to think about whether we should have make-your-own-sundaes at the party or if that would be tacky and a mess. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Kirstyn wouldn’t really want to get out of doing the party. She just wanted me to reassure her as always, which is fine. She’s not as lucky as I am, her lifeisn’t smooth the way mine…Shouldn’t they be home by now? Does Luke like me , like me? Should I wear my hair down for the party or half up or all up? What if I’m actually not overreacting, and we are seriously going to be poor all of a sudden?
    What if something really bad is going on and everybody knows except me?
    I was still sitting there on the middle step when Quinn and Allison came home with Gosia, laughing as they clumped up the back steps about something that happened outside school, and then going shh , shh —as if the worst thing ever would be me overhearing their secrets. Last year most of the time Allison and I were always together and Quinn got all serious, practicing piano like every free minute, her hair pulled back