Chapter 1

RHEA Goodman sat at the broad wooden table in her mother's farmhouse and waited expectantly. Her parents, Flower and Power (real names: Stephanie and Bob), were looking uneasy, and Rhea felt in her bones that It Was Time.

Time to explain why she'd been brought up a nomad, moving from commune to commune.

Time for Flower and Power to explain why they clung to the hippie thing, even though they were in their fifties and ought to have ulcers and IBM stock.

Time to explain her younger sister's insistence on playing "kill the witch! kill the witch!" with the kid as the hero and her as the witch.

Her theory? Flower and Power had robbed a bank. Or blown up a building. Because they were on the run, no question.

Only…from whom?

And her little sister was just weird.

"Rhea, baby, we wanted to sit you down and have a talk." Flower ran her long, bony fingers through her graying red hair, waist length and for once not pulled back in the perpetual braid.

"About your future," Power added, rubbing his bald, sunburned pate. He was about three inches shorter than her mother, who, at five-five, wasn't exactly Giganto. She had passed both of them in height by the time she was fourteen. "And your past."

"Super-duper." She folded her hands and leaned forward. "And whatever you guys did, I'm sure you had to do. So I forgive you."

"It wasn't us," Flower said, sitting down, then changing her mind and standing. Then sitting again. The sun was slanting through the western windows, making the table look like it was on fire, and for the first time in memory, Rhea saw her mother wince away from the light. "It was destiny."

Yeah, you were destined to rob a bank. Or free test animals. And then have kids and spend the rest of your life on the run. Homeschooling, ugh!

"As the eldest—"

"Yeah, where are the other ankle biters, anyway?" Rhea had four brothers and sisters: Ramen, Kane, Chrysanthemum, and Violet, aged nineteen, fifteen, twelve, and eight, respectively.

"Away from here. This is business strictly for the eldest of the family. For centuries it has been this way."

Abruptly, Flower started to cry. Power got up and clumsily patted her. "We can't tell her," she sobbed into her work-roughened hands. "We just can't!"

"We must," Power soothed.

"Hey, whoa, it's all right!" She held her hands up in the universal "simmer down" motion. "Whatever you did, it's cool with me." Good God, did they kill someone? "I'm sure we can figure something out."

"It's not what we did, it's what you're going to do."

"Go back to college? Forget it. Like the man said, it's high school with ashtrays. Get a new job? Working on it. Try to get one of my poems published? Working on that, too."

"No," Flower said, lips trembling. "Nothing like that."

Copyright © 2007 MaryJanice Davidson and Emma Holly Vickie Taylor Catherine Spangler.