ONE

“Everybody, listen up! Our cousin and Leah Nazir will be here in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! So everyone get your pants on!”

“Pants tyrant,” came one response, and “We have a cousin?” was another, and “Angela, shrill is not a good look for you,” and “If I didn’t put my pants on for the mayor, I’m not doing it for Leah Nazir. Or our brother.”

“He’s not your brother,” she said, pointing to Mitchell. “He’s your cousin. He’s your brother.” Pointing to Jordan.

“No, he’s mine!”

Other families, she thought, are not like this. I’m pretty sure. “You think I won’t tell your girlfriends? The ones lucky enough to have them? They’ll hear everything. They’ll see everything.” Angela Drake shook her phone in their direction. “I will take soooooo many pictures of you guys without your pants. The girls will mock you and dump you in a flash.” Unlikely. But she was desperate.

“How long have you been a hostile pornographer?”

“Nineteen minutes.”

“That’s how long we’ve got to re-robe,” one explained, “not how long she’s been a hostile porn peddler.”

“Just . . . come on,” she said, and she definitely didn’t whine. Nope. Too much pride and class for that. Right? Right. “Guys? Come on? Pants? Okay?”

Grumbling, they complied. She was careful not to let the relief show on her face. Her plan, hatched at age ten, had a much better chance of working if everyone played nicely together.

So it was good to see amusements (cookbook, TV, phones, gambling sheets) were set aside as the lot of them changed out of one thing (swim trunks, hot pants, boxers, culottes, briefs) into another (khakis).

The lot of them. That was just right. Because she was a bad person, Angela found her brothers and cousins generally interchangeable. They were all young and lanky and had messy mops of thick dark hair, from lightest brown (with gold highlights—her brother Jack, the lucky creep) to near black (her cousin Jordan, another lucky creep—why were long eyelashes wasted on boys?) and everything in between. They all had blue or green eyes or, in her cousin Archer’s case, one of each. Long noses, wide mouths, long limbs, big feet, deep voices (except Jack, who was sixteen and still occasionally squeaked, to his annoyance and everyone else’s mirth). They were a pile of energy when they weren’t a pile of sloth. Looked alike, talked alike, annoyed alike.

In fact, if some of the family gossip about her father and uncle was true, some of her brothers were actually her cousins and vice versa. If it turned out to be true, not a single one of them—herself included—would have been surprised. Which reminded her . . .

“And we’re not going to bring up family scandals.” Even as she said it, she understood at once it was a lost cause. Because Jordan, Jack, Mitchell, and Paul all knew the reason Archer and Leah Nazir were coming to town was . . .

“Isn’t that’s why The Skull is coming to town? The family scandal?”

“Don’t call her that!” The worst part: “The Skull” wasn’t even the nastiest nickname the public used for one of the best Insighters on the planet. “And I meant the other family scandals. Don’t talk about those. Any of them. Well, maybe that thing with the orange. That wasn’t too bad. Nobody called the cops, and we eventually got the stains out of the carpet. No, scratch that, leave all the scandals out of it. Just to be safe. Okay?”

“Didn’t Archer kill a guy last month? I mean literally murder the hell out of someone?”

“Don’t talk about that, either! Honestly! It’s like you guys aren’t even reading the memos I send out!”

A low sigh from behind her. Another problem with a large family: You were always surrounded. “I’ve told you before, hon. Shrill isn’t your best look.”

“I remember, Mom.” The Scandal No One Should Talk About had blighted Angela’s childhood and stolen her mother. Mrs. Emma Drake had turned into a shadow the day her brother-in-law pled guilty to murdering her husband. Angela knew that threatening the lot of them with “. . . or I’ll tell Mom!” would never have worked. Mrs. Drake was so unplugged from herself, strangers (and neighbors, and family members) often assumed she was sedated. “And I’m not being shrill. I’m being authoritative.”

“Authoritative in a high, shrieky voice,” one of the pack commented.

“Firm!” she definitely didn’t yelp. “I’m being firm. Because I want to make a good impression on—on—”

“The Skull,” everyone in the room said just as Angela finished with, “Archer.”

A barrage of scornful hoots was their simultaneous rebuttal. “Since when—”

“When, Angela?”

“Since when do you—”

“Archer? You think we’re buying that? You want to make a good impression on—”

“Oh, this is too too rich . . .”

“Archer? The one you treated like a house pet that never quite figured out house-training? That Archer?”

“I did not!” Well, maybe sometimes. During middle school, possibly. Maybe once or twice in high school. “All of you, back off. And back up.” They’d all climbed off or from beneath various pieces of furniture and were closing in, which was as dreadful as it sounded. “We didn’t get along when we were kids, but that was years ago.”

“Years.”

“Years, she says.”

“Hey, guys, it’s all in the past because, y’know, Angela here says it’s been years and years and—”

“She thinks last Christmas is ‘years’?”

“She thinks last month is ‘years.’”

She groped for the flyswatter hanging on a nail between the living room and kitchen, then lunged forward like a fencer on the offense. “Back! All of you, get back!” The Horde collectively flinched as the swatter swung and hissed through the air.

“Oh, gross.”

“Seriously with this, Angela?”

“Don’t point that thing at me.”

“We have a flyswatter?”

“Yeah, it’s usually on one of those little hooks on the keyboard.”

“All right!” Swish, lunge, parry. If I didn’t know better, she thought, I’d think I was a fencer in a former life. But nope. Alas: She’d been nothing more exotic than a minor league baseball pitcher just after World War I.

Which was probably why she didn’t consider softball a real game. “You’re right.”

“Hear that? I’m right!”

“Which one of us is right?”

“Shut up, you’re all basically a hive mind, anyway.” She’d stopped ducking and weaving (literally as well as figuratively) and held them all at flyswatter length. “I admit it: I was a shit to Archer through most of our childhood—”

“The sordid truth comes out!”

“It was awful, I was awful, and I’ve apologized to him.” So many apologies. Even now, she flushed hot with embarrassment when she remembered the cutting things she’d said over the years. The fact that, as an adult, he tolerated her with absent good humor was more a testament to his easygoing personality than to her amends. Which she found perversely irritating. The guy can’t even hold a grudge right.

But, again: The Plan.

“We need to put that behind us now because— Oh, my God they’re here!” She almost dropped the flyswatter, hesitated—it had kept the throng at bay pretty well—then hung it back up. She would not meet Leah Nazir with a flyswatter in one hand. Most likely.

“This is the most excited I’ve ever seen you.”

“Of course I’m excited! She’s the Mangiarotti of Insighters.” She could actually feel the puzzled silence, and tried again. “The Mozart of Insighters.”

“She’s a famously immature genius harpsichord player who loves jokes about shit?”

“Scatological humor,” she corrected automatically, then cursed herself. “I mean, no!” She flinched as she heard car doors thunking shut in the driveway. They’d be heading up the walk to the front door. They’d be entering the front door! Her cousin/maybe brother/worst enemy and the James L. Brooks of Insighters! Here! In her house! Where she’d been stood up for prom! Twice! “Please. I’m begging you guys. Be nice. Be . . . not weird. I mean—as best you can,” she modified.

No use asking for miracles.