The end of our first week at Fairview also marks the end of our fourteenth year. When classes start up again on Monday, we’ll be fifteen—something I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for.

As we walk home together on Friday afternoon, we try to figure out our long-overdue birthday plans. We’ve all met people this week, people we could potentially be friends with—even me, which is a small miracle facilitated entirely by drama class. We’re all in agreement that inviting anyone over or anything like that would seem desperate this early on, we’re better off making this birthday Donovan only, then going all out for number sixteen once we’ve been here for a while—or Mom has someone been talked into moving us all back to Virginia, where we can celebrate with friends we’ve known our whole lives.

"Pizza and movies," I suggest not for the first time.

Reece, who is walking beside me, rolls her eyes. "Boring."

I expect her to go on some big spiel about all the things we could probably convince our parents to do for us out of guilt, but she casts her eyes down and says nothing.

"I don’t hear any better ideas," Rhiannon says. "What options do we really have? Everything in Fairview is made for old people. Maybe there’s something going on in town, but do we want to go and have everyone gawk at us on the anniversary of the day the Fairview Four were brought into the world? Hell, they probably already have a parade scheduled. Right Reagan?"

Her fingers poke me in the back, "Not funny," I snap halfheartedly. I am so not ready to joke about my rant on Fairview’s obsession yet. The rest of our first week was less awful than I’d expected it to be. I still wish I’d kept my big mouth/pen shut.

A gray sky looms overhead as we make the turn off Main Street, towards Apple Road and Oakridge. By the time we reach our house, we’re still no closer to deciding what we want to do with our birthday the next day. A few raindrops have sputtered out of the sky, leaving speckles on the sidewalk as we near home.

Eight hours later, the drizzle has grown into a full-on thunderstorm. The wind blows the water away from the front of our house, leaving me cozy and dry on the porch to count down my last few minutes as a fourteen-year-old.

Everyone else in my family finds rain either depressing or massively inconvenient to both style and outdoor activities. Not me. There might be nothing I love more than the sound and smell of a storm, even the feeling of it on my skin when the weather is right is amazing to me. Sometimes, the rain leads me to thinking too much, but tonight, it leaves my mind blissfully empty. A blank slate to start the new year.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Reilly asks, popping her head out of the partially opened front door.

"Rain," is my only answer. I’m half mesmerized by the tiny droplets falling in front of the streetlight and the sound of water pouring through the house’s old gutters.

Part of me hopes she’ll go back inside, but when she says, "It’s almost time," I’m glad she didn’t. A thousand thoughts come rushing back into my head as I look over at my sister. Reilly’s hair is tied back in a French braid that falls down to her shoulders, where it meets her bright-purple nightshirt.

I can’t believe I would have forgotten our birthday tradition. It must be the new house that’s messing everything up.

"Which room?" I ask, getting up off the deck chair.

"Yours. Reece is waiting upstairs since Rhiannon is asleep already."

Of course she is. Rhiannon sleeps like clockwork.

As soon as we get back to my room, Rhiannon sits up in bed, "What time is it?" she asks.

"We’ve got six minutes," Reece answers then shoves herself into Rhiannon’s bed with her.

The two of them lie down and snuggle in beside each other, waiting. Six minutes until our fifteenth birthday and I almost missed it, not that my sisters ever would have ever let that happen.

I get into my own bed where Reilly has already curled up at the end like a cat, I slide under the covers, click off the lamp on my night side table and plunge the room into near darkness.

"What do you guys think?" Reilly asks. "How was fourteen?"

"Let’s see… We started high school. Literally on our birthday last year. We moved. Reilly had her first kiss," Rhiannon says, listing off some of the more exciting moments of the last twelve months.

Beside her, Reece makes kissy noises. I can’t help but giggle, somewhat wishing this portion of the recap would end already. This year, like every year, I have nothing to contribute on the romance side of things.

"I fell madly in love," Reece declares with no hint about who she’s talking about. I’m pretty sure she fell madly in love four times in the last six months. "I give fourteen five out of five."

"Seconded!" Reilly calls from her spot at my feet.

"You guys give every year five out of five," I argue. They are both the type of people who will make the most out of every single year of their lives. "I’m calling it a three-point-five. Eventful, but not always in a good way."

"Three stars. Tops," Rhiannon says, I’m surprised it got that high of a rating from her. Although, now that I know she met a guy she actually cares about, that could easily explain the extra stars even if she isn’t going to explain her reasoning to Reece and Reilly. "This isn’t where we were supposed to be starting fifteen. We went backward instead of forward. Right back to where we started."

From a few feet away, I see the screen on Reilly’s phone come alive, lighting up our side of the room. "One minute!" she says, giving my foot a quick squeeze.

For the most part, the year has been good. No complaints—not even one about the move. I’m just not sure it was a year I’ll remember ten years from now—minus the whole going-back-to-Fairview thing. Even starting high school didn’t end up being that big of a deal. There were a lot more people than there had been in our middle school, but freshman year was a lot like the year before, and the year before that. At least for me. I read a little more, and I started playing City of Ages, spending most of my time with Nadine and Elise. Same old Reagan, same old life.

"Happy birthday!" my sisters yell out together.

I mumble something that sounds like happy birthday once I realize I wasn’t watching the seconds count down with everyone else. For a minute, we lie there in silence, thinking about what fifteen would mean for us or just falling back asleep.

"So, any guesses for this year?" Reece asks.

"We’ll hit the front page of the Fairview Gazette… again," Reilly says, laughing.

Mindy got her precious interview and photo-op once Rhiannon and Dad showed up that is. Enough for a full front-page spread, including a picture of Mom and Reece moving boxes, Reilly chatting with the neighbors, and me and my sisters sitting in birth order on the front step. I have a sinking suspicion there will be something in the morning’s paper, which will only bring my note to Nadine back to the forefront of everyone’s minds at school.

"Mom will keep trying to convince us of how great it is to be part of such a close-knit community," I add, using my fingers to form quotes around the last part.

"Dad will renovate every room in the house, starting at least four novels, none of which he’ll finish." Rhiannon is probably right, I can’t help but wince at that last one.

Our dad had to give up his teaching job at the university back home to move out here for Mom, and there are no post-secondary teaching jobs available within an hour of Fairview. He keeps saying that this is the universe giving him a chance to write his novel, but we all know he’d rather be teaching.

"Reagan will finally kiss a boy," Reilly says, giggling like this is the funniest thing in the world.

An image of Kent flashes through my mind. In my head, he’s wearing a shirt that both perfectly ties together the green in his hair and the gold in his eyes while also clinging to the muscles in his arms.

All week he’s been making a point of including me in conversations in drama, and introducing me to people. He’s acting like we’re already friends instead of people who met for ten seconds on my lawn before school started. And that’s something.

But not something enough to report back to my sisters with.

"No, she won’t," Reece scoffs. "I’m calling it now. No action for Reagan until seventeen and a half."

I try to come up with something to joke back or poke fun at her for, but everything I come up with of sounds a little too mean, and that isn’t what tonight is supposed to be about. It’s our birthday, and that’s important to me. To all of us. Even if I never act like the eldest sister, I came into the world first and I’ve always secretly worked to make sure our birthday is a day about the four of us together.

"I didn’t make the soccer team," Reece says so quietly that I’m not sure I heard her right. I didn’t even think about if Fairview had a team.

"What? No way!" Rhiannon cries out, indignant on our sister’s behalf.

"I didn’t realize tryouts had happened yet," Reilly says. "They’re insane if they can’t see how great you are. Idiots."

"They happened the day after we moved here, before the school year had even started." Reece says this like it’s no big deal, but there’s no question of just how big a deal this is. It’s Reece and soccer.

"Oh," I say, not sure of what else to add. "Well, that’s different then, right? I’m sure you’re way better than anyone they’ve got."

"I guess," Reece says. "But that doesn’t make it any better. I’m going to fall behind. And when it’s time to try out for the upperclassman team next year, none of the coaches will have any idea who I am. I might never get to play again."

I want to point out that there might be local teams she can join, but that’s not the point. I don’t pretend to know the first thing about sports. Playing soccer is where Reece shines. She plays rugby and volleyball too, but she doesn’t come alive the same way as she does when she’s kicking around a soccer ball. She’s good at it. Really good. In a way that makes people wonder what exactly happened to the rest of us. We have the same nature, the same nurture, but none of the talent. Not that I could ever see myself getting into sports even if I wasn’t hopeless at them.

Richmond had a pretty big kiddy soccer league when we were little, and my parents tried putting us each on a different team when we were seven or eight. The idea was to give us all the chance to do something away from our sisters, even if it meant driving to four different practices every week.

I fell on my face in front of everyone on the very first day. At first my parents insisted I had to stick it out. Then they saw my first game. Whether it was how miserable I looked or how bad I was at actually connecting my foot to the ball… they never made me go back. Reilly and Rhiannon at least finished out the season. Reece never stopped.

Until now.

I have no idea what to say, and from the sounds of it, Rhi and Reilly aren’t doing any better. We go to Reece’s games to cheer her on. Okay, Rhiannon and I are usually dragged kicking and screaming to her games, but we and get the basics of how it all works! The only thing is I couldn’t tell you about what’s involved in moving up the ranks in the high school soccer world. Reece has never said it, but she’s thought about playing in college.

When no one else says anything, one by one, my sisters’ breathing all takes on the rhythmic inhale and exhale of sleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I want to come up with some kind of real prediction about what this year could mean for me, but I honestly don’t know. That’s kind of exciting all on its own.

A month ago, I would have agreed with Reece’s prediction for my love life this year. Like Rhiannon, I’m not exactly known for my romantic adventures, I have a habit of keeping to myself—which doesn’t give me a lot of opportunities to meet guys I have anything in common with. Fifteen would have passed unnoticed on the dating side of things. Maybe it still will.

But I’m feeling weirdly optimistic.

I drift off to sleep thinking about Fairview and everything that comes with it, I can’t help but think that anything is possible. Anything.

* * *

"Rise and shine, girls!" Dad’s voice booms into our room.

Startled out of sleep, I flail like a maniac, thwacking Reilly in the head with my foot. She must have spent the entire night curled up there.

By the time I open my eyes, my mom has joined him in the doorway to my room. Both are smiling way too much for this early in the morning, no matter what day it is.

Mom is wearing an oversized sweater and looks more comfortable than I’m used to seeing her. My dad is clean shaven and a little taller than average, the effect emphasized by long limbs. His deep voice never quite seems to match his thin frame. He has light-brown eyes and thin, brown hair that matches mine and my sisters'. With the exception of our noses, which we got from my mom’s side, we look like Donovans through and through.

"Good morning," Mom chirps, her short frame is practically bouncing with energy. She's usually more excited about our birthdays than we are, I can't fault her for it—having four tiny people plucked out of your body in one day is no small accomplishment.

The day flies by like all birthdays do—too quickly but full of silly memories like all the years that came before, this time just in a new location. Reilly and Reece make a point of Instagramming the entire experience with me being their camera person. I’m usually the one holding their phones so they can actually be in the pictures they're posting. There’s an instance where Reece takes a selfie with all of us crammed into the frame, which I make her send to me.

After dinner, we sit in the living room surrounded by wrapping paper. As expected, Mom and Dad went way overboard in an attempt to appease us about the move, something I'm already all but over.

I got a massive gift certificate to the local bookstore, some new clothes that look exactly like everything else I own, a new video card for my computer, and one of four matching new desks that will go up into the still-empty space in the attic, which our parents have promised we can do anything we want with, but they still heavily imply that we should be using for studying, staying out of their hair. My sisters all got equally overloaded piles of presents. It’s excessive by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not about to complain.

The conversation finally lulls as we all look over our new things and show off our new stuff around in the makeshift circle we're sitting in. My mother, being who she is, can only let the quiet sit for so long before she has to interrupt with her favorite story. It’s the story of us.

"It was a dark and stormy night," she starts, eliciting eye rolls from Rhiannon, Reece, and me. Reilly and Dad just smile along, encouraging her—suckers for sentiment.

"And by night, she means afternoon," Dad says right on queue. "The surgery was scheduled for the afternoon because most doctors prefer to book these kinds of things during office hours, and you had a lot of doctors. None of which were more excited to meet the Fairview Four than their very own mother."

"Our," Rhiannon says. "Our mother. We were there, remember? You don't have to tell the story like you're still being interviewed by the Gazette." It sounds snarky, but we all know she's only teasing.

This part of the birthday tradition happens at a different time every year, and it goes more or less than same as it did before—only with different parts embellished depending on how nostalgic my parents are feeling when telling the story.

Our job is both to play along and give our parents a hard time as is our sacred duty as their children.

Before snuggling in beside Reilly on the couch, Rhiannon shuts up. At the same time, Reece reaches over to brush my back with her toes, using her insane flexibility to make a connection between the two of us from our spots on the floor. As my parents go on about our birthday, I revel in my favorite part of the day—the history I share with my three favorite people in the world.

Every year on September ninth, it feels a little like it must have been during those days and weeks after we were born—like we’re all still part of one greater whole. The older we get, the more we all stretch into our own identities, but I’ll always love the reminder that we started out together.