“If we could just use our college fund,” she growled.
“Never happen.” Jillian blew out her breath in disgust. “Stupid waste of money.” Their parents saw Jillian’s fascination in movies as a phase that she’d outgrow. Louise doubted it; Jillian had planned from the age of four on being the youngest movie director ever to win an Oscar. “They want us to be lawyers or bankers or something stupid and boring like that. The only way they’ll let us use our college fund for anything other than school is if we were already out of college and making buckets of money.”
It kept coming back to the fact that they had no way of making money as nine-year-olds. It wasn’t that they couldn’t figure out a way to earn money. Every scheme they’d come up, though, required a bank account to collect their earnings. Without their parents’ consent, and more importantly, their social security numbers, the twins couldn’t legally apply for one. Louise was sure that if they were normal kids, their parents would have been happy that their kids were taking responsibility and learning how to manage money. Their mother knew them too well; she saw a bank account as a too-easily exploitable venture.
“With the money they’re making now, Mom and Dad couldn’t take on four more kids.” Louise had checked into the costs involved in a standard pregnancy. “I had no idea how much time and money goes into having a baby born. You have to go to the doctors constantly. There’s blood tests, urine test, sonograms, ultrasounds. And that’s not even what it costs for the delivery. It’s a massive amount of time and money if everything goes right. It’s a whole other ballgame if things go wrong.”
“Then there’s food and clothing and where would the babies sleep? We couldn’t have six of us in this bedroom.”
“This would be so much easier if we were almost eighteen like Alexander.”
Louise nodded in agreement. “What we need most is time.”
“We need to be old enough that we can have good jobs. We have to be able to pay for a surrogate mother like April, a place we all can live comfortably, and still be able to buy them stuff like socks and boots and winter coats.”
Jillian obviously was thinking of the homeless men they saw on the street sometimes, nearly freezing in the snow.
“And they need their own college fund. So if one of them wants to be a lawyer or a doctor, they can.”
“We need time and money,” Louise said.
“With time, we can get money. It’s just time we need.”
8: BIRTHDAY GREETINGS
On Thursday, Jillian made the mistake of leaving the invitation out on her desk in their bedroom where their mother saw it during one of her spot-checks on how clean they were keeping their bathroom. They were deeply engrossed in video editing at that moment, so she managed to read it before they even realized she had picked it up off Jillian’s desk.
Their mother made a little sound of impatience. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? I need to R.S.V.P by tomorrow.”
Louise and Jillian exchanged glances. They shared the responsibility of telling her by both saying, “We’re not going.”
“It’s Elle,” Louise added. “We really aren’t friends with her.”
Their mother pursed her lips, considering. They waited, barely breathing. “She invited all the girls?” she asked finally.
“Yes but it’s just a power maneuver to get control of the play!” Jillian cried. “She’s a Gemini, Mom, which means her birthday really is after May twenty-first. She’s having her birthday early so she can have it before the joint-class play meeting at the end of this month.”
Louise winced. Jillian was an amazing liar but when she stuck to the truth, she seemed to have no idea what would be the result of her words.
“What happened to invade and conquer?” their mother asked.
“This is not Iraq,” Jillian said. “It’s a birthday party.”
“It’s diplomacy. You need to learn it.”
“But we don’t want to go,” Jillian cried, digging them deeper.
“Honey, this is going to seem callous and awful, and I hate that I sound like my mother, but life is full of things you don’t really want to do that you should do. Everything from going to the dentist to giving blood. I really don’t like taking time out of my schedule to let someone jab me with a needle and screw up the rest of my day by sucking blood out my arm. The only reason, though, that I’m alive today is because some stranger donated blood for my mother before I was born and again when I was a teenager and was in a car accident.”