Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child

“Hurrah! I’m an uncle!” Jack said, and everyone started talking at once.

Everyone except me, that is. I was feeling a little peculiar. I hadn’t thought about being uncles and aunts until Jack spoke up. Then Nan said, “And Papa is a grandfather!” and I felt even more peculiar. All sorts of memories came rushing back, and I shivered. I didn’t want to be like my aunts, not even like Aunt Tilly, and I didn’t want my sisters to be like them, either. I didn’t want my brothers to be like my uncles. And I most especially didn’t want Papa to be like our grandfather.

Then I thought that maybe it took a long time and a lot of nieces and nephews to get as mean as all the aunts and uncles had been to me. After all, there were twelve ahead of me just in our family, and all my older cousins, too. I swallowed hard. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe all the aunts and uncles had been fine until a thirteenth child came along. If that was it, then as long as none of my siblings had thirteen childings, they’d be safe. It would be a long time before anybody got close to having thirteen babies. I’d have plenty of time to convince them to stop before then.

“What are you thinking about so hard, Eff?” my father said in my ear.

I was so startled that I said, “Being an aunt.”

Papa laughed, and I saw that he didn’t understand what I meant.

“It’s a big responsibility,” I said, but he only laughed harder. I didn’t really want to explain in so many words what I’d been thinking.

Papa still didn’t understand. He lifted me up right off my feet and hugged me, and then he went through the whole family hugging everyone. He read Mama’s letter out loud to all of us, and we had roast chicken for dinner that night even though it wasn’t Sunday.

Mama wrote every few days, though her letters were very short because she was so busy. Three and a half weeks later, she wrote that Sharl had had a baby boy, and we went through the whole thing again. I was happy to have the roast chicken, but I wasn’t sure about the fuss that went along with it. After all, we wouldn’t be seeing either of those babies for a long, long time.

The rest of the summer got steadily worse and worse. Mostly, that was because Mama had to stay in Helvan Shores longer than she’d expected. Sharl took sick the week after her baby was born, and for a while it looked like she might die. Mama’s letters got shorter and shorter, though she tried to send something every day or two so we wouldn’t be so worried.

I wasn’t worried, exactly. My first thought, when we got Mama’s letter, was that if Sharl died then maybe I wouldn’t be counted as a thirteenth child anymore. Then I saw how upset everyone else was, especially the older ones and Papa, and I wondered if I was really as evil as Uncle Earn said, to have such thoughts. I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud.

I stayed out of the way as much as I could for the next two weeks, so that I wouldn’t have to pretend to feel bad when I didn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Lan. When the news came that Sharl was out of danger, I felt like a sham. Nobody noticed. We all sent letters to Mama and Sharl, and then settled down to wait for Mama to come home. But from then on, I knew that Uncle Earn had been right about me. I was a real thirteenth child at heart, and if I didn’t look out extra-sharp, I’d end up doing horrible things to somebody one day.

THE REST OF MY NINTH-YEAR SUMMER WAS NO BETTER THAN ITS beginning. Some of that was because of Rennie. Since she was the oldest girl still at home, she took over running the house while Mama was away. Before Mama had left, I’d overheard her telling Mrs. Callahan, who came twice a week to help out with the cleaning, that she hoped that once Rennie saw the work it took to manage a household, she’d be in less of a hurry to have one of her own.

It didn’t work out the way Mama planned. As soon as Rennie got over missing Mama and feeling all worried about Sharl, she started bossing the rest of us mercilessly, like she wanted to prove that she could handle the householding better than Mama. She even tried to boss Mrs. Callahan, but only once. The rest of us learned pretty quick to do our real chores—the ones Mama had left for us—and then take off the first chance we got.

The boys mostly went out to the experimental farm that the college ran to educate the agricultural students. It was only about four miles away, next to a little creek that the students used for some of their irrigation projects, and they could swim and fish. Jack and Hugh built a rat trap and set it out by the fields. They wanted to have rat fights with the other boys, but Papa found out before they’d caught enough rats. They didn’t get in as much trouble as you might expect, because Professor Wallace, who was in charge of the agricultural school and the farm, also found out about it. He thought counting all the different sorts of rats would be very useful, and said he’d pay them a nickel a rat if they kept track of exactly where they’d caught each one. For the rest of the summer, they caught rats, and they made three dollars and thirty-five cents apiece.

Lan didn’t spend much time out by the farm. In the three years we’d been in Mill City, he’d made a lot of friends, and nearly every morning one of them would come by our house to see if he wanted to play ball or collect wood for the miniature fort they were building. He always went. I tried to go along the first couple of times, the way I always had before, but the other boys made it plain as day that they didn’t want any girls along. I could see it made Lan uncomfortable to stick up for me, though he did it, so I stopped trying.

It was the first time I’d spent much time apart from Lan, and I passed most of it on my own. I knew most of the girls from the day school, but I wasn’t really comfortable with them. I was sure that if they knew I was a thirteenth child, they’d behave just like everyone back in Helvan Shores. Besides, if I did really, truly make friends with someone, and they didn’t mind when they found out I was a thirteenth child, I might drag them down when I went bad.

So I spent most of that summer on the roof of our porch. There was a window at the end of one hall that you could crawl out, next to a little niche where the storeroom stuck out. If I backed into the niche, I was invisible from the window and really hard to see from the ground unless you knew just what to look for. Rennie never found me, and I could sit and think, or read, or write in the little diary-book that my sister Diane sent me for my ninth birthday.

Things perked up around August when Mama came home, and then it was fall and Lan and I started the fourth grade. That was how they listed us, at least—Lan and I were both in fifth-grade history and natural science, and they decided to put me all the way up into sixth grade for reading and composition. Schools out in the territories weren’t so strict about keeping people all in one grade, the way they did back in Helvan Shores. We had one girl in our fifth-grade natural science class who was only seven, and there were a couple of older boys who were back with us in arithmetic.

Everyone was excited about fourth grade. Our very first class was with Miss Ochiba, who taught most of the classes in magic at the day school. For fourth grade, that meant theory and background; we wouldn’t be doing actual spells until we were ten. The magic classes were the one area where nobody was ever put ahead in school, though if you were slow about learning you might be kept back. Hardly anyone was slow—magic was too important. Out past the Great Barrier, it could save your life, even if you weren’t a full magician with the strength and knowledge to cast one of the Major Spells.