A/N: This si my first story! Please R&R! BTW, this takes place about 3 years after the second Cheaper By The Dozen movie. Sarah is fifteen. If anyone sees anything that contradicts the movies, please tell me.
Disclaimer: I don't own Cheaper By The Dozen, Kate, Tom, Sarah, Jake, Kyle, Jessica, Nigel, Charlie, ect., ect. I wish I did, but...oh well. However, I do own the general storyline. No infringment was intended
Sarah Baker slammed her bedroom door shut behind Jake after another nasty fight with her mother and father. There were more and more of those these days, she realized. Right before she figured out that she didn't care.
It was hard enough being the5th child out of twelve and getting picked on by your older siblings and annoyed by the younger ones, but when you add mom and dad in your face all the time, its just too much. So Sarah had taken to chilling in her room a lot more lately. Lacrosse season was over, school had been out for a week or two, causing most of her friends to leave town for a few months, and she was more bored than she thought she could ever be. Being bored got her in trouble. And it usually involved pain for one of her other siblings. After all, she had a title to keep up.
This time, she had duct-taped Mike to the outside wall of the house, upside down, and she and Jake had used him as a human target for paintball. Mike had been fine for the first few minutes, but then the stinging got worse…and worse…. So he had started screaming. Mom had come running, ripped the guns out of Sarah and Jake's hands, and pulled a very blue and orange Mike off of the wall. The two 'gunmen' had spent the next few hours scrubbing the wall where they had missed their target, scrubbing all of the paint out of his clothes, and then apologizing to him while he smirked evilly at them. He knew what was coming. The yelling.
Mom had sent Mike up to bed, and then she had called Sarah and Jake into the dining room where she and Tom were waiting. They started by asking whose idea it originally was, but they really hadn't needed to ask. Sarah was always the one to engineer these kinds of things, and she could get Jake along for the ride for anything she wanted too.
Neither Jake nor Sarah had uttered a word when asked who the mastermind was. They had merely stood side by side, hands at their sides, heads bowed. Jake would never tell on Sarah, because that was one of the first rules: you don't ever tell a parent on another sibling, no matter what happened or who did it. Sarah would never pin anything on Jake that didn't belong on him. Number one, that was just wrong, number two, it was a twisted way of breaking the rules. Sarah had written most of the rules and code herself, and she hadn't broken a single rule yet.
Kate and Tom had just looked at each other and sighed. They hadn't expected either child to tell, but it didn't matter. They knew.
"Jake, it's late. Go up to bed, and we will deal with you in the morning," Tom had told his son. "Goodnight."
"Night," Jake had muttered, and then stolen a glance at Sarah. When had she met his apologetic glance, she had smiled reassuringly at him, then looked away to stare straight ahead. Jake knew his sister didn't care about what happened to her, because her parents weren't too tough, but he did know she cared about how hard they came down on Jake. She was always looking out for him, because he was her closest friend among the 11 other Baker kids. They were closest in age, and he was her partner in crime. He had shaken his head slightly. She could take care of herself in front of their parents. He then had left the room, and walked up the steps, but took his shoes off at the top of the staircase, and had slid silently down the banister to sit quietly against the wall right outside the door to the living room.