A/N: Here we go. I've been happily ignoring this for two years, and the other day I picked it up and COULD NOT put it back down. It's a little bit fitting that I started working on it just as I was going into high school, and now that I'm about to graduate from college I'm still not done. Anyways. I hope that you guys like it!

ZXCVBNM

I hate boys.

Really. And if you think about it, I am totally justified in this manner of feeling. They don't bathe regularly. They curse and swear. They walk into a room, grab a shirt off the floor, smell it, and declare it good for another week. They wear so little cologne that you want them to wear more, and when they do it makes your eyes water and your nose burn. They wear their poor hats to death, and then some. And they'd rather end up lost than ask for directions.

And before you scoff and wave me off, just listen. I know. I live with seven of them.

I am the only estrogen-bearing, period-having, living, breathing, thing with boobs in my entire household. It has its moments. Most of the time it sucks.

I have five brothers. Dan, Eric, Connor, Mason, and Jacob, in that order, and they're all older than me. Then there's my father, who teaches English at this boarding school in France, called Kadic. That's actually where I live—France. I was born in America to American parents, and English was my first language, but my parents moved to France when I was four because my mother was desperately in need of treatment for her cancer. My dad couldn't support all of us, so he got a job at Kadic. After Mom died we stayed, and we've been here ever since.

We also live with my grandfather—mom's dad. Nana died when Dan was two, and he's 23 now, so she was gone way before I was born. Papa stayed with us, at first because Nana had died and he didn't want to be alone, and then for Mom, who was battling her first round of cancer. When we moved, he followed us.

And then there's me. August Christine Parker McNealson, at your service.

So I'm fifteen years old this year. Jake is seventeen, and Mason is eighteen. Connor and Eric, the twins, are twenty (Eric is older by exactly twelve minutes and seventeen seconds), and Dan is twenty-three. All this said to show that, while I'm at Kadic, Mason and Jake are there too. Which makes it pretty impossible for any guy to even look at me. Not that they'd want to. I mean, I'm not ugly, but I'm not exceptionally pretty either. I have all the right features in all the right places, a couple freckles, and that's about it. And I'm completely FLAT. To the point that, even though I'm fifteen and most girls my age have started wearing women's bras by now, I've just gotten to the point where I have to wear one every single day. Yeah, shutting up about boobs now.

Right. So. Now that I've introduced my immediate family, let's move on. Eric and Connor are both engaged. Connor is engaged to Maggie, who is definitely very French. I try not to comment too much about her. Eric, my fun-loving older brother who is very in-tune with his inner child, is engaged to a fun-loving, teenager-at-heart named Lydia. She was actually here studying ballet, and Eric was with his friend visiting another dancer who was friends with Lydia. They made eye contact and haven't stopped looking since. Lydia has a daughter, Zoe, who was adopted from Korea. They also have a dog named Kujo (yes, after the dog in that movie) who spends more time at our house than at his. This could be because Lydia's apartment has a strict no-pets policy. And probably because he's a big smelly St. Bernard.

That's everyone. To recap, I have five brothers, one father, one grandfather, no mother, a niece, and one quasi-dog.

Okay. So, moving on.

The new year at Kadic will be… different. And not different good.

My best friend, Emily, and I, sort of had a… falling out, if you will, over the summer. I really don't want to get into all the nasty little details, but I will say this. If I'd seen it coming I probably could have dealt with it a little better. Emily had been my best friend since the first grade, and losing her, no joke, was really hard. It's like one day I was her best friend and the next day she didn't know I existed anymore. That really, really sucked. It just… well, it threw me, but it hurt, you know?

Anyways, I've said all this so that I can launch into the epic story of Who Changed My Life And How They Did It.

ZXCVBNM

Mom died when I was in the seventh grade, but when she was alive we'd make breakfast for the boys on the first day of school, and take pictures, and send them all on their way. When I started, I loved it. School, I mean. I would stay up the entire night in anticipation, and then be unable to drag myself out of bed in the morning in time to eat breakfast. I'd always go grouchy and hungry and tired, and I loved every minute of it.

Now that there's only three of us in school instead of six, Papa makes breakfast. Dan and Eric and Connor get the rest of us out of bed, and by this time Dad's already at school doing teacher stuff. We eat, and then we go visit Mom's grave. It's something we started doing the year she died—we go every weekend. When we come back we go to school, and then we come home and go to Luigi's, home of the best pizza on the planet. It's great.

I woke up that morning at 5:30, determined to make a good impression on anyone who wished to be impressed. Then I went upstairs and ate breakfast with the rest of the family.

Dad never left on time for the first day of school, hence his being in the kitchen hastily eating a toaster strudel. He held a bouquet of red roses in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, and his briefcase was lying open on the floor. Papers were scattered about. Dad, needless to say, looked annoyed.

"Damn latch broke again." He muttered, then took a sip of his coffee.

"Good morning to you too, Dad!" I said cheerfully, squatting down to help Connor pick up the papers. Connor was pretty much the only one who did anything around the house at all. He cleaned. He cooked. He vacuumed. He did the laundry. He walked the dog. If there was something to be done, it was Connor's job. Not that the rest of us were all lazy slobs, because we weren't. Actually, it was more like Connor was very… touchy. He wanted things done perfectly, and if you couldn't do that, there was no point in even trying. He got very upset, no joke, about the towels being folded the wrong way or the floor not being vacuumed right. Like, to the point that he would revacuum the room so that all the lines on the carpet matched up. So, mostly, we just let him do his own chores, and less work for us!

"Sorry." Dad apologized, reorganizing the stacks of paper we handed him. "Briefcase is old. It's been around since before I married your mother."

"You'd think you could get a new one!" Dan waltzed by, carrying a plate of eggs and bacon. A biscuit was perched rather precariously on the side of the plate, a big slap of butter stuck on the top.

"I should, but I can't. I'd rather just hang on to this one, if it's all the same to you." Dad grinned. "Are we going to go visit Mom today?"

Papa walked into the room. My grandfather is no spring chicken. He was twenty-two when my mother was born, and she was twenty-five when Dan was born, and Dan is twenty-three now, so that makes Papa about… Seventy. Right on the nose. But even though he's seventy, he's still pretty spry for an old man. He can outrun Dan, the hockey player, on a bad day, and Mason, the skinny track nerd, on a good one. God only knows how badly he'd beat me. "It's tradition, Jacob." Papa winked at my father, then sat down at the table, helping himself to a biscuit. He looked around the table for a minute, then directly at Mason. "Boy, where's the lard?"

We had this conversation every single morning. "The what, Papa?" Mason asked, even though he knew the answer.

"The lard, boy! The grease from the pig! Only proper way to eat a biscuit is to smother it in lard!" Papa was born and raised in Alabama. Lard is, apparently, very big in Alabama. Then, with a wink at the rest of us, Papa added, "Why, when I was your age…"

I grabbed a biscuit from the table and my school bag from the door. "I'm ready." I announced, blowing a stray piece of hair from my face. "Anyone else?"

"Yeah, I'm done." Mason stood up, brushing the crumbs from his shirt.

"Me too." Dan took his coffee mug from the table. "Okay. Let's go."

ZXCVBNM

Visiting my mother was not a hard thing to do. I'd been incredibly close to her. I was hurt by her death, but I knew it was coming, so perhaps I was not hurt quite as much as I would have been if my family hadn't been completely honest with me about Mom's cancer. We visited Mom every weekend, and Dad always had roses. My mother was a true romantic. Every time my dad brought home roses Mom would just about melt, and then they'd go lock themselves in a bedroom for hours at a time while Dan and Papa tried to distract the rest of us who were too young to know where babies really came from.

We weren't quiet when we visited her, either. We made noise. We jumped around. We wore colors. Mom would have wanted it, so that's what we did. We'd visit her grave and lay the roses down, pick up the dried ones from last week, stay for a while, and go home. Today we took a picture, with all of us gathered around the grave stone. After we were done the group broke up, with Dan and the twins headed off to the house and the rest of us toward the train station. Papa drove us, dropped us off, and went home.

The train was late. Joy.

"Hey." Jake poked me between the shoulder blades. "I'm bored."

"Me too." I leaned up against the wall. "Rock Paper Scissors?"

"Yeah, why not?" Jake leaned against the wall beside me. "Okay. One, two, three, scissors."

"Damn. I had paper."

Jake let out a satisfied "ha!" and presented me with his fist so we could go another round.

Jake is blind. I don't know what his vision is, in terms of numbers, but it's safe enough to say that he's blind as a bat. He's considered legally blind by the French government, hence not being able to drive a car, hence the whole reason we take the train into the city every morning. That, and it's easier than loading all of us into a car and going to school, then trying to coordinate schedules so we all go home at the same time. He goes to normal classes and has normal teachers, he just reads all his textbooks in Braille instead of letters.

He's brilliant. Anything he does, he does well. Take math, for instance. A normal seventeen-year-old would be taking pre-calculus. Jake took it as an eighth grader. He has an A in German and Latin, an A in chemistry, an A in his computer class, and he competes regularly with Jeremie Belpois, who is in my grade, for the number one grade slot in Kadic. It sucks, and we're all green with envy.

He also has the coolest dog in the whole world. Echo is a mutt, but he's an adorable mutt. He looks like a cross between a poodle and a lab, but that could just be me. He's incredibly well trained-he sits there patiently until Jake needs him, and then he springs into action like superdog.

"You suck at this game." Jake grinned at me. "Okay. One, two, three, rock."

"Paper."

He stuck his tongue out at me.

Mason walked up behind Jake but didn't say anything. With a wink, he just stood there.

If you didn't know Jake you wouldn't be able to tell that he wasn't blind. The sunglasses he wears are the only abnormal thing about him. We can walk up to him and not say anything, and within ten seconds he has us identified and involved in a conversation. He does this by scents and sounds. The soles of Mason's shoes squeak, so anytime anyone with squeaky soles walks past him, it has to be Mason. I am the only one in the house who smells even remotely like a girl, thus making me very easy to identify.

"I know you're there." Jake said lightly. "Wanna play?"

"Yeah." Mason leaned against the wall beside us. "One, two, three, rock."

Echo whined and put his head on his paws. Then we heard the far-off rumbling that signaled the coming of a train. Echo, well trained as he is, is freaked out by dead people and trains. When we take him to visit mom he freaks out and we have to leave him in the car. On the train, there really isn't another option except to keep a firm grip on his collar and dare him to move. Anyways, the train ride was long and boring, and most of us used it to sleep. So when we finally pulled up to the stop twenty minutes later, we emerged all stumbly and bleary-eyed.

From there we walked about ten minutes to the school. As I stood outside looking at the gates, with Mason on my left and Jake on my right, it became very clear indeed.

It was time to go back to school.

ZXCVBNM

The first thing I noticed when I got to Kadic was the sheer number of new faces. I knew a lot of seniors had graduated, but I didn't think it was enough to warrant the sixty or seventy new people I saw just standing in the courtyard. The second thing I noticed was a little dog, running through the crowd, apparently starved for the sight of grass. The third thing I noticed was Odd Della Robbia, a guy from my math class the year before, chasing the little dog.

"Kiwi!" Odd yelled after the dog, skidding to a stop at a corner. "You stupid mutt!" Kiwi looked up at Odd, amusement in his eyes (if a dog could convey amusement through his eyes?...) and barked. "Oh, shut up." Odd scooped the mutt up in his arms and turned on his heel, very quickly. And landed nose-to-chest with Ulrich Stern, class heartthrob, and totally unattainable. Rumor had it that he was either dating or completely smitten with Yumi Ishiyama. Already the world seems a little darker…

"Jim's going to find him eventually, you know." Ulrich remarked drily, slinging an arm over Odd's shoulders.

"And I say, let him come!" Odd thrust a finger into the air as the pair started walking away. "Kiwi's a smart dog. He won't let some buffoon like Jim find him, will you, Kiwi?" Kiwi barked a reply to this, at which point Ulrich said something else. The guys were then out of earshot and I couldn't hear them anymore. But did that stop me from watching them? Noooooo…

I think it is absolutely hilarious that the entire student body knows that Odd keeps a dog in his wardobe drawer, yet the adults, my father included, have no idea. Kiwi is forever escaping and Odd always goes after him, and neither one of them get caught.

A hand landed on my shoulder. It belonged to Mason. "You like him, yeah?"

"Ew, gross." I shrugged his hand off. "He's cute but unattainable. Taken."

"Sucks, doesn't it?"

I laughed. "You have no idea."

Mason just laughed. "Well, you can't win 'em all," he said, flashing me a grin and walking away.

ZXCVBNM

My first class was Math. Math is the bane of my existence. It is a full hour and ten minutes of sitting there listening to Ms. Meyer drone on and on about cosines and tangents and many, many other supernaturally boring math terms that will do absolutely nothing for me once I've graduated. Joy.

After Math came German, the third language that I am at least semi-fluent in. As a rule, people in Europe study English starting from the second grade. I've always had good grades in it because English was my first language and we speak it at home (usually). Anyways. I started studying German because I was not interested in Latin or Spanish or Russian.

After German was History, the coolest class on the planet. Maybe that was only because we had the coolest teacher on the planet, but whatever… Mr. Langdon started the class off with a debate on whether beheading Loius and Marie was such a good idea. I said no. Not that it was a good idea, but that we shouldn't have done it, because if you really look back in history, the King and Queen had no idea that their people were suffering. They were living on in wonderful excellence with their children, and all the while their subjects were living a life of desolation. I blame this on their advisors. Their purpose is to advise. They didn't do that.

Odd was also in my psychology class. Oh, joy. Now, don't get me wrong, Odd Della Robbia is a perfectly acceptable human being. He hasn't done jail time. He doesn't have three pregnant ex-girlfriends. He doesn't have a drug record. What he does have, however, is a reputation of being the kind of person who sits down for a project, proclaims themselves no good at this stuff, and goes off to do something else, leaving the other partner to do everything while Odd reaps the benefits of "hard work". He was small, not necessarily short, and usually wore his hair down these days after complaints that it got in the way of other students. He was kind of cute, I had to admit, although Ulrich was infinitely cuter.

Mr. Langdon taught the class for about twenty minutes before he went off to do something else. Probably a teacher. "Well, guys," he said, sitting on his desk, "I've got other stuff to do. Do something productive." With that, he hopped off the desk and walked out of the classroom.

I saw Odd get up from the other side of the classroom and walk over to where Jeremie Belpois was sitting, his head buried in some book. Jeremie always had a book. Always. It was a constant. Like, there are always stars in the sky, or the moon is always out, the sun is always shining, the grass is always greener on the other side. Jeremie always had a book. Which is why it took Odd a considerable amount of time to drag him away from it and into a conversation.

I sat there, drumming my fingers on the desk. I was bored. My book was back at the house, because I'd forgotten it in the haste to get out of the house and go see Mom. Mr. Langdon hadn't assigned us any homework, so I sat there, bored stiff, until the bell rang forty minutes later.

From there, it was off to lunch. Thank God, both Mason and Jake had my lunch period, so we sat together. Mason saw that I looked miserable, and I think Jake figured it out.

"What's up?" Mason asked, taking a bite out of his sandwich. "You look terrible."

"Thanks. I love you too." I grabbed a sandwich and chowed down. "No, I'm just…" I sighed. "Alone, I guess."

"Aren't we all." Jake muttered. "You know, being a boy sucks sometimes."

"Hey. That is not fair. Do you know how hard it is to be the only thing with estrogen?"

"Yeah, yeah…" Mason waved me off. All the boys had heard this lecture a thousand times. "We know. You have so kindly informed us about a hundred million thousand times."

I crossed my eyes at him. "Stuff it."

Mason grinned. "I'm so glad this is my last year here!"

"I try not to think about you graduating this year. It makes me sad."

"Well, I'll still be here next year. I'm not going anywhere special." Mason wanted to be a track star… Which meant no college for him! That was a good idea. He'd go run a while, make some big bucks, then come home, settle down, and use his earnings to find a good nursing home for dad while the rest of us chased kids around the house. The only flaw in this plan was this: Kadic's track team sucked. Not just a little. It was bad. They came in last in just about every race they ran, and the ones they placed higher was because of Mason's score alone. Hey. I can't help but brag. The kid can fly when he wants to.

"Dad wants you to go to college, you know."

"Oh, yes, I know. And so does Papa. And Dan. And Eric and Connor and Jake, for that matter. I think you're the only one who doesn't want me to go."

"I never said that." I winked at him. "I just said that if you go, I get your room."

"That's why I'm not going."

"Oh, come on. There's barely enough room for all of us now. Wait until Maggie and Lydia move in… And Lydia has a kid, too!"

"Yeah, yeah. And if Zoe draws on the walls, you can't cover it up with paint…"

Let me explain about our house. We actually live about thirty minutes away from Kadic, 20 if you take the train into the city. It's on this great piece of land where there's grapes, and that's about it. It's not a vineyard, if that's what you were wondering. Anyways, it's an old, old house. Have you ever watched the movie Babe? In that movie, old Farmer Hogget and his wife live in an old house in northern England where everything is… old.

That's exactly what our house is like. The entire thing is made of stone. It's not exactly big, more like an average sized house, but it's big enough to fit all of us, and that's all we need. It's drafty in the winter and hot as hell in the summer, and we love it that way.

The house was mom's idea. When we moved here we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'd be done with her chemo soon, and we could start life as a normal family again. So, we decided to stay. At that point Dan was thirteen, so he was the only one who really had any trouble leaving people behind to start over. The rest of us were totally gung-ho. So, we packed up, moved, and settled down here on an old ex-vineyard, and we've been here ever since, in a beautiful house overlooking absolutely nothing.

"Just you wait. Eric and Lydia's kids…" I shuddered involuntarily. "Now that'll be something to see."

Mason twitched. "Oh God. They'll be just like their parents."

"I know it." I paused and looked at him. He winked. And then, in unison, we said, "We need a bigger house."

Jake shook his head. "No way. Never. I am in love with our house."

"Well, you can buy it from dad and stay there. You're almost eighteen."

"Yeah, if I wasn't blind I could drive next year!" He punched his fist in the air, then crossed his arms.

That's something else about France that irks me. Okay, so the legal drinking age is sixteen, right? Well, you can't drive until you're eighteen. Which means that you have two years in which to cause all sorts of mayhem on the road while drunk. On the other hand, it gives you two years to learn how to hold your liquor so you don't cause mayhem and madness. Good and bad at the same time. In America, you don't drive until you're sixteen and you don't drink until you're 21.

"Lucky." I muttered. I still had three more years before I could even think about getting behind the wheel of a car, hence my taking the train to school every morning. Then I crossed my eyes at him even though he couldn't see me. "I'm so bored. Lunch lasts forever."

"Be glad that it does. It's less time we have to spend in school!"

"More, actually. If we got half an hour for lunch instead of an hour, things would go a lot smoother. We'd get out at 3:30 instead of 4." Mason shook his head. "Whatever. I'm going outside. Anyone want to come?"

"I'll stay here." Jake said, motioning to his latest book—something about the medieval political structures of England, in Braille. Two seconds later he was off learning about Archibald the Nervous who conquered the Danes and took all their women as his concubines. Mason rolled his eyes and walked out the door. I followed.

Mason, skinny as he was, was also good at soccer, which is why a few guys stole a ball from Gym and started a game out on the courtyard. Odd della Robbia and Ulrich Stern were among those guys. I sat on the steps, bemoaning my lack of athletic abilities and watching Mason and two other guys slaughter anyone who dared oppose them.

This became our tradition. Our schedule. Every day we'd finish lunch, go outside, and Mason would play some sport while I watched from the steps. It became a ritual. Everything was always the same.

Until, one day, it wasn't.

A/N: Please review and let me know what you think! Reviews keep me motivated to ignore my school work and post new chapters!