Time passed, and their family grew. Sam and Mercedes managed to keep up with work, bills and nine kids. Who could say that they didn't look happy? They were just weeks from celebrating their second anniversary… if they could survive to see it.

Mercedes rushed into the house. After finding her husband sitting in the living room, she threw her arms around his shoulders. "I didn't think I was going to see you again," she breathed. She hugged him so tight that their cheeks were crushed flat against each other's.

Braxton stopped over the couple and crossed his arms. "So dramatic," he scolded. All the sixteen year old wanted was to fulfill his rite of passage of getting his driver's license, but his guide was being unreliable. "I couldn't focus because you kept nagging."

"You wouldn't pay attention," the mother argued. "You were playing with the AC."

"You were sweating the whole time."

"I was having a twenty minute long panic attack."

"Twenty minutes?" Sam didn't even expect them to make it that far. "Where did you go?"

"The end of the driveway." With only two weeks left until his driving test, Braxton couldn't wait until his mom was ready to let him go. He huffed, "I'll just ask dad to ride with me before he leaves town."

Reed groaned into his science book, "Is it time for a break?"

"We just had a break," Sam reminded.

Like father, like son, Sam strongly believed that Reed was dyslexic. He tried to make the boy comfortable by having all the kids do homework at the same time, and it always ended with him being one of the last left. He constantly brought up the idea of testing, but the ten year old didn't want to hear it. It quickly escalated to a fit where Reed would promise to "do better," and Sam would be confused over what to do.

Thor clinched his ball close as he entered the room and stopped over his brother. "Prince, can I play?" His little fingers drummed against the rubber as he waited for his brother to give him attention.

Prince didn't look up from his puzzle to answer, "No."

Unlike his brother, Prince didn't struggle with his lessons. He attended a school for gifted children. He shined brightest in math. The eight year old enjoyed practicing division, but puzzles were his "me time" activity.

"Momma, get her!" Prince ordered as he stopped his baby sister from eating one of his pieces.

Diana Evans was the newest addition to their family. The angel faced nine month old was made of pure love and sunshine. All her siblings had a theory for her future personality, but she was more focused on crawling, being cute and exploring the world by tasting things that weren't all food.

Thor lit up when Whitney entered the room. "Lets go outside." He held out his ball, but again he was rejected.

"Not now." She playfully tapped the top of his head as she passed him. Whitney had a smirk frozen on her face that was unsettling to the parents. The eighteen year old passed out college brochures and announced, "I actually took Sam's advice. If Juilliard is stupid enough to deny me, I applied to NYADA and NYU… and a couple of more schools in New York." She had her top 3 picks, and the others didn't compare.

"Where's New York?" Thor softly asked.

Peter heard his youngest brother as he slid past him. "Far, far away." He fell back into the chair with his sketchbook.

Unable to ignore the scent that tickled her nose, Whitney asked, "Did you use my Hawaiian Coconut body wash?"

"No, it's your Mountain Stream wash." He shrugged, "I just want to smell good."

For reasons, she called one of her brothers Mr. No-bath and another Mr. Long-bath; who do you think is who?

As his sister was starting to get riled up, the jingle of the doorbell caused him to jump out of his seat. "I got it." He ordered everyone to stay put as he rushed out of sight. The fourteen year old smiled as he opened the door to his friend from art class. Before he could greet her, he could hear a crowd gathering and whispering behind him. His lips tightened as he led her inside. "Maya, this is my family."

"Hi," the crowd said in unison.

"We're going to be working in our books," he explained before taking Maya's hand and leading her to the patio.

Whitney reached out to stop her mother from following the pair. Knowing what was playing in her mind, she joked, "They're in the backyard, not on the Titanic." She couldn't let her mom's paranoia ruin her brother's first date. "Upstairs," she dictated.

Sam started up the stairs with one arm wrapped around his wife and the other around his baby.

She allowed her husband to lead, but giggling caused her to stop in the middle of the hall. She opened the door to her oldest boys' room and found two teens sitting in the middle of the floor. She squinted her eyes at Logan and the cheerleader. "Why do you have a girl in your room with the door closed?"

"I'm just tutoring her."

"Fine, but you can tutor from further away." She gestured with her hand for the two to part, but they didn't follow. "Move!" she ordered.

Sam peeked into the room. "Sorry, keep studying." He pulled the door until there was a narrow slit. He rubbed his wife's shoulder and nudged, "Come on, I'll put you both down for a nap."

Reed felt like he couldn't get away from his reading. Every hour of every day, it loomed over him. He woke up to go to school and read. He came home to homework. Sit down, read, stand up, read, downstairs, read, upstairs, read. By bedtime, he had only flipped the pages of his book once.

"Little Dude, you're still doing homework?" Jackson asked, strolling into the bedroom. He had left home to watch a concert with his dad, and he wasn't truly surprised by what he returned home to. He sat beside the boy. The fourteen year old peeked at the pages, but refused to take the book as it was nudged at him. "I can't keep doing your homework."

"Just read it to me like you did before," he groaned, dropping the book into Jackson's lap.

He huffed, knowing something had to change. "Nothing bad is going to happen if you get tested. If you're not dyslexic, we can move on, but if you are, there's teachers that know how to help. You-"

Reed shook his head through the speech but finally exploded. "No, I'm not doing it. They're not putting me in the class for stupid people."

And those people get made fun of a lot.

"First, dyslexia doesn't mean you're stupid. Second, there's no classes just for 'stupid people.' Lastly, and most importantly, why the hell does it matter what other people say." He preached that there was no point to jumping through hoops for the opinion of someone else. "You wouldn't let what someone else says stop you from signing to play with a big soccer team, right?"

"No."

Jackson let his point hang as if it was obvious: gossip wont stop you from doing what you want, so it shouldn't stop you from doing what matters. "You got your health and a home full of people that want you. Nothing else is more important," he explained. "Let them talk, but if they touch you, you put that right hook on them."

Mercedes froze in the doorway and gasped, "What are you telling him?"

He huffed at his mother's timing. When he wanted to be a good big brother, it backfired someway. "There was a whole talk before th-" He stopped and jumped up. To make a topic be forgotten, he had to move past it. He took her hand and cheered, "Let me show you what I got from the show." He pulled her away.

Thor gloomed as he stood over the edge of his sister's bed. When he had her attention, he apologized. The boy removed the brochures from behind his back and admitted, "I was going to hide them." He took the invitation to sit.

"This is just information about the schools. I already applied," she explained with the corners of her lips turned down in pity for the seven year old.

"Why do you have to go so far?"

With hundreds of people in it, she claimed the city was hers. "It's where I belong." While most girls gushed over crushes, Whitney always called New York City her love. Her heart jumped a beat at every chance she had to visit.

She kept two photos from her first trip to Manhattan in a double picture frame by her bed. The first photo was of her mother cuddling the four year old whose eyes twinkled as she focused up at the billboards of Time Square. Her father didn't get the same honor of photographing her face because in the second photo, taken on the 70th floor of the Rockefeller Center, their daughter couldn't tear her eyes away from the skyscrapers that interrupted the view of the Hudson River.

Thor was focused on losing the only person that made him feel like he wasn't the forgotten kid. He shrugged and admitted, "But I'm not special like everyone else." He wasn't a genius. He didn't have a hobby that allowed his mother to spoil him with materials. He didn't have an activity that would drag the family out of the house to watch him perform.

"No, you're the most special."

He was too sweet to be overlooked. He had hand drawn cards ready on every birthday. While most of the siblings were guilty of wanting to drop the whiny Diana off at a fire station, Thor rushed to her with blankets and toys, excited for his big brother duties. He read stories to whoever was sick; he'd wake them up to get it in before his bedtime. He was the only kid excited to go to every game, performance, and art show.

Whitney promised Thor that she still needed him. "I'm leaving, but we can still talk. We can still plan our outfits for the first week of school, and you will help me pick out the perfect look for meeting with record labels and Broadway auditions." She fell backwards into her pillows and smiled as Thor followed. "You'll always be my favorite little brother, and I will always be your favorite sister… And you still can't tell your dad that we call each other that."

Sam held his daughter up as she jumped against the bed. He kissed her tan button nose. "Say Dada." He smiled as his daughter squealed at him. "Dada."

Mercedes grinned at the father and daughter, but argued, "Our baby isn't a parrot."

"It worked with Peter. His first word was Yoda."

She sat beside the pair and dropped her pillow into her lap. Silently, she repaid her day. "Do you think I'm being too hard on the boys?" she asked as her fingers swirled at the silk pillow cover. "Can you at least see where I'm coming from?"

"You can't stop them from growing up." He softly smirked at her pout. He had seen it with his first wife; with a newborn, a kid being potty trained and two kids in school- one being for his first year- she was shaken by the rush of changes.

Mercedes was fortunate enough to breeze through without anxiety with Whitney, but then she had four boys clustered in the same age range. They didn't want to put restrictions on their life. They wanted everything: parties, cars, dates. They knew how to make their mother's heart beat faster.

"I trust our kids, but I don't trust the situation they could get into." She explained, "Our kids are in an art school where the theater and culinary kids are cooler than the jocks. With a car, they could go anywhere they want. They could go to parties to drink or to someone's home to have sex."

Sam defends the boys by announcing, "We talked about that, and they know that they're not ready for that."

"So you never told your dad what he wanted to hear when you were having an uncomfortable talk?"

He chuckled to himself. "Not as often as I did my mom." He shifted the baby so he could reach out for his wife. He promised. "All of our kids are smart, and they know they'll never get ahead by being around the wrong people. They're going to leave this house to be the best people for the world… and I'm kind of starting to like the idea of them being gone."

Mercedes couldn't resist giggling. "You could have told me that before planning to restart," she argued, pointing to the little one in his arms. "When Diana is old enough to leave us, we'll be grandparents."

He could agree, but he knew the roles would be different. "Grandparents are supposed to love them, fill them with sugar, and send them back home." He didn't know the words to describe what her laugh did to him, but he knew he was going to have that feeling for the rest of his life. "Everything is going to be great, and I'm happy to have it all with you."

Thank your for reading.