Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.

"Come on, Chloe, what else do you have to do?" Pete whined at her as she declined the invitation for a biking excursion that he was busy planning with Clark. Actually, Pete was planning while Clark shrugged his shoulders a lot and deferred with the standard chores and asking the parents disclaimer. "It's summer," her friend insisted. "There is no possible school event for you to be covering trying to convince them to let you onto the high school paper early."

"I told you that I'm busy," she replied maybe slightly more harshly than she normally would have due to the reminder that they had refused to allow her to move up and work in the high school office despite the fact that there was so little interest in the extracurricular that the publication was a once monthly event.

"With what?" Pete demanded pouting at her as if she had single handedly set out to destroy his "epic beginning of the last summer of our pre high school lives."

She answered him. She did. She just maybe did it softly enough that what he actually heard was probably something along the lines of "mumble, mumble."

"What was that?"

"I said that I'm babysitting, okay?" She clarified.

"Since when do you babysit?" He asked her suspiciously.

"Since now, apparently."

"How did that happen?" Clark piped up obviously hearing the lack of enthusiasm in her voice.

"Look," she told them in her I'm only going to explain this once tone, "one of the guys from the plant got a job elsewhere and is in the process of moving. He is off looking for their new house while his wife is finishing out her two weeks at her job here. I guess they usually work opposite shifts or something, so the kids don't have a regular babysitter. My dad volunteered me to help out."

"Ouch," Pete commented, "that is some deep parental betrayal right there."

"It's not that bad," Chloe admitted. "They are paying me - pretty well actually. And dad knows that I have my eye on that new laptop. I have to start earning it somehow - with summer break I've got the free time to put into it."

"So, who is it that you are babysitting for?" Clark asked her. She was pretty sure that he would be able to give her some sort of further details on the family. She was still not quite used to this everybody knows somebody who is married to somebody's sister whose cousin works for so and so kind of train of interpersonal identification that Smallville seemed to use to keep track of its citizens.

"The McMillans," she answered waiting for Clark to speak up with something that he knew or had heard his parents mention about them. She was looking at the wrong friend for the reaction that came.

"The McMillans?" Pete practically choked. "Seriously?" He started to laugh. "You got scammed. You got scammed big time.

"Why are you laughing?" Chloe demanded turning to the other boy when it was clear that Pete was too enmeshed in his mirth to say anything else. "Clark! Why is he laughing?

"Umm . . . you see," Clark looked incredibly uncomfortable to be the bearer of bad news, "the McMillan boys have a bit of a reputation."

"I know there are four of them, but the oldest one is only eight," Chloe tried to argue. "The youngest is three and out of diapers. How bad can it be?" Neither of her friends answered her.

Chloe was forced to remind herself of the cliché about famous last words. How bad could it be? The McMillan boys were not exactly what she had been led to believe. She had been told that she would be watching children - not attempting to herd cats (clawed, feral cats). That was maybe a little harsh as none of them had actually clawed her, but the youngest had attempted to bite a chunk out of her arm. She just felt lucky that it had been a cool, rainy morning. She had been wearing a sweatshirt that deflected the little hellion enough that she didn't suffer any actual damage.

She had yet to determine which of them was actually responsible for the streak of green paint that was currently globbed up in her hair (they could be surprisingly stealthy for all of the noise level), but she was very certain that it had been the six year old who had plugged up the sink and flooded the bathroom floor. Her shoes were going to take forever to dry, but there was no way that she was going to leave them unattended after she had caught the four year old going on a scissor wielding rampage (just because she had confiscated that pair did not mean that there weren't others). The eight year old had been holding an entire box of spiders when she had noticed him hovering over her while she was busy using half a cabinet full of towels trying to mop up the floor. Where did one even find an entire box full of spiders? It was not her best day ever, but the day was not yet over.

Chloe pushed up her sleeves (physically as well as metaphorically) and prepared to wade back into the fray. She was a Sullivan Lane blend. An unruly mob (even if it did consist of four squirmy small children with a definite lack of listening skills) was not going to get the best of her. She was a journalist. She did not go running away from a little bit of chaos; she went running toward it. She could do this. She was going to do this. She was not a quitter. She just needed a moment to reevaluate. She needed a strategy, and she needed it yesterday. She let her eyes drift closed for a moment as she mentally tallied up all the clues to the different personalities that she had received in the course of the past few hours and tried to think what would be her best method of attack for each of them. She used a trick she had learned on a visit to her uncle's to pop the bathroom window to let herself back inside (she was pretty sure that the locking her out of the house had been a coordinated effort).

"Alright, boys," she announced coming up behind where they were all trying to peer out the living room window to see where she had gone, "let's talk about what's going to happen next."

"What did you do to them?" Clark asked her as he stood on the porch of the McMillan house three days later with a pie in hand. Cleary, Mrs. Kent had sent her friends by to check up on her (the pie was a dead giveaway). Pete was openly gawking at the sight of the oldest boy as he could be seen running a vacuum across the living room floor through the open doorway.

"A little of this and a little of that," Chloe responded with a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders.

"Really, Chloe, what did you do to them? They are . . .," Pete trailed off and looked at Clark helplessly.

"Behaving? Listening to you? Not setting anything on fire?" Clark tried.

"Yeah," Pete agreed, "what he said."

"I just provided them with some appropriate motivation," Chloe told them. "Tell your mother thank you for the pie, but I am working," she hinted. Clark took the hint and handed over the plate before hauling the still staring Pete back to their bikes.

The vacuum turned off, and she turned to look at the expectant face behind her. "Chores all done?" She asked him. He nodded excitedly. "Adventure time it is then," she announced leading to cheers being heard from four different directions. "And," she added as she sat the plate on the floor beside her while she knelt to help the youngest get his backpack situated across his shoulders, "we have pie for our snack."

Mrs. McMillan had cried actual tears while hugging her goodbye. The boys had group piled on her in an exuberant display of affection before loading themselves into their minivan. Clark and his dad had come by to help finish off loading the U-Haul that Mr. McMillan had brought in the day before, and he stood by Chloe as they waved the family off down the lane.

"That was amazing," Clark said looking impressed. "If word gets around to the mothers of Smallville, you could have that new laptop in no time."

"It wasn't that hard after I got my bearings," Chloe admitted. "Can't say that I want to make a career out of it though. I'm pretty sure that wrangling a bunch of unruly boys is not what my future holds."