Missing In Action.....

[Dani]

July 26, 2026

Hello Journal,

I guess this is the part where I introduce myself and tell you about my interesting life. Usually I come up with some really cool introduction, but since this is like the sixth journal that I’ve had in my lifetime, I figure I might as well cut to the chase.

My name is Mia. I’m fourteen years old. I live in East Philadelphia with my mother. I attend an all-girls catholic school called Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. And yes, the school is just as depressing as it sounds.

I know that sounds pretty boring, right? Let me see if I can think of something more riveting to say……

I just recently learned that my grandmother had a heart attack.

Is that better?

I was in complete and total shock. It wasn’t because I was extremely close to my grandmother. It wasn’t because I couldn’t stand the possibility of losing a family member. Nope, it was nothing like that.

It was because that, up until then, I didn’t even know that I had a grandmother.

Okay, I knew that I had one. My mother obviously had to come from somewhere. It’s just that I wasn’t sure that I had a living grandmother. My mother didn’t really like to talk about her family. She once said that I was the only family that she had, so I always assumed that my grandparents were dead and that my mother was an only child or something.

While I was in complete shock, my mother immediately fell apart. I’ve never really seen her cry like that before. Then again I’ve only seen her cry a few times in my life. Once when I was nine years old, I got hit by a car while I was out riding my bike. I expected my mom to yell at me and give me one of her lectures about how dangerous it was for little girls like me to ride my bike really fast through oncoming traffic and pretend that it was a motorcycle. Instead, she bawled her eyes out.

Rex has also made my mom cry before. Although that’s kind of my fault too, I guess. I should have been nicer to him. Then again, I don’t see any reason to be nice to someone that clearly hates me.

I was about twelve when my mom met Rex for the first time. I have no clue where she met him. I just remember coming over to our house for dinner and her introducing him as “my friend Rex”, which of course I knew was a load of crap. We wouldn’t have gone all out for a “friend”. I wouldn’t have been forced to squeeze my ass into an itchy dress for a “friend”. Mom would have left her hair pinned back and not let it down in long pretty brown curls for a “friend”. She wouldn’t have attempted to cook a pot roast and nearly burn down our entire apartment for a “friend”.

Like I said, Rex doesn’t like me. Well, he just doesn’t like kids in general. Why he decided to date a woman with one, I’ll never know. Still, he made my mother happy, so I held my tongue. And I’ll give the guy credit; he actually tried to be nice to me. Mom kept saying that we’d warm up to each other, but that never really happened. The final straw came when I dented the back of his new Aston Martin with my bike. It was an accident. I was pedaling at top speed, trying to get away from this creepy guy that I had thought was following me on my way home. I did the right thing and apologized to Rex, but instead of understanding, I got chewed out, told to watch where I was going, and was referred to as “a little bitch”.

The dent was an accident. The sugar that I poured in his gas tank, the Vaseline that I put on the car door handles, the vegetable oil that I poured on his muffler, and the half a ton of breadcrumbs that I dumped on his car that caused a bunch of birds to flock to it and shit all over it was all intentional.

Of course, he tries to be all fake nice to me around Mom. In fact, he even took me to the father-daughter picnic at my school last year, although that was mostly because Mom had asked him to. I was kind of nervous because it was my first year that I got to attend the picnic. You see, as the PTA committee would often point out each year, you need a father in order to be able to go. I don’t have one of those. Well I did, but he’s dead.

I mean, I think he’s dead. I’ve never met him before and Mom always manages to burst into tears whenever I bring him up. Sometimes she’d say to me that my father would have been very proud of me, but that’s all she ever really said about him. It may sound depressing, but I actually prefer to think of him as dead. It’s better to think of him as dead instead of thinking him being somewhere out there and not wanting to have anything to do with me. I used to come up with all kinds of crazy stories in my mind about how my father died. One of my favorites was that he was that died wrestling with a crocodile while on safari in the Australian Outback. Another one was that he was a war hero that was killed in battle.

Anyways, Rex and I wound up not having such a great time at the picnic. He spent most of the day on his cell phone and the rest of it complaining about the food. And then he made it a point to tell everyone that he was “a friend of Mia’s mother”, which caused a lot of whispering among the nuns and the other girls in my class. I mean, it was the truth, but I wished he had lied for once. You see, we already have a pretty bad reputation with my school as it is. Pretty much all of the girls that attend my school live in fancy houses, have two parents, ride to school in fancy cars, and have enough money to rule the world. I live on the second floor of a two family house with a single mother that once had to clean the fancy houses of my schoolmates in order to afford my tuition. I ride to school in a really old Honda that backfires all of the time. It’s a widely known fact that I don’t have a father. My mom’s the only person that showed up at school events. She’s the only person listed in the school directory next to my name and address. Oh yeah, and we’re not Catholic either. We’re…..ummmmm well, I don’t really know…..

I wished Rex had of said that he was my stepfather or something. He could have said that he was my father for all I cared. Sure, he’d never hold a candle to my dearly departed, crocodile wrestling father, but at least he could have spared Mom and I from being the center of the gossip for a change.

Anyways, Mom’s birthday rolled around not too long after the picnic. Rex had made reservations at this fancy restaurant where it costs like at least a hundred dollars to eat. Mom had bought herself this fancy new dress that she really couldn’t afford, but she wanted to look good for her birthday. We waited and waited, but Rex never showed up. After an hour, Mom assumed that he had gotten stuck at work or something, so we headed down to his office. He was stuck alright. And boy, he and his secretary were stuck in a very interesting position.

I don’t know why Mom covered my eyes right that second. I’m not a child. I know what they were doing. I learned about it in biology class. I’ve seen people do much worse on the subway. Still, Mom felt the need to make me sit outside while she yelled out every four letter word that she could think of.

Mom and I spent the rest of her birthday evening at Burger King. I got her a big paper crown to wear on her head. It went very nicely with her dress. She tried not to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. I actually felt kind of bad. I wondered if Rex would have cheated on Mom if I didn’t exist. His secretary certainly didn’t look as though she had given birth at any point on her life. Maybe he needed to find someone that wasn’t saddled with “a little bitch”.

So other than Rex, my late father, and me, nobody’s ever been able to make my mother cry. At least, until this whole grandmother having a heart attack thing happened.

I was sitting outside on the front steps when my mom came home crying yet again. I was surprised to see her home because her shift at the department store didn’t end for another few hours. I could tell that she had been crying for a while because her mascara had run all over her face and made her look like a raccoon or something.

The next hour was complete chaos. She just started running around packing things and kept yelling that we had to go to some place called Riverside. She was so loud that our landlords Mr. and Mrs. Murphy came running upstairs to see what was wrong. That was when I got the gist of the story.

Mom was having lunch at the food court during her break when this lady approached her and said that she looked familiar. The lady turned out to be my grandmother’s cousin who was in town for some play or something. While she was filling Mom in on her life, she just casually mentioned my grandmother’s heart attack out of the blue.

That’s all I really know of the story. Mom started breaking down afterwards. About fifteen minutes and one cup of tea later, she informed the Murphys that the two of us were leaving for Riverside as soon as possible and would be gone for the rest of the summer.

The next thing I knew we were all packed up in our slightly reliable Honda and making our way towards to Riverside. It took us two days to get there. Surprisingly, our car managed to make it the whole way there, despite running out of gas a few times and getting a flat tire.

My grandmother’s house is huge. It looks like one of those houses on one of those old-time reality shows that they air late at night on the oldies channel. I swear my bedroom back in Philly is smaller than her garage. Rich people make me so uneasy. All of the ones that I’ve met have this habit of making me feel as though I’m beneath them or something. It was kind of scary to think that my own family could be like that.

The door was answered by this girl that I could have sworn looked like me. She had long brown hair and blue eyes just like I did. The only real difference was that she was dressed like a supermodel and I looked as though I had just walked right out of a sewer. I felt like just I did during my school’s Dress Down Days. On regular days, I could blend in easily with my uniform. Dress Down Days just served to remind me of what clothes my classmates could afford and I couldn’t.

So anyways, despite looking like she was around my age, this girl turned out to be my aunt. Mom broke down and cried the minute she saw her, which caused my aunt to look at us with an even weirder look than the one that she was already giving us. In fact, she never stopped looking at us like we were crazy. I couldn’t really blame her. I’d probably be weirded out if two people just showed up randomly on my doorstep and started crying, family or not.

My grandmother had an even weirder reaction upon seeing us. She fainted. Of course Mom and I freaked out because we thought she was having another heart attack or something. My aunt didn’t panic. Instead she ran and got a pitcher of water and dumped it over my grandmother’s head, which revived her, thank goodness.

After all of the initial shock and excitement, Mom and I wound up sitting down in my grandmother’s enormously large living room and having a rather in depth discussion with her. First of all, we learned that her grandmother’s heart attack was a year ago and that she’s fine now. She claims that her cousin’s senile or something. Also my grandmother is about the most down to earth rich person I’ve ever met. She’s a writer. She even owns her own publishing company. She used to be the editor of the local paper, but she had to step down because of the heart attack and a bunch of other health related things.

I wound up telling her almost everything about me. I didn’t mean to. She just seemed so easy to talk to. And she was really understanding about everything too. She seemed to hate my school just as much as I did, despite the fact that she had never been there. She thought it was cool that I wrote a lot of stuff down. And she was shocked, but thrilled, that I was an honors student that had skipped a grade. She even said that I could call her Grandma, even though she claimed that she looked far too young to be my grandmother. She said that she had tried to come up with cool and inventive names for her other grandkids to call her, but they kept mispronouncing them.

She and Mom were a little weird around each other. I guess it had something to do with the fact that she hadn’t seen Mom in a long time or the fact that she kept calling her by the wrong name. I figured it was because she was getting older. After all, she said that she was “looking at the dreadful edge of sixty dead in the face.”

After we finished getting acquainted with one another, Grandma took me down the street to introduce me to the neighbors because they had kids my age. I know she meant well, but I still didn’t think that it was a good idea. I haven’t had the best track record with my own peers. The girls at my school don’t really talk to me and when they do, it’s usually because they’re calling me names. It used to bother me a lot when I was younger, but I’ve gotten over it somewhat. I don’t need to go to birthday parties and sleepovers. I have my journals to keep me busy in my spare time.

Grandma’s neighbors, Harper and Devyn Mondego, surprisingly turned out to be really nice. They’re twins and starting tenth grade in the fall just like me. They remind me of those twins that you see in movies and television. You know, how they always make a big deal about two people being twins, but being incredibly different at the same time? That’s basically what Harper and Devyn are.

Harper has brown hair and is a tomboy that’s a pitcher on the school baseball team. Devyn has dyed blonde hair, wears a lot of makeup, and is on the dance team, which is “not the same thing as being a cheerleader”. Despite the differences, they seem to get along pretty well, although I did notice a bit of teasing going on between them.

Anyways, I hung out with them for pretty much the entire afternoon. We sat around, drank soda, ate chips, and swapped life stories. Theirs is pretty interesting. Not only are they twins, but both of their parents are as well. Their parents were high school sweethearts and actually had them while they were still in high school. In fact, their mother was only seventeen when they were born. They were born here, but they had to move around a lot because their dad’s in the military or something. They even got to live in Hong Kong for a year. They wound up moving back here for good two years ago because their mom thought it would be easier for them to stay in one place instead of switching schools every year. Their dad wound up having to stay in Germany for a while, but wound up getting transferred a few months ago to a place closer to them and was able to move back home.

Mom was actually eighteen years old when I was born, but I only know that because I know how to do math, not because she actually told me. It’s also pretty obvious because most of the other mothers at my school look about ten years older than her. I told them all about that and how the other parents look at her funny. Devyn was surprised that people would frown upon something like that because she knew a lot of kids whose parents had them at a young age, including her own boyfriend that was born while his mother was still in middle school.

Of course, this led to a full-scale discussion about her boyfriend Gage. I got to hear the entire story of their entire four month love affair and about how his uncle married her aunt this past spring and how they wound up getting together at the wedding. I got to hear about how her father doesn’t approve of him because he’s on a first name basis with the cops. I also got to hear tiny little details about how he’s a senior and has “gorgeous dreamy blue eyes”.

I’ve never had a boyfriend before, so I couldn’t really relate. The only time that I was really around boys was when I would go to the mixers that my school would have with the all-boys Catholic school. Mom would always get excited about them and would always scrimp and save enough to buy me a new dress for each one. She would always take a picture of me standing in our living room right before the dances and say that I looked like Cinderella or something. And she’d always get excited when she’d pick me up after the dances too and I’d tell her that I’d had a really great time. I never had the heart to tell her that I would always spend the entire evening sitting against the wall, watching all of the upper class girls dancing with their dates.

I actually zoned out for a few seconds while Devyn talked about Gage. She was a very nice person, but the way she went on and on just got to be kind of….weird, I guess. I swear she could have written at least a two-hundred page novel about their relationship. I didn’t think it was that possible for that much to happen to a person, much less two people, over the course of four months.

I wound up embellishing my life to them a little bit. I wasn’t exactly lying, just stretched the truth a little. I told them that I’m currently attending a fancy private school on a scholarship, instead of saying that it was financial aid. I told them that I recently became really close to a girl at school named Mackenzie Peterson and wound up hanging out after school, instead of telling them that my fist got really close to her face because she called me a mutt, which landed me in detention after school. I told them that my mother was in sales, which is actually true. I just left out the fact that she works in a department store and sells vacuum cleaners.

I really felt kind of bad lying to them because they were really nice girls, but I had no choice. I felt so intimidated sitting with them in their nice big house. I didn’t want to be the poor girl from Philly. I wanted to fit in, even if it was with some people that I’d probably never see again after I went back home.

Since I couldn’t very well tell them that I have no idea where or who my father is, I told them that he had died wrestling a crocodile in the Australian Outback. I would have told them that he had died in military combat, but since their dad was in the military, I figured they’d have a lot of extra questions for me.

Boy, was that a bad idea. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, Harper jumped up and said that I should go meet her best friend Tyler because his dad was from Australia too. Devyn laughed and said that Harper was just looking for an excuse to go see Tyler because she likes him and never did anything about it. She also added that it’s too late for her Harper to do anything about it because Tyler’s been dating some girl named Arielle Tanner for the past few months, which leaves Harper now stuck in something called “the friend zone”.

So we wound up going to see Tyler at his aunt and uncle’s house. He actually wasn’t a bad looking guy, but I didn’t think he was as gorgeous as Harper made him out to be, although he did kind of have “windswept blonde hair”. He was pretty nice though. Of course, Harper and Devyn told him about my alleged father. He actually thought it was pretty cool. He said that his dad had never wrestled a crocodile, but he once attempted to chase off a mouse by running after it with a broom.

Not only is Tyler’s dad from Australia, but he has two aunts, an uncle, two cousins, and a grandmother that all still live there. Luckily they didn’t live anywhere near the Outback. I was finally able to stop him from asking questions by telling him that my father was gone before I was born and that it was hard for me to talk about him sometimes.

Once he stopped with the questions, things got much better. Harper, Tyler, and I ended up playing a three on three basketball game with Tyler’s cousins, while Devyn hung back and watched. Harper and I decided to play on a team with his cousin Nate. I’m no expert at basketball, but I figured that we’d have a better chance at winning playing with him because he’s twelve and his little brothers on Tyler’s team were much younger. We turned out to be very wrong.

Nate was a pretty good basketball player and so was Harper. I did alright too, but I was no match for Nate’s little brothers Tommy and Keith. Tommy can dribble really fast and do all sorts of crazy tricks with the ball. Keith’s only five years old, but somehow he can manage to shoot the ball in the basket from several feet away. Tyler said it was because his uncle’s the coach of the high school football and basketball team and taught them how to do all of that.

Then we all decided to go in the house and play video games. We had to all take our shoes off because Tyler’s Aunt Miki is really insane about people tracking dirt in the house. Tyler said that she’s insane about pretty much everything these days, but that it’s because she’s eight and a half months pregnant. That’s why he somehow managed to let his father and his uncle rope him into staying with her for the day. He told us all about how crazy pregnant women can get and how crazy his mother was when she was pregnant with his little sister Zoe. Apparently his stepfather has very little feeling in his left hand now because his mom squeezed it so hard.

For a crazy pregnant woman, Tyler’s aunt actually seemed really nice. She didn’t seem to mind having a random strange girl show up in her house. In fact, she was thrilled to be around a bunch of girls for a change. She said that she felt outnumbered with her husband, her three boys, and the football and basketball teams constantly running in and out of her house. Even the baby that she’s pregnant with now is going to be a boy. She’s thinking of getting a poodle and naming it Fifi as a way of coping.

So Harper, Devyn, Tyler, and I sat down and started playing Street Fighter 10. Devyn may be a huge girly girl, but she kicks some major video game ass. I was pretty good too. I don’t own the game, but I got to try it out a few times at the video game store near the department store where my mom worked. We both still wound up losing though. Harper and Tyler wound up playing each other and Harper wound up beating him, which made Tyler whine and say that Harper didn’t love him anymore. Devyn cracked up and Harper wound up turning bright red.

After we played a few more rounds, Tyler’s Uncle Jack came home and wound up playing with us too. He’s a nice guy, but he really kicked my ass at Street Fighter. He invited all of us to stay for dinner as a consolation prize. I would have said no, but I was having so much fun with everybody. Plus, they were having hamburgers, hot dogs, and what Tyler’s aunt referred to as “the biggest and best salad in the whole world”. There was no way that I could turn that down, so I texted my mom and told her that I was staying at one of the neighbor’s houses for dinner.

Right before we sat down to dinner, Tyler’s dad showed up. I know it sounds lame for me to say that he was nice too, but he really was. I guess everybody around here has to be really nice to each other because they live in a small town and probably see each other every single day. They’re probably so used to being nice to each other, that it’s hard for them to be mean to outsiders like me.

Anyways, his dad was pretty cool. He has a pretty cool Australian accent, despite having lived here most of his life. He said that it somehow managed to stick because he moved back there briefly when he was a teenager. Tyler couldn’t understand what the big deal about his dad’s accent was. He said that his girlfriend came over once and she seemed more interested in hearing his dad talk than in anything he had to say. This caused everyone to laugh and Tyler’s aunt to roll her eyes and make a face.

Mom showed up to pick me up a few minutes later. I was a little bummed because I was having such a good time and I didn’t want to leave before dessert. Before I could leave, however, Tyler’s family wound up staring at Mom really funny as though she were from another galaxy or something.

That’s when it really got crazy. I won’t go into exactly how much gasping, crying and shouting went on. A lot of things were said, but there was only one detail that came out of the whole conversation that I felt was important: Tyler’s Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki are also my Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki.

Yup, that’s right. His Uncle Jack is my mother’s older brother. Like Grandma, they actually took the news really well. In fact, Uncle Jack said that if he had known that I was his niece, he would have let me actually win at Street Fighter. Aunt Miki seemed a little annoyed at Mom for some reason, but she still gave me a hug. I guess she was upset because she didn’t know about me or something.

Tyler’s dad had a stranger reaction to everything. He kept staring at Mom like she had come back from the dead or something. Then he started calling Mom by the wrong name, just like my Grandma had done. Plus, for some reason, he looked shocked when Mom ate a hamburger. I don’t know why he was shocked. Uncle Jack said that she could have one. It’s not like she took it without asking.

After I got back to Grandma’s house, she filled me in on a few more of my relatives. Of course, I have Uncle Jack, Aunt Miki, and their kids. Then there’s my Aunt Molly, the reigning homecoming queen of Riverside High that’s almost four years older than me and going away to college in the fall. I also have an Uncle Sammy that came home later that night. He’s in college too. I have an Uncle Nick, who’s married to my Aunt Katie and has three boys, Connor, Kyle, and Riley. I have an Aunt Sophie that’s getting married soon to a guy named Vic. I guess I can call him Uncle Vic. Those were all that Grandma could really explain to me for now. She was tired and said that she could explain the rest in the morning.

I also have an Aunt Kylie that died a long time ago. I think she was Mom’s twin sister or something. Either that or she looked a lot like my mom. Grandma didn’t say anything about her, but I think that’s why everybody keeps calling my mother “Kylie” instead of her real name, Anna. Grandma called her it, Uncle Jack called her it, and so did Tyler’s dad. In fact, when Tyler’s dad called her that for the millionth time, she got really mad and kept insisting that her name was Anna. This could also explain why he kept looking at her funny. The only person that seems to remember Mom’s real name is Aunt Miki. She actually remembered to call her Anna.

Tyler also invited me to his birthday party this weekend. His dad thought it was the greatest idea ever. Mom said that she wasn’t sure, but Tyler’s dad said that it was going to be “the party to end all parties” and that I would be really sad if I missed it. He also said that she was more than welcome to come and help out if she wanted to. He also kept listing a bunch of other random reasons why he thought both of us should come. She wound up changing her mind, but was only because I made a pouty face and started begging.

Anyways I should go now. I got another interesting day in Riverside ahead of me tomorrow.

Mia

[Dani]

July 31, 2026

Hello Journal,

My aunt is one of the biggest bitches to ever walk the face of the earth. There now, I’ve said it.

Of course I don’t mean Aunt Miki. I couldn’t possibly think that of her. She’s been nothing but nice to me since I’ve gotten here.

Nope, the coveted bitch title belongs to my dear Aunt Molly.
It feels so weird for me to call her Aunt Molly. I mean, she’s only four years older than me. She’s young enough to be my sister. Then again, she won’t even treat me like a sister, so I guess I shouldn’t really think of her as one. In fact, she hardly treats me like a person.

Ever since Mom and I got here, she’s been a major pain in the ass. She acts like it’s such an inconvenience to have us here. I don’t get it. Grandma’s house has ten bedrooms. The only people here are Grandma, Mom, Aunt Molly, Uncle Sammy, and me. It’s not like she was forced to give up her bedroom for us. If they had come to stay with us in Philly, I would have probably wound up sleeping on the couch.

The other night, Grandma wanted us all to have a nice family dinner together. Unfortunately for Aunt Molly, this happened to occur on the same night that her boyfriend wanted to go out. Grandma said that she had to stay home, but that her boyfriend was more than welcome to come over and join us. The way Aunt Molly reacted; you would have thought that Grandma had invited her boyfriend to have dinner in a swamp or something. Later on, I heard on the phone complaining to him about how she couldn’t go out because her sister and niece randomly showed up. Yeah, we did show up randomly, but it was just the way that she said it….it was like she wanted us to disappear. I can understand that it might be weird having relatives suddenly appear out of thin air, but I’m actually enjoying meeting my family.

Speaking of family, Mom and I are going to Aunt Sophie’s wedding. We got to talk to her on the phone the other day and she insisted that we come. It’s going to be here at Grandma’s house in a few weeks. A bunch of people from Grandma’s family weren’t able to make it, so we got their spots. Grandma’s now going crazy trying to figure out what to do with the other empty spots.

I’m so excited. I’ve only been to one other wedding in my entire life. Our landlords’ daughter got married when I was ten years old. We barely knew her, but they were nice enough to invite us. It felt kind of weird because pretty much everyone else there was family and we weren’t. They didn’t make us feel left out or anything, but it still felt kind of awkward.

My whole life I’ve been Mia Isabella Howard. Besides my mother, I was the only person that I knew who had the last name Howard. I know it sounds silly, but it’s really nice to discover that there are more Howards out there. It’s nice to be part of a family for a change.

In other news, I found out why everyone keeps calling Mom “Kylie”.

I found this out the other night when Tyler and his dad came over to invite Mom and me to go bowling with them. Mom said that I could go on ahead, but that she was suddenly coming down with a cold and wanted to spend the rest of the night in bed. I didn’t buy it for a second, especially with the huge fake cough that she let out. For some reason, Tyler’s dad believed her and we went bowling without her. We actually wound up having a good time too. Tyler’s dad is a really nice guy, but he really sucks at bowling. I wound up beating him by like a hundred points. After we went bowling, he took us to the store and got Mom a get well card and some chicken soup. I would have told him that Mom was faking, but he seemed so nice that I was worried that I might hurt his feelings or something.

Anyways, when we got back, Mom was dancing around the family room to some random song. When she saw the three of us standing there, she looked so guilty. You could tell that she had been busted. I felt so bad for Tyler’s dad because he had wasted his money on the card and the soup. I was so sure that he was going to get mad. Instead he wound up laughing and saying that Mom should have just told him that she didn’t want to hang out with him instead of making up such an unconvincing lie. When he referred to her as “Kylie” again, I had to ask him why he kept calling her that instead of Anna. He told me that when he met Mom for the first time over twenty years ago, he was informed that her name was Kylie, so that’s what he called her and that he’ll continue to do so. He also said that around the time that they first met, he was taught in school that Pluto was a planet and he still believes that it is one, even though everyone else claims that it isn’t, just like he refuses to accept that my mother’s name is Anna. I started to ask him more, but Tyler said that I better quit while I was ahead because it takes his dad awhile to shut up once he starts talking about Pluto being a planet.

Finally, Grandma poked her head in the room and said that she couldn’t help but overhear the conversation and that she wanted to say that she had named my mother Kylie, not Anna. She also said that Mom was very proud of her name growing up and that she can’t believe that she had changed it to such a plain sounding name.

By this point, Mom looked as though she was going to faint. I was in shock too. I mean, my whole life I’ve known my mother as Anna. That’s what her co-workers called her, that’s what Rex called her, that’s what anybody else who had met her called her. Kylie sounds like the name of some glamorous fashion model. I’m not trying to say that my mom’s not pretty or anything; it’s just that she’s not exactly the type of person to have a closet full of glamorous clothes and a million pairs of shoes. Plus, it’s not like she can afford to have those things.

After Tyler and his dad left, Mom still looked as though she were in a daze. She kept repeating the fact that Tyler’s dad had bought her soup over and over again. I guess Mom must really like chicken noodle soup or something. Maybe I should get her a few cans for Mother’s Day next year.

Anyways, back to my dear bitchy Aunt Molly.

Grandma thought that it would be a good idea for us to spend time together, so last night she suggested that Aunt Molly take me to hang out with her friends. I guess Grandma hadn’t noticed the dirty looks that she had been giving me.

I really didn’t want to hang out with Aunt Molly. I wanted to hang out with Devyn, Harper, or Tyler, but they were being kidnapped by their parents. Devyn and Harper’s grandmother was coming over for dinner and their parents needed them there for “mutual support” or something. Tyler was spending the night at his mother’s house and was getting dragged against his will to watch his stepfather accept some boring award for something.

Even though I was bummed, I still had Tyler’s party to look forward to the next night. I figured that I could get through an evening with Aunt Molly if I just kept thinking about the fun that I would have at Tyler’s.

Aunt Molly is the reigning homecoming and prom queen of Riverside High. She was also head cheerleader this past school year. These are very prestigious titles that require a lot of work. They require her to only hang out with a certain group of people. They also require her to treat those people outside of her social circle differently and boss them around. She has to do all of this while keeping her hair bouncy and shiny, her nails freshly manicured, and her clothes up to date with the latest styles. Her life is so difficult and tiresome; it’s amazing that she’s able to find the time to sleep at night. There’s a guy that lives near us in Philly that works in the sewers and has to be at work at 5 am. His job seems so easy compared to Aunt Molly’s.

Yesterday was my twin cousins Kyle and Connor’s 17th birthday. They’re my Uncle Nick’s kids. Well, actually they’re Aunt Katie’s kids, but Uncle Nick adopted them when they were little, so that makes them my cousins. Then again Uncle Nick’s not even blood related to me, so I’m not sure what to consider them. No wonder Grandma says our family doesn’t bother with technical details……

Anyhow, Kyle and Connor had an exclusive pool party last night. It was so exclusive that it was invitation only. If you lost the invitation, you were out of luck. Grandma actually had to run over to their house that afternoon and get Aunt Katie to make up an invitation so that I could go to the party. Personally, if it took this much work to get me to set foot into this party, I probably would have been better off not going.

Aunt Molly and I were driven to the party by her boyfriend Denny Covington. Denny’s a triathlete, which means that he plays football, basketball, and baseball. He was elected prom king and homecoming king. His father is the mayor of Riverside and is currently running for governor of the state. He’s going to Harvard in the fall to study law because it’s “the perfect platform in which to launch a political career from”. His father also bought him a Bentley after he got his driver’s license because foreign cars have much better workmanship than American cars.

I learned all of this within less than five minutes of meeting Denny. Yeah, I don’t like him very much……

In addition to prom king and homecoming king, Denny was also voted “Best Looking” and was the MVP of the basketball team and took them all the way to state. He and Aunt Molly were also voted the cutest couple. Because they were voted cutest couple, they have to arrive at parties together. I asked Aunt Molly why we couldn’t just take her car and meet him there. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

One of Denny’s best friends is my cousin Kyle. After meeting Kyle, I can see why. They’re both two of the biggest douche bags that I’ve ever met in my entire life. He kept introducing me to everybody as “his cousin by marriage”. Technically, that’s true, but like Aunt Molly, he acted like being related to me was one of the worst possible things that could have ever happened to him.

Pretty much everyone else at the party was a member of Riverside High’s elite social circle. There was Aunt Molly’s best friend Brooklyn, who spent most of the evening texting on her cell phone and pretending to listen to what I had to say. There was also Brooklyn’s cousin Arielle, who is also Tyler’s girlfriend. I made the mistake of telling her that I hung out with her boyfriend the other day. Apparently I’m not allowed to hang out with her boyfriend. There’s some sort of code that states that he’s not allowed to hang out alone with other girls. I asked her why and she gave me a funny look just like Aunt Molly had earlier. It’s not a good idea to ask these people questions. I have no clue why they hate it so much. Maybe there’s some code that states why it’s so wrong. Trust me though; asking them questions is not a good idea.

Brooklyn and Arielle are also Kyle’s cousins, except they’re on Aunt Katie’s side of the family. Maybe there’s a huge bitchy trait on that side of the family. Aunt Katie seems like a very nice person, so I guess she somehow managed to avoid it. I’d sure hate to meet Brooklyn’s and Arielle’s parents. They’d probably hate my guts as soon as they laid eyes on me.

Despite the fact that it was a pool party, we did very little swimming. Everyone basically spent most of the party sitting in lounge chairs staring at the pool. Occasionally, somebody would sit on the edge of the pool and dip their feet in the water, but that was all. For the third time that night, I made the mistake of asking a question. I jumped up and asked them why nobody was getting in the water. Then I added that it was pretty stupid to have a pool party without going into the water at all. I started laughing because I thought that it was ridiculous. Kyle started laughing right along with me. He was still cracking up when he pushed me into the pool a few seconds later.

Getting pushed into the pool was humiliating enough, but it got worse. You see, I didn’t pack a bathing suit when I left Philly because I didn’t think I’d need one, so Grandma talked Aunt Molly into lending me one of hers. Unfortunately, Aunt Molly is more built on top than I am. We had to tie a few knots in the bathing suit top just to get to fit me right. The top had stayed on me just fine until I hit the pool. To make things twice as worse, I didn’t even realize this until I saw the top floating in front of me, which means that at least twenty people got a nice view of my chest, or lack of one.

Of course, I couldn’t stay out there, so I covered myself up with the top and ran in the house. I explained to Aunt Katie what happened and she was nice enough to give some sweats to change into. After I finished changing in the bathroom, I swung the door open and wound up accidentally hitting someone in the face.

The person that I hit in the face turned out to be Julian, the best friend of my cousin, Connor. He understood that it was an accident, but I still felt embarrassed about the whole thing. Luckily, the door didn’t seem to do any type of major damage to his face. He has a very nice face. He has blue eyes like me, but they’re much bigger and more interesting than mine. His hair’s dirty blonde, but I swore that I could see some shades of red in there as well. Then again, that could have just been the light reflecting off of it or something. His hair also kind of hangs a little bit in his face. If he went to the all-boys catholic school back in Philly, he would have definitely had to get it cut.

I wasn’t staring at him or anything. I was just checking to make sure his face was alright. It was the right thing to do after all…….

I met my cousin Connor a few minutes after I met Julian. I can’t believe that he and Kyle are twins. He also understood that it was an accident. He said that it’s not my fault that his friend’s a slowpoke that doesn’t know how to watch where he’s going.

I wound up spending the rest of the party hanging out with Julian and Connor. Julian and I got involved in a really heated game of ping pong, which I eventually won. He claims that he was being a gentleman and “let me win”. Later on, both Connor and Julian practically killed me at pool. I tried to play it cool by telling them that I was being nice and “letting them win”, but it was hard to believe because I sucked so badly.

Aunt Katie made everybody go in the kitchen later on so that we could sing Happy Birthday and watch Kyle and Connor blow out their candles. Kyle got annoyed and said that he was too old for that, but Aunt Katie said that until he turns eighteen, she’s legally obligated to tell him what he is and isn’t too old for. Then Uncle Nick pointed out that after everything that he and Aunt Katie had been through with Kyle, the least that Kyle could do is to give him and Aunt Katie one more year of embarrassing memories for them to catch on film. I’m not sure exactly what they had been through with Kyle, but it must have been pretty serious because he actually shut up and listened to them.

I also got to meet my little cousin Riley. I felt bad for him. He’s only ten and kept following everybody around. I guess he was bored since there was nobody his age there.

After the party, I rode back to Grandma’s house with Denny and Aunt Molly. Denny kept complaining that I still smelled like chlorine and that it wasn’t good for the air filters or something. I pointed out that the only reason I smelled like that was because my stupid cousin pushed me in the pool, but of course he ignored me.

So today was Tyler’s party. Aunt Miki came over and insisted that she take me to the mall to buy me something to wear. She said that it wasn’t fair that I hadn’t been to the mall yet. I actually didn’t think that it was a big deal to go to the mall, but since she’s pregnant and emotional, I went along with her.

I texted Devyn and Harper and had them meet us there. I asked Mom if she wanted to come with us, but she decided to stay home yet again. I think it might have had something to do with the weird look on Aunt Miki’s face when I invited her.

I was never really a big shopping person. I never really needed to be. I’ve been wearing a uniform to school pretty much every day since I was five. Apart from the nice dresses that Mom had bought for school dances, my wardrobe consisted of a few pairs of jeans, some sweatshirts, and t-shirts. I never really paid attention to what color they were. Sure, I feel sad during dress down days when everybody had nicer clothes than me, but I got used to it.

Well, I sure got some nice clothes today. Aunt Miki made sure of that. I got this really nice sparkly top and a pair of designer jeans to wear to Tyler’s party, plus a few other really cool things. Aunt Miki even managed to find me a matching pair of shoes and earrings to go with my outfit.

Harper, Devyn, and I also tried on a bunch of really expensive clothes that we wound up not buying. It was like one of those scenes from a movie. I always wondered why the characters in the films never bought most of the clothes that they tried on. I guess it’s because they couldn’t afford them.

We all had tacos at the food court for lunch. Aunt Miki ate about five of them. She says that my unborn cousin often causes her to eat really gross and disgusting food and that he’s going to pay when he gets here by being allowed to only eat vegetables and salad for the rest of his life.

After our fun adventure to the mall, Harper and Devyn came over to Grandma’s house and got ready for the party with me. Aunt Molly had Brooklyn over to get ready for the party with her. They went for “social purposes”. You see, Arielle’s their friend and she’s dating Tyler, which means that the entire cheerleading squad is suddenly obligated to attend Tyler’s party out of some sort of ridiculous sense of duty. I know….it doesn’t make much sense to me either. Especially since they don’t even like Tyler and went into this whole explanation about how Arielle’s a junior and can do much better than dating someone who’s “just a loser sophomore”. If they don’t like Tyler, then why can’t they just stay home? I wouldn’t want someone at my party that hated me…..

Mom was kind enough to offer us a ride to the party so that we wouldn’t have to ride with Aunt Molly, her annoying boyfriend, and friend. Harper spent pretty much the entire car ride going on about how Tyler’s not a loser and how the real losers are on the cheerleading squad. Devyn then made some comment about how cheerleaders always get everything they want, which caused Mom to yell really loud and suddenly slam on the brakes really hard when we pulled up in front of Tyler’s house. She quickly apologized when she saw the confused and scared looks on our faces, but didn’t explain why she had yelled. She did wind up speeding away really fast as soon as we got out of the car.

Tyler’s party was like ten times bigger than Kyle and Connor’s. I could have sworn that there were at least one hundred people. Harper said that it was because Tyler always has the cool birthday party. It all started several years ago when his parents got divorced just a few weeks before his birthday. His dad didn’t want Tyler to be sad, so he took Tyler and some other kids to the amusement park to cheer him up. The next year, Tyler’s mom took him and his friends to the circus. The year after that, his dad took him and his friends to see some monster truck show. Every year, his parents take turns throwing him a birthday party and every year they try to outdo each other. Tyler says that his mom is already making plans for his sweet sixteen next year. He said that there’s talk of a helicopter…..

Personally, I thought Tyler’s birthday party was extreme enough without a helicopter. There were hundreds of people running back and forth between the basement and the backyard, a guy giving away snowballs from a truck, and a DJ playing rock music. Tyler’s dad’s an electrician and he somehow managed to rig up this really cool fireworks display for after it got dark. We also each got a really cool glow in the dark black t-shirts to take home that said “I Survived Tyler Arthur’s Epic 15th Birthday Bash”.

I followed Harper around for pretty most of the entire party. Devyn was with us for a little while, but she disappeared as soon as her boyfriend Gage showed up. I met him for a few seconds. He doesn’t really say much other than “hey” and “yeah”. I think he might have said more if I had hung around him longer, but it was still kind of weird. As much as Devyn talks, I thought that her boyfriend would be a man of more than a few words.

Aunt Molly, Brooklyn, Arielle, and all of the other cheerleaders wore their uniforms to the party. I guess this was their way of reminding everyone that they are cheerleaders. I can’t think of any other reason why they had them on. Tyler told Harper and me that Arielle wears her uniform pretty much everywhere. It even got to the point where Tyler’s mom told her to change clothes before coming over because she was getting tired of seeing her wearing her cheerleading uniform. Arielle wasn’t too happy about that. Harper said it was probably because her entire wardrobe consists of her cheerleading uniform and that Arielle probably even sleeps in it.

I guess this uniform thing extends to all of the jocks as well because Kyle, Denny, and their friends all had on their team jackets. They looked even dumber because it was like ninety degrees outside and they didn’t need to wear them at all. The air conditioning in the house wasn’t even cranked up that high. They didn’t really do much during the party, just stood in the corner with their arms folded. I don’t even think I saw them eat at all.

Harper and I sat in the corner and talked to Tyler for a bit. He confessed that he didn’t really know at least half of the people at his party. His mom had only let him invite ten people to his birthday party last year, but his dad said that he didn’t have a limit on the amount of people this year and that he could invite the entire student body of Riverside High if he wanted to, which is what he wound up doing. He also thanked Harper for helping him make the invitations and for riding her bike all over town to help him deliver them. Before Harper could say anything, Arielle suddenly appeared, kissed Tyler on the cheek, and also thanked her for helping with the invitations. Harper said that it was her pleasure because she knew how difficult it was for Arielle to tear herself away from her tanning salon appointment.

I can’t remember what Arielle said after that because that’s when Julian came over and said hi to us. Turns out he’s also really good friends with Tyler. Neither one of them can remember exactly how they met, but they’ve been pretty good friends for a few years now. He knows Harper through Tyler and because they have the same Spanish class. After he mentioned this, he turned to me with this really nice grin on his face and asked me something in Spanish.

Now I’ve never taken Spanish before. My school only offers French and I haven’t taken it yet. I’m supposed to start this fall. I didn’t want Julian to think that I was some sort of idiot, so I tried to remember the little bit of Spanish that I had picked up on the subway back home. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong phrase to utter. I always thought that “extrano” meant “extravagant” or “great” or something like that. The guy on the subway was laughing and grinning when he said it and the guy that he was saying it to seemed pretty happy as well.

Well, I was wrong. “Extrano” is Spanish for “weird”. That’s right, I called Julian weird.

All he had done was ask if I was enjoying the party. I knew that he had said “party” because I recognized the word “fiesta”, so I was trying to reply that I thought that the party was great and wound up calling him weird instead. I wished that I had said that I was weird. At least I would be telling the truth…..

Just like at the other party, Julian easily forgave my mistake. He’s such a nice person. I mean, he’s nice like several other people. You know, like Tyler, Harper, Devyn, and my family are nice? Julian’s nice like they are. I’m not trying to single him out or anything like that…..

We all kept talking for a few more minutes until Tyler suggested that we go in the kitchen to get some pizza. Since there were so many people at the party, the pizza that was already set out went pretty fast.

So Arielle, Tyler, Harper, Julian and I headed towards the kitchen. We were almost in the room when we saw something that stopped us in our tracks.

It’s weird enough walking in on your friend’s father kissing someone. It’s ten times weirder when that person is your own mother.

I guess they didn’t see us standing in the doorway because they kept right on going. I can’t really speak for the others, but I was too stunned to really speak up. I was still recovering from the revelation that Mom’s real name is Kylie. Watching her kiss someone….it was just too…..

The funny thing is that I have seen Mom kiss a man before. I’ve seen her and Rex kiss each other numerous times. Every time I saw them kiss, I wanted to throw up. Seriously, my stomach would get this really nauseous feeling whenever I saw it happen. While seeing her kiss Tyler’s dad was weird and a little creepy, I actually didn’t feel sick to my stomach.

A few seconds later, I heard this soft clicking noise. I turned around and saw Aunt Molly standing behind me, holding up her cell phone with this really evil grin spread across her face. That really ticked me off. It’s strange enough watching my mom kiss someone, but taking pictures of it is just downright perverted. I was about to fight her for the phone when I heard an ear-piercing scream coming from another nearby doorway.

Apparently Tyler’s mom was also freaked out at the sight of his dad kissing my mom.

Of course this caused them to stop kissing. Mom looked like she was about to have a heart attack when she realized that we were standing there, but she looked like she wanted to crawl in a hole and die when she saw Tyler’s mom. Not only did her screaming end the kissing, but it caused several people to run into the kitchen and see what all of the screaming was about.

Tyler’s mom kept asking what my mom was doing there. Instead of answering, Mom grabbed me by the hand and said that we should go now, which his mom thought was a good idea.

I couldn’t understand why we had to leave. The party wasn’t over for like an hour. I hadn’t even gotten to see the fireworks display yet. Plus, Tyler’s dad said that he didn’t want us to go. I don’t know if he wanted us to stay because I actually looked like I was having fun or because he just wanted to make out with my mom or something, but I really wanted to stay.

Unfortunately, we didn’t stay. It was so embarrassing. Pretty much everybody saw us leave. I could barely look anybody in the face. Yet again, we were the outcasts.

Mom and I spent the rest of the car ride back to Grandma’s house in silence. Later on that night, I asked her what happened. She started off by saying that I had forgotten Tyler’s present in the car and that she had headed back over to drop it off. After a few “ums”, she sat on the edge of my bed and told me that sometimes people do things when they’re younger that they shouldn’t repeat when they get older. Then she told me to rest up because we were going back to Philly the next day.

This is great, just great. My summer finally starts getting exciting and now we have to go home all because Mom kissed Tyler’s dad. I don’t even know why Tyler’s mom was making such a big deal out of it. It’s not like Mom was kissing Tyler’s stepfather or anything. This really, really sucks.

Also, I don’t get why Harper makes such a big deal out of Tyler’s hair. I mean, I know she likes him, but Julian’s hair is far more superior. Just saying…..

I have to go to bed now. I can’t believe we’re actually leaving tomorrow. I hope that I at least get to say goodbye to everybody or something.

Mia

[Dani]

August 5, 2026

Hello Journal,

Well, we’re still in Riverside.

Grandma threw a fit when Mom told her that we were leaving. She said that it would be rude and insensitive for us to leave before Aunt Sophie’s wedding. Then she went on about how Aunt Sophie hasn’t seen Mom since they were teenagers and that she would be very sad if we didn’t show up. I also pointed out that Aunt Sophie would also be very sad if she didn’t get to meet me either.

Aunt Miki came over later that day and was also pissed that we were leaving. She really went off about it too. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that she was pregnant, but she really scared me for a second. She started screaming about how her brother always manages to do something stupid that causes my mom to disappear without saying goodbye. I have no idea what she meant by that. She didn’t really elaborate.

She did say how she found out about Mom kissing Tyler’s dad. My little cousin Keith has to go to playgroup every week with a bunch of other kids. One of those other kids is Tyler’s half-sister Zoe, whom Aunt Miki described as “one of the strangest kids I’ve ever met in my entire life”. Anyways, Aunt Miki was picking up Keith from there and overheard Tyler’s mom ranting to one of the other moms about how my mom “ruined Tyler’s birthday”. She doesn’t really like Tyler’s mom, so she found it funny that she was mad, but she was still pissed that she had to find about it from her.

She also said that Mom wasn’t there for her and Uncle Jack’s wedding or any of the fourteen anniversaries that followed. Mom also missed out on them buying their first house and their first fight over Uncle Jack’s decision to put his football memorabilia all over their living room. Most importantly, she missed out on Aunt Miki being pregnant three times. Aunt Miki said that the least Mom and I could do was to stick around and watch her push this kid out.

So Mom gave in and decided to stay. She said that she was going to avoid running into Tyler’s dad for the rest of the trip. Grandma said that Riverside’s a small town and that you’re bound to run into someone at any given point.

So “Operation: Avoid Tyler’s Dad” began. Mom didn’t really call it that, but the way she was acting, you would have thought that we were on some sort of top secret mission. I’m surprised that she didn’t suggest that we wear all black or something.

I got to meet Aunt Bekah and Uncle Chase the other day. They’re not really my aunt and uncle. They’re my godparents. Actually, they’re not really my godparents, but Mom says that if I had been christened or something, she would have asked them to be my godparents. As Uncle Chase puts it, they’re my “surrogate godparents”.

They have the most adorable two year old boy named Parker. I guess I should call him my godbrother. I haven’t really been around a lot of babies, so I found him really entertaining. He kept handing his toys to me and asking me to play with him. He can’t really talk that well yet, so he says “pway” instead of “play”. Mom got confused and thought that he was asking her to pray with him.

Uncle Chase owns this really nice Italian restaurant. Aunt Bekah took Mom, Parker, and me out to lunch there later that afternoon. We invited Aunt Miki and her boys to tag along with us. The Riverside High football team is starting their training for the upcoming season, which means that Uncle Jack’s busy and Aunt Miki will become “a football widow”. In three more months, she’s going to be “a basketball widow”. Luckily, Uncle Jack doesn’t help out much with the baseball team, so she has springtime to look forward to.

We also had lunch with Uncle Chase’s sister and her two daughters, Claire and Rory, who are six and three. She’s a nurse. Her little girls looked as though they had stepped out of a fashion magazine. I’m allowed to call her Aunt Reese, despite the fact that she’s not my “surrogate godmother” or even related to me at all. I swear I’m going to have to start making a chart about how all of these people are connected to one another. Otherwise, I’m just going to get confused and call someone by the wrong name.

So yeah, I wound up spending the afternoon with seven kids. It was interesting. Parker likes to play with his food. He spent several minutes twirling his spaghetti with a fork and saying “Daddy!” really loudly. Aunt Bekah says that he’s trying to imitate his father because he’s seen him stir spaghetti on more than one occasion. He was twirling it so fast that he got sauce all over Claire’s white dress, which caused her to cry. Aunt Miki’s boys were acting crazy too. Nate and Tommy kept complaining about having to hang out with “a bunch of silly girls and a baby” and Keith is going through a phase where he keeps asking people to pull his finger. (Believe me, you don’t want to know what happens if you do.) The only kid that wasn’t making any noise was Rory, who was just staring into space the whole time.

Then we all went to the zoo. Aunt Miki said it was the perfect place to go if you ever want your kids to stop screaming. Mom was surprised at how big it was and how much fun she wound up having. She said that she had no desire whatsoever to visit a zoo when she used to live in Riverside. The zoo we have back home in Philly is pretty impressive. There’s this big hot air balloon that you can ride in that gives you a view of everything. Mom took me up there once when I was about six or seven. She wound up freaking out and throwing up. I felt really bad about it because I had begged Mom for like a month to take me to the zoo and it had wound up making her sick.

I got to ride a camel with Nate and Tommy. It was actually a lot of fun. Aunt Miki complained about the smell. She said that her boys were going in a tub full of vanilla scented bubble bath as soon as they got home and suggested that I do the same when I got back to Grandma’s house. There was this whole section for kids with these big lily pads that we got to jump and down on in the water. We also got to ride the train all around the zoo and see the monkey house. There was also this really nice merry go round that we got to ride. There was this spinning thing on it that Mom got on and rode with me. She screamed a lot, but she started laughing when we got off the ride.

While we were leaving the zoo, Aunt Miki got a call from Uncle Jack. There was a very interesting piece of gossip floating around the football team.

Remember when Aunt Molly took a picture with her cell phone of Mom kissing Tyler’s dad?

Yup, at least twenty kids at Riverside High not only know about it, but have a picture of it on their phone as well……

Of course Mom totally freaked out. Aunt Miki then suggested that we all go to the mall for something called “retail therapy”. Apparently, if you’re sad, you’re supposed to go shopping to cheer yourself up. I guess it’s something that only rich people do.

When we got to the mall, Mom practically fainted in the parking lot. She said that the mall wasn’t that big when she was a teenager. She was like a kid in a candy store with the way that she was staring at the stores. I could have sworn I saw her drooling when we walked into Lord and Taylor. She even wound up buying some stuff. At first I was worried that we couldn’t afford it, but it turns out that stuff in Riverside is actually much cheaper than stuff in Philly is. Aunt Reese said it had something to do with the cost of living and the economy, but I kind of got lost as she was trying to explain it.

It was so weird watching Mom run around the store. You would have thought that she’d never seen clothes before or something. She even bought me some too. Now I have some decent clothes to wear for when my school has Dress Down Days.

After Mom’s “retail therapy”, we went to get ice cream because my unborn cousin told Aunt Miki that he wanted a banana split with extra hot fudge. She says that he will he will be grounded as soon as he’s old enough to care about whether or not he wants to leave the house. I felt really sorry for him.

While we were all eating, Aunt Miki said that she felt bad for Mom, but that Tyler’s dad deserved to have this happen to him because he did something similar to her and Uncle Jack seventeen years ago. Back then, Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki had just started liking each other or dating or something. Tyler’s dad didn’t want them together because he didn’t want his friends dating his little sister. Uncle Jack had stopped talking to her for like a few days and she was really sad, so she wound up kissing this other guy “out of loneliness”. Tyler’s dad saw them, took a picture of it with his phone, and sent it to Uncle Jack.

After she got to that part, Tommy got all excited because he realized that Aunt Miki was telling the story about “the time that Daddy beat someone up and gave them a black eye”. Since he was so happy, she let him finish the story. His version was pretty confusing, but the gist I got from it was that Uncle Jack, Tyler’s dad, and their friends somehow wound up running into the other guy, who then said something really bad about Aunt Miki, which caused them to beat him up. If you think that story’s interesting, you should have seen the way that Tommy told it. He even did a live reenactment of how he imagined Uncle Jack beating up this guy. It was really impressive. I wonder if Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki ever thought of signing him up for boxing lessons.

Later that night, Uncle Sammy took me to hear his friend Daylin play open mic night at some place in town called Xania. Daylin and Uncle Sammy have been best friends since they were little kids. They don’t see each other much anymore because they go to colleges in different states, but they always catch up when they come home to Riverside for the summer. She’s not his girlfriend. They’re just friends. Uncle Sammy made sure that this fact was drilled in my head during the car ride on the way down to see her. He says that Grandma keeps saying that they look cute together and has been saying it since they were in elementary school.

While we were waiting for Daylin to go up on stage, we watched all of the other acts. They were pretty interesting. This one girl wore all black and started screaming some poem about how the universe has no concept or meaning whatsoever. Then these three kids started singing some song without any music at all. They actually sounded pretty good. About halfway through the song, I somehow managed to forget that there wasn’t any music playing. Then Julian came out and started playing the piano.

Yeah, that’s right. I got to see Julian, the one and only Julian Mayes, playing the piano. That’s his name, by the way: Julian Mayes. I think his name’s really cool. Also he’s really good at playing the piano. I couldn’t really figure out what song he was playing. It sounded like some sort of really cool cross between rock and jazz. He also sings too. I wish I could come up with a decent word to describe his singing. I feel like I’m underselling him or something if I just say that he’s “really good”.

I can’t understand why Uncle Sammy’s not dating Daylin. She’s really pretty. She has this really long flaming red hair. She kind of reminds of that really old Disney cartoon The Little Mermaid, except, you know, without the tail. She’s also really funny. She kept telling all of these stories about how she used to call Uncle Sammy “Sam I Am” when they were growing up and about the time that they started a cake fight at his eighth birthday party. She’s way more fun than Aunt Molly’s boring ass boyfriend.

Daylin is also one of the best guitar players that I’ve ever seen. Her family’s pretty musical. Her dad used to play guitar in a band when she was really little. Her stepmother sings and plays the guitar and the piano. Uncle Sammy said that he felt so weird riding in the car with Daylin’s family when he was younger because they would sing along so well to the radio and he could barely carry a tune. Daylin said that her family really appreciated Uncle Sammy’s “excellent humming skills”.

We ran into Julian on the way out. After that scene at Tyler’s party, I was too nervous to say much of anything to him. I did manage to say hi to him, but I got all tongue-tied when he said hi and smiled back at me. I was able to tell him that I enjoyed his performance, but I wound up giggling and I wound up sounding like I was lying or something.

Things around here got even more interesting a few days later. We were just finishing up dinner one night when Grandma got a call that Aunt Miki was in labor. She got so excited that she almost ran out of the house without her shoes on. Aunt Molly said that it wasn’t that big of a deal and to call her as soon as the baby stops looking like an alien. Since Uncle Sammy wasn’t home, it wound up just being Mom and me going with Grandma to the hospital.

Grandma was jumpy for pretty much the entire car ride. It was no wonder that we didn’t get in an accident. Mom kept telling her to calm down. Luckily, she was fine by the time we got to the waiting room. That’s when Mom started freaking out.

“Operation: Avoid Tyler’s Dad” was no longer a success.

It turns out that Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki had left their boys with Tyler’s dad. He was the one that had called Grandma. Mom said that it would have been very helpful if Grandma had told her that before we left the house. Grandma said that not telling Mom was well worth seeing the priceless expression on her face. She also said that Mom had no reason to be so freaked out around someone that she’s known pretty much her entire life. Tyler’s dad agreed with her and said that “Princess” had nothing to worry about.

Oh yeah, my mother’s also known as “Princess”. This is the second alias of hers that I’ve discovered in the short time that we’ve been here. I’m starting to wonder if she used to be a secret agent or something.

I guess Mom doesn’t like that name very much because she told Tyler’s dad that he “shouldn’t talk like that in front of the children”. I personally didn’t see what the big deal about it was. I thought it was a very nice nickname. I’d rather have someone call me “Princess” than any of the other names that I’ve been called during my lifetime. Tyler even pointed out that he’s overheard his dad call his mom much worse. That actually seemed to cheer Mom up a little.

Grandma then suggested that she take her grandchildren down to the cafeteria for chocolate pudding. Tyler almost didn’t go because she wasn’t his grandmother, but his dad said that he could pretend that she was for the next hour or so.

Personally, I didn’t want to leave Tyler’s dad and my mom alone together. They were cracking me up. Plus, I wanted to hear more about “Princess”.

Anyways, the chocolate pudding was actually pretty good compared to the usual hospital pudding. Our landlord back home in Philly got sick once and we went to see him in the hospital. The food there was really crappy. The pudding had some yucky filmy stuff on top of it. I had to get a knife and scrape it off. The pudding that we had in Riverside was nothing like that. It was really nice and creamy.

While we were eating pudding, Grandma started telling us about the first time she met Aunt Miki. She was about Keith’s age and had on these sunglasses that were too big for her face. She had no idea that little girl would grow up to be her daughter in law. Then she started talking about when Uncle Jack started dating her. He had just gotten this nice new car for his birthday and he used to always drive it over to her house to impress her. The funny thing about this was that they were living next door to each other at the time.

Then Tyler asked Grandma if he could remember when his parents first got together. She said that she couldn’t really remember that, but she did remember meeting his grandmother for the first time at some coffee shop when Aunt Molly and Uncle Sammy were little. They became really good friends after that. Tyler’s grandmother wound up marrying a really nice man and moving to Minnesota a few years later, but she still comes back to visit and is coming down for Thanksgiving this year.

Grandma said that she could remember how it rained the day that Tyler’s parents got married. She didn’t attend, but Uncle Jack and Aunt Miki did. They came over to her house afterwards and she remembered Aunt Miki being angry because the rain had ruined her hair and made her shoes muddy.

Tyler thinks that the rain was probably a sign, since his parents were divorced by the time he started kindergarten. He said he was a little confused when it happened because pretty much everybody else he knew had parents that were high school sweethearts like his were, but their parents seemed happy and his parents were always fighting with each other. His mom’s now remarried to some guy named Ted that’s a psychiatrist, who’s always trying to analyze him. Ted drives him crazy, which is why he lives with his dad now and only sees his mom on the weekends.

He did have a funny story about how his mother met Ted though. She was in a really bad mood one day and wound up accidentally slamming her car into the back of his. After they exchanged curse words and insurance information, he asked her out and the rest was history.

Riverside’s just full of stories. It’s like every kid I meet has some interesting story about how their parents met or fell in love. I don’t have a really cool story to tell about my parents, so I’ve decided to make up one myself. Here’s what I have so far:

My father saved my mother from a crocodile that was trying to eat her. She fell in love with him and they wound up creating me. One day, he was swimming in the ocean with my mom when a tsunami suddenly came through. He was able to get her to safety, but the waves took him out before he could save himself.

Yeah, I know that sounds pretty ridiculous, but you should hear how extreme some of these other stories are. I mean, Uncle Chase and Aunt Bekah met because she had fallen into a frozen lake in the middle of winter and he wound up saving her from catching hypothermia. It sounds like something straight out of a movie. My story just needs some fine tuning, that’s all.

After we finished our pudding, we headed back to the waiting room where Mom and Tyler’s dad were. Mom seemed much calmer than she was earlier. Tyler’s dad said that we had the worst timing in the world. He never explained what he meant by that, but Grandma proudly stated that our family’s always been known for its bad timing.

We still had a pretty long wait, which was filled by telling even more stories. I swear, they should send a TV writer to Riverside to get ideas. They could make a fortune off of my family’s stories.
I felt really left out, since none of the stories were about me, so I asked Mom to tell the story of the day I was born. I had never heard about it and I didn’t expect her to say anything, but she told it.

I was born in the middle of a really bad storm. The roads were flooded and the entire neighborhood had lost power. Mom had gone to the hospital a few days before because she thought I was coming out, but it turned out to be a false alarm. The day of the storm, she thought she was having another false alarm and didn’t pay much attention at first. Eventually, she realized that it was the real thing and started panicking big time because she didn’t think she’d be able to make it to the hospital. She was also crying because she didn’t want the first thing that I saw when I was born to be darkness. Eventually an ambulance got to the house, but Mom had already given birth to me by the time they had arrived. I was born in our landlord’s spare bedroom. His wife helped Mom deliver me.

After Mom finished the story, Grandma started crying. She said she wished she had been there to help and she hated that Mom had to go through that alone. I actually smiled after hearing the story. I might not have a cool story about how my parents met, but I do have a pretty epic birth story.

Tyler then mentioned that it was too bad that his dad wasn’t there because he might have been able to fix the power. Mom said that he could have fixed a lot of things. Then Uncle Jack rushed out to tell us that my new cousin was here.

That’s when the real surprise came in. It turns out that the bratty little boy that had been growing inside Aunt Miki for the past nine months, kicking her and making her eat really bad food, was actually a seven pound little girl named Kelsey Marie Howard.

Grandma started crying again, except this time she was happy. She gave me a big hug and said that she always wanted to have a granddaughter and now she had two. Aunt Miki was so happy and told me to not look at her if I wanted any more new baby cousins. She said she was done now that she had her little girl. She was also happy because her and Uncle Jack could finally get rid of the ugly puke green color and all of the football stuff in the nursery and put up bunnies and ballerinas like she always wanted. Tyler’s dad got upset because he was the one that helped Uncle Jack paint the nursery and he didn’t want to have to put up bunnies and ballerinas. Mom thought that it would be a brilliant idea to have Tyler’s dad put up bunnies and ballerinas.

I’m so glad that we didn’t go back to Philly yet. My new cousin Kelsey is so cute. I swear she waved at me from the maternity ward.

I love it here in Riverside. There are so many stories and fascinating things going on. Plus, I’ve made so many new friends. Sure, there’s been some drama. Aunt Molly’s still a bitch, my cousin Kyle’s still a douchebag, Julian probably still thinks I’m insane, and Tyler’s mother and stepfather think that it “wouldn’t be in his best psychological interests” for him to hang out with me, but I’m still enjoying myself. I wish there was a way that we could stay here longer, maybe even for good.

I’ll have to try to convince Mom to let us stay. “Operation: Stay in Riverside” is now a go.

Mia

[Dani]

August 16, 2026

Hello Journal,

Phew, finally got a minute to myself. It’s been hard to think, much less write anything for the past week or so.

Aunt Sophie’s wedding was yesterday. It was very lovely and interesting. The days leading up to it were interesting as well.

First we had to get the house organized. Not so much cleaning it, but figuring out where everybody’s going to sleep. You see, Grandma has thirteen kids altogether. Uncle Sammy’s away at college during the school year, but lives at home the rest of the time. Aunt Molly will be doing the same thing once she leaves for college this fall. Uncle Jack and Uncle Nick live in Riverside with their wives and kids. All of Grandma’s other kids live out of state and she offered to let them all stay here so that they don’t have to pay for a hotel.

So we had to make sure that all of the guest bedrooms were in order, figure out who was sleeping in each room, and make sure that there were enough cots, sleeping bags, and rollaway beds for my cousins. Uncle Sammy says that it’s always like this whenever there’s a holiday or huge family function.

Then there were the airport visits. I swear I’ve been to the airport more times this past week than I’ve ever been in my entire life. First Aunt Sophie flew in from Seattle a few days early to help get everything set up. That’s where she and Uncle Vic live. She works for some clothing designer and he’s a veterinarian. Grandma says that she loves going around telling people that her daughter’s marrying a doctor and replying with “spaying and neutering puppies and kitties” when they ask what field he’s in. Aunt Sophie thinks that it would just be easier to just say that he’s in the veterinary field, but Grandma says that it’s funnier seeing people’s reactions to the spaying and neutering comment.

Once she got here, we had to make yet another trip to the mall. I told Grandma and Aunt Sophie that I’d never been to the mall this much in such a short period of time. They laughed and said that I must not know my mother very well.

I laughed back, but I was actually a little sad because they were right. I don’t really know my mother that well. Up until last month, I thought she was this poor orphan from Philadelphia named Anna who shopped at the thrift store. It’s a bit weird to discover that my mother is really some rich girl named Kylie who has a shopping addiction, a large family and comes from a place called Riverside. I mean, my mother had an entire life before me. I’m not really upset about it so much, just really curious.

Anyways, we went to the mall to get dresses for the wedding. I got a really nice black and white one and Mom got a light purple one. I think light purple is one of the most disgusting colors ever. It reminds me of this grape cough medicine that Mom used to give me when I got sick. I guess the bad taste must have scarred me for life or something, because I absolutely hate looking at that color. Yet somehow Mom managed to look beautiful in it. Then again Mom looks beautiful in a lot of things.

Then we all went out to brunch at this diner called Palmer’s that Aunt Sophie’s sister in law runs. I swear there isn’t a place in town where my family doesn’t know somebody. Almost every time we go somewhere, everybody says hi to Grandma and seems so genuinely happy to see her. I think it’s so cool. I feel like my family’s famous.

We got the best waffles ever. I haven’t had many waffles in my lifetime, but I can tell you that these were certainly the most memorable ones that I’ve ever tasted. Mom said that Grandma used to get up every morning before everyone else did and run down to the diner to buy the waffles. She would then go home and heat them up before Mom and her siblings woke up and make them think that she cooked them herself. It took them only a few weeks to figure out where the waffles really came from.

Later that day, I also got to learn all about my grandfather. Well, the closest thing that I have to a grandfather. Mom’s real father left when she was a baby and died when she was a teenager. Grandma’s second husband, Aunt Molly’s father, wound up adopting her. I’d barely heard much about him except for a few jokes from Grandma in which she referred to him as the “scum sucking pig”. In spite of this, she still says that I’m allowed to call him Grandpa.

Grandpa’s currently serving a three year prison sentence in New York for tax evasion. His third wife and stepchildren live in New York too. I asked Mom how come I’d never met them before since New York is only about a two hour drive away from us. She got real mad and said that I don’t need to meet them. She also said that they wouldn’t want to meet me either.

I can’t understand why she said that. Except for bitchy Aunt Molly and my douchebag cousin Kyle, Mom’s family has been really welcoming to me. I can’t imagine what problem Grandpa and his family would have with me. I tried asking her about them again and she told me to drop it. It was like she gets whenever I ask about my father, except that she looked like she wanted to punch the wall instead of bursting into tears.

Aunt Molly got real pissed and yelled at Mom for talking bad about Grandpa. She said that he was a good person and that Mom had no business badmouthing anyone in our family since she’s the one that walked out on them. Mom started crying and yelled back that Aunt Molly didn’t understand. Grandma and Aunt Sophie tried calming Mom down, but she was just too upset and wound up hiding out in her room for the rest of the night.

Fortunately, Mom was fine by the weekend of the wedding, which was great because that’s when the rest of the family started coming in. Even though Grandma had told me how many kids she had, I still wasn’t prepared. It’s still great being part of a big family, but when you grow up with just a mother and no other relatives, it can be a little overwhelming seeing so many people at once.

First there was Uncle JJ and his girlfriend Candy. Her real name’s Candace, but she goes by Candy. She’s a dancer. Nobody would elaborate on what kind of dancer she was, but Uncle JJ said that she was a really good one. Given how short and tight her dress was, I figured that she wasn’t touring with the ballet company.

Uncle JJ’s twin sister, Aunt Chynna came down next. She’s married to Uncle Andy and they have two boys, Jason and Brandon, who are eight and six. They were followed by Uncle Lucas and his wife Aunt Kacie. Then Uncle Cori came by himself because he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Grandma said that she had a feeling that that situation would be corrected at the reception, which caused Mom to roll her eyes. She says that Grandma’s the worst matchmaker ever.

Aunt Alexia came up from San Francisco with Uncle Eli and their five year old son Sebastian. They’re a very interesting bunch. Aunt Alexia and Uncle Eli have been together for years, but they’ve never been married. She says that marriage is “a ridiculous concept that society expects us to feed into”. She kept repeating that all weekend. Aunt Alexia plays guitar in some rock band. Her son likes to bang pots and pans together. Her and Uncle Eli even bought some with them for him to play with. I wish they had bought earplugs with them as well…..

Finally, Aunt Brandie came in from Jersey with Uncle Kaden and their four boys. I couldn’t remember their names. All I remember was seeing these four boys running around with blue eyes and wavy hair. They looked like stair steps when they all stood next to each other. The second oldest was like a head shorter than the oldest one and a head taller than the third boy. Then the third boy was….well you get the general idea.

Uncle Kaden and Aunt Brandie not only bought their kids with them, but practically Uncle Kaden’s entire family. His mother and Grandma are old friends, so she decided to invite all of them to the wedding to fill up extra spaces. So his father, mother, his sister, her husband, their three kids, and like six more of his siblings wound up coming in from Jersey as well.

All of them were real surprised to see Mom, but the most surprised out of all of them was their foster brother Emmett. Grandma told me that he and Mom used to date when they were in high school. I got really excited when I heard this because I thought that I finally found my father, or at least someone that I could pretend was my father. I was so relieved because I was having a hard time tweaking my made up story about my father saving my mother from a crocodile in the jungle. It would be great to get a real story like everybody else.

Then there were tons of other extended family members that didn’t live in Riverside. Grandma’s cousin Erica, her husband Silas, and their six kids live a few hours away, so they drove down in this big station wagon. Mom’s godsister Morgan flew in from Korea with her husband with the hard to pronounce name, along with their son with the weird name. Her sister Peyton flew in from up north with her husband and kids. Their other sister Taylor and her husband drove in from some part of California that I’d never heard of. They left their kids at home with a sitter. Considering what a madhouse it was here, I applaud them for that.

The night before the wedding, we had the rehearsal dinner here at Grandma’s house. Actually it was mainly just a dinner since nobody rehearsed anything. Grandma said that she didn’t really see a reason to do so since people don’t really need to practice getting married and all they really have to do is show up.

Dinner was alright. I finally got to meet Uncle Vic and the rest of his family. There really weren’t that many of them. It was just his parents, his brother, his sister in law that I already met at the diner, their son, his sister, her husband, their two kids, and about ten other people that were like his aunts, uncles, cousins, or whatever. It sounds like a lot of people, but there were like three times as many with our family.

In addition to that, I discovered that I’m sort of related to Aunt Molly’s snooty cheerleader friend Brooklyn. Her stepmother is yet another one of Mom’s godsisters. In most places, that wouldn’t even be considered family, but apparently in the Howard family, it’s like being blood-related. That’s why I don’t understand why Mom thinks Grandpa wouldn’t want to meet me. I mean, if this family can accept all of these crazy people running around the house, then they could accept me.

During dinner, I got to hear even more stories about “the good old days”. At least, that’s what Grandma calls them. Aunt Alexia says that they’re just days that happened a long time ago, but not all of them were exactly good. Aunt Katie says that she’s not old and that “a long time ago” took place long before she was born. Aunt Alexia wasn’t even sure how that’s possible since she’s younger than Aunt Katie.

First I heard the story of how Aunt Sophie met Uncle Vic in the lunch line back when they were in high school. She had a boyfriend, but she wound up liking Uncle Vic more, so she dumped her boyfriend for him. They dated all the way through high school, but broke up in college because they went to different schools on opposite sides of the country. Years later, they got back together after running into each other at their ten year high school reunion.

After that story, I was treated to the epic tale of Aunt Brandie and Uncle Kaden. It was so long that I could barely keep up. I’m thinking of asking them to tell it to me again so that I can write it down and sell it to Hollywood or something. It has everything in it: action, romance, drama, and singing, Uncle Kaden in a coma, my grandparents getting divorced, and some really epic marriage proposal in the middle of the woods. And that was only the first half of the story. Aunt Brandie was just barely in high school when all of those things happened.

All this storytelling made me curious about my mother’s relationship with Uncle Kaden’s brother, Emmett, so I decided to ask him about it later that night. He started telling me some story about how he took Mom to the high school prom and she wore these shoes that hurt her feet so much that she refused to dance. He couldn’t remember much else about it, but he smiled and told me that they had a good time. I was a little disappointed because it wasn’t the epic story that I was hoping for. My bizarre story about my parents meeting in the jungle was far more interesting.

When the night was over, we had the fun task of getting everybody settled in. Luckily, not everybody decided to stay here. Some of Uncle Kaden’s family, my cousin Erica and her family, and Mom’s godsister Taylor and her husband were actually smart enough to get hotel rooms for the weekend. Uncle Nick offered to let Uncle Kaden’s sister stay at their house, which pissed off Aunt Katie for some reason. Mom’s other godsister Morgan and her family had to go stay at her mother in law’s house because apparently she starts crying and saying that they no longer love her if they don’t stay with her. Then the other godsister Peyton’s family wound up staying at Brooklyn’s house. Because of this, Aunt Molly convinced Grandma to let Brooklyn spend the weekend here. As if there aren’t enough freaking people around here already…….

Thanks to my newfound relatives, I wound up spending the weekend crammed in one of the basement guest rooms listening to Brooklyn and Aunt Molly text and giggle. I guess I should be lucky that I have so many male cousins instead of female cousins because there are twice as many kids crammed in the other basement guest room. Although hearing my cousin Sebastian bang pots and pans together is just as deafening through a wall as it probably would be if I were in the same room as him. It’s also just as deafening hearing my cousin Brandon scream bloody murder at like three in the morning and having to hear Uncle Andy convince him that the Boogeyman didn’t sneak on the plane and follow them to Riverside.

Once the wedding rolled around the next day, things got even more insane. I could tell you just how crazy it is having breakfast with a bunch of kids, but I’m sure you can use your own imagination. I will tell you that it involves a lot of yelling, plate banging, and spilled food. Grandma also said that I could invite Harper and Devyn to sleep over since Aunt Molly was having Brooklyn stay for the weekend. They came over with their parents just as Aunt Chynna and Aunt Brandie were attempting to break up a wrestling match between their boys in the middle of the living room. I’m shocked their parents still decided to let them spend the night, considering what a looney bin they walked into.

A lot of other people wound up arriving early. Uncle Nick and Aunt Katie bought their kids over early, resulting in Kyle “accidentally” walking in on Uncle JJ’s girlfriend getting out of the shower. He claims that he needed to use the bathroom and just happened to walk in at the wrong time. Considering how many bathrooms there are in this house, I’m not sure if I believe him. His parents certainly didn’t.

Tyler, his dad, and Arielle also came by early. I’ve never heard Mom scream so loudly in my life. I guess I’d scream too if somebody saw me running around like a crazy person with big curlers in my hair. Mom didn’t even know they were coming to the wedding. Grandma thought it would be a good idea to invite them as a surprise to make up for something involving Mom’s senior prom. I have no clue what Grandma was talking about, but she said that she’d explain it to Tyler’s dad after a few drinks.

Aunt Molly wasn’t too thrilled that Tyler, “the lowly sophomore”, was there and yelled at Grandma for inviting him. Later on, right before the ceremony, Grandma yelled at Aunt Molly for inviting her boyfriend Denny’s family to the wedding. Since Denny’s father’s running for governor, he figured that the wedding would be a perfect opportunity to try and get people to vote for him. He was passing around bumper stickers and shaking everyone’s hand. Grandma didn’t like that one bit. Aunt Molly says that she has to get used to it because her and Denny are getting married. Grandma says that it will be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Despite all of the yelling that went on earlier, the ceremony on the beach turned out to be really beautiful. I wound up sitting with Mom, Harper, and Devyn. Tyler’s dad sat with us too because Arielle dragged Tyler off to go sit with the other cheerleaders. He also said that it was because he had a much better view of the ceremony from our row. I can’t understand what he meant by that since the cheerleaders were actually a few rows in front of us.

Three of my cousins yelled “Ewwww!” really loudly when Uncle Vic and Aunt Sophie were pronounced husband and wife. I’m sure that will show up really nicely on the wedding Blu-ray. Grandma’s crying will probably drown it out though.

The reception was really interesting. It was at some big pavilion a few miles down from the beach. We all wound up sitting with Tyler’s dad again, except that this time Tyler and Arielle sat with us too. Arielle kept rolling her eyes at us the whole time because she didn’t want to sit with us. She kept trying to convince Tyler to move somewhere else and sit with her friends, but he didn’t want to.

Mom was really surprised that Tyler and his dad actually wore ties to the wedding. Tyler said that he didn’t really want to wear one and didn’t think anybody would care if he did, but his dad made him wear it. He even bet him twenty bucks that somebody would say something about him wearing a tie. So Mom wound up causing Tyler to owe his dad twenty bucks.

Emmett came by our table to chat for a while. As soon as I could, I tried to get the conversation shifted to stuff about when he and Mom were in high school together. Mom couldn’t really remember too much about it, but she did tell me that they were on the cheerleading squad together. Now that really shocked me. I can’t believe that my mother used to be a cheerleader. I can’t believe she was once a bitch like Arielle, Brooklyn, and Aunt Molly. Maybe I’m better off not knowing about my mother’s life before me. Maybe I’m better off thinking of her as Anna and not Kylie. It’s kind of hard to do though because everybody around here calls her Kylie.

Mom also talked a little about hers and Emmett’s first date, which she also couldn’t remember much about. It’s such a pity because it seemed like it would have made a lovely story for me to tell. She said that they went on a really nice picnic one night. Tyler’s dad says that’s what people did when they were too cheap to take their dates to restaurants.

Oh yeah, I also learned that Mom isn’t from Riverside. She’s from some place called Mabtown. The entire town was destroyed by some massive hurricane that ripped through it when she was a teenager and she wound up moving to Riverside. In fact, a lot of the families that lived in Mabtown also wound up moving there too. Mom and Emmett both kept saying how much nicer Mabtown was than Riverside. Tyler’s dad says that they both have no room to talk because Emmett skipped town long before the hurricane even happened and hasn’t even lived in Riverside and because Mom skipped town less than six months after moving to Riverside.

Mom tried to change the subject by asking Tyler and Arielle how they got together. Tyler’s dad didn’t think that it would be a good idea to talk about that, but Arielle jumped in and told some story about Tyler and Harper crashing her slumber party. She says Tyler did it because he wanted to talk to her and that Harper did it because she was jealous that she didn’t get invited. Arielle thought it was amusing that someone went through all that trouble to talk to her, so she decided to go out with Tyler. He had to wait awhile to go out with her because his dad was furious and grounded him for two weeks once he found out what he did. Mom nearly choked on her food when she heard that. She found it so unbelievable that she bought Aunt Bekah over to the table to hear the same story. She was also shocked.

Apparently Tyler’s dad, Uncle Jack, and a bunch of their friends crashed Aunt Bekah’s slumber party when they were in high school. They sprayed Mom, Aunt Bekah, Aunt Miki, and some other girls with silly string and did a bunch of other mean things to them. Tyler’s dad looked he wanted to hide under the table or something while Mom and Aunt Bekah told this story. He kept turning bright red and couldn’t really come up with a good reason to explain why he ruined a slumber party.

After dinner, Aunt Sophie threw her bouquet and Mom wound up catching it. It was pure luck. She hadn’t even gone up to catch it. She just happened to be going up to get another piece of cake and the bouquet fell right at her feet. Aunt Molly got pissed because she was the one that was supposed to catch it and kept demanding a re-toss.

Tyler’s dad caught the garter. He says that it was also pure luck. I’m not sure if pure luck involves practically knocking over six guys and reaching his arm out like he was trying to catch a football, but I’ll take his word for it. Since he caught the garter, he had to put it on Mom’s leg. Mom had this really weird look on her face the entire time. Grandma found the whole thing so amusing that she ran and got her camera to snap a few pictures.

We spent the rest of the night dancing. Mom danced with Tyler’s dad because he told her that the person who catches the bouquet is only allowed to dance with the person who caught the garter. I’ve only been to one other wedding in my entire life, so I’m not sure whether that’s true or not.

After like three hours, Harper, Devyn, and I were kind of tired, so we walked back to Grandma’s house and watched TV. We got like an hour of peace before other people started coming back and making the house noisy again.

While we were getting ready for bed later, we heard this really loud noise from outside. A bunch of us ran upstairs from the basement to see what it was. We saw Mom closing the front door. Her hair was a mess. She looked like she’d accidentally stuck her finger in a light socket.

She said that Tyler and his dad were coming to the beach party that Uncle Vic’s sister and brother in law were throwing at their house the next day. They figured it would be a good way to make up for Mom’s high school cheerleading competition. Then she told us that Riverside is a very nice town when viewed on the back of a motorcycle, but it’s safer to view it while wearing a helmet.

I have to go now. It’s almost 7am. I want to enjoy the last bit of quiet that I have left. Luckily my family’s leaving tomorrow, so I don’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn to get some privacy. Also I’m dying to hear exactly what a beach party has to do with a cheerleading competition, as well as hear the tale of Mom’s random late night motorcycle trip.

Mia

[Dani]

August 25, 2026

Hey,

I have to go soon. I just can’t really talk much…..I’m going to start crying again. Even writing this is making me cry.

Usually when I’m sad, I can write and it will make me feel better. I’m going to try it now, but I doubt it will do any good.

I guess I should start at the beginning. Mom and I have been spending a lot of time with Tyler and his dad. Ever since my Aunt Sophie’s wedding, we’ve practically been inseparable. We all hung out together at the beach party, then the four of us went to the beach together the next day. We went to the amusement park together. Mom screamed her head off on the roller coaster and threw up later that day. I won a gigantic stuffed lizard from some game where you had to squirt a water gun at this plastic fish to make it go fast. I beat Tyler’s dad by like an eighth of an inch. He was a real good sport about it and gave me a big hug. A few nights later, we went out for pizza. They also came over for dinner another night. Tyler even came over and hung out a few times while Mom and his dad went out alone together.

We were spending so much time together that it felt like we were a family or something. I know it sounds silly. I know it sounds downright crazy, but it’s true. I realized this the other night while we were having dinner at Palmer’s. Since Mom and I are going back to Philly in a few days, Tyler’s dad wanted to take us camping before we left. Mom wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, so he started teasing her and saying that she that she was afraid of bears. She kept saying that she wasn’t and he kept saying that she was. Tyler and I thought it was so funny that we started laughing. After a few seconds, our parents wound up laughing right along with us. That’s when I started feeling like we were a family.

When I was little, I had to stay with our landlord’s wife after school while Mom was at work. She would always watch reruns of a lot of old TV shows. I forgot the names of most of them. They were all pretty much the same as far I was concerned. All of the shows were about families and started off with some catchy theme song about how they always stuck together and loved each other. Then they would show all of these shots of them smiling and doing stuff together like dancing, talking, and playing catch. At the end of it, they would almost always show them sitting together at the dinner table and laughing, just like we were at the diner.

I know that laughing while eating dinner doesn’t automatically make you a family. I know that there has to be more to make a family. There has to be love and a whole bunch of other stuff. I get that it isn’t just about a mom, a dad, some kids, and a dog. I told you it was stupid. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s how stupid I was to even have that thought.

Later on after dinner, I talked to Tyler and his dad while we waited for Mom to come out of the bathroom. She took forever, so we had a lot of time to talk. Somehow we started talking about Tyler’s birthday party. I said that I’d be fifteen in April and that I hoped that my birthday party would be as cool as Tyler’s party was. I don’t even know why I said that. There was no possible chance of that happening. I don’t have any friends back home in Philly and even if Mom lets me invite an unlimited amount of people from school, they more than likely won’t show up. It’s not like they could fit in our apartment anyways. We could probably cram in about ten girls from my homeroom at the most. I doubt they’d have a good time anyways. They’d probably complain about how ugly the furniture was.

After I made the comment about my birthday, Tyler’s dad looked at me with this shocked look on his face and started mumbling something. I assumed that he was just surprised at how old I am. I look like a teenager, but I have had some people comment that I look younger than my actual age. I usually get it from old people though.

Once he stopped mumbling, Tyler’s dad looked at me like I was an alien from another planet or something. Then he asked me about my father. I was so shocked that he had suddenly changed the subject that I didn’t say anything at first. Before I could say anything, Tyler jumped in and told him my made up story about my father being from Australia and dying before I was born. I couldn’t really explain the truth behind that, so I just nodded my head and agreed with Tyler. I felt too embarrassed to admit that my father was pretty much a figment of my imagination. He looked really sad when I told him, like he felt sorry for me or something. Looking back on it, I wished I had of just told the truth.

We went skating later that night and had a lot of fun. Tyler and his dad didn’t mention anything else about my father, which made me happy because I didn’t want Mom to start crying like she does every time that I bring him up.

Tonight Tyler came over to hang out while his dad went out with my mom yet again. Grandma had a date too. Aunt Molly says that it’s disgusting that Grandma’s dating at her age and that grandmothers aren’t supposed to date. Grandma says that Aunt Molly has no room to criticize other people’s choices in dates.

Anyways, it was just Aunt Molly, Tyler, and I at my grandmother’s house tonight. Since Aunt Molly had disappeared into her room, Tyler and I decided to invite Harper and Devyn over to watch a movie. We were halfway through it when I went in the kitchen to get a snack. I overheard Aunt Molly on the phone talking about some party that was going on at her boyfriend Denny’s house tonight. She was talking about how Arielle, Brooklyn, and a bunch of other people would be there. I didn’t really pay too much attention until she said Julian’s name.

That’s when I decided that I had to go to this party. I knew that I wasn’t invited. I knew that Aunt Molly would probably rather have a root canal than allow me to be seen in public with her, but I still had to go. I had to see Julian. I wanted a chance to talk to him and hang out before I went back to Philly. Every time I saw him, something embarrassing happened. I wasn’t sure what I thought would happen this time. I mean, I wasn’t sure if he liked me or anything. I know that I really shouldn’t care whether or not he likes me and I don’t….well at least not that much…. It was silly to care about that when I was leaving for Philly in a few days.

So I ran out in the living room and told everyone about the party. He didn’t really care at first, but as soon as I mentioned that Arielle was going, he wanted to come. Devyn was on board to come too. Harper didn’t really want to go, but reluctantly agreed to tag along once Tyler begged her.

Of course Aunt Molly didn’t want us to come with her. She didn’t want to be seen arriving at “the party of the century” with a bunch of sophomores. I had to literally beg her to let us come. I think I promised her that I’d do her chores for the rest of the time I was staying here or something. I felt like I was Cinderella begging my evil stepmother to let me go to the ball.

It took us forever to get ready for the party. I must have tried on at least three different outfits. Devyn and Harper had to run home to get ready and Aunt Molly took forever too. Tyler thought it was ridiculous that we all took so long to get ready. If this wasn’t so important, I probably wouldn’t have taken so long getting ready, but I wanted to look nice or at least halfway decent.

Aunt Molly’s boyfriend Denny lives in an estate on the other side of town. Actually, it’s really just a big house. I’m not really sure what makes it an estate. I’ve lived in an apartment my entire life. I consider anything with more than three bedrooms to be huge. I guess if I had of lived somewhere else, I would have been able to tell the difference between an estate and a big house, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re both the same thing. Our landlord back home has a saying, “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then it’s a damned duck….”

Denny’s parents were out of town at some fundraising thing, which is why he was having the party in the first place. I didn’t think that anyone could throw a party bigger than Tyler did, but I was wrong. Denny’s house was packed. He had not only the kids from Riverside High, but kids from like three different high schools, plus even a bunch of kids from the college. Aunt Molly said that there was no way that they would allow themselves to be “outpartied by a lowly sophomore”. I’ll never get Aunt Molly and her friends. I know I keep saying that, but I kept secretly hoping that someday I actually would understand her. I mean, she’s my aunt. I should be able to connect with her somehow.

Speaking of distant relatives, I ran into my cousin Kyle at the party. He was mean to me again. Although I did kind of interrupt his make-out session with some blonde chick, so I guess I shouldn’t really be too upset. It wasn’t my fault though. I had to go to the bathroom. The one in the hallway had a line and I overheard someone say that there was one in one of the bedrooms, so I went in the room. It’s not my fault that he didn’t lock the door. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

After I got out of the room, I somehow lost track of Harper. I had already lost track of Devyn and Tyler as soon as we got to the party. Devyn was looking around for her boyfriend Gage and Tyler was looking for Arielle. Harper was supposed to be waiting outside for me, but I guess she got lost in the crowd or something. I was running around and yelling her name when I ran right into HIM.

Yeah, I literally ran right into Julian. Really hard too….. He’s like a half foot taller than me, so my head just crashed into his chest. I still feel a little light-headed from the impact.

I swear I’m doomed to always humiliate myself in front of Julian. We just can’t ever meet up like two normal people. I’ve only seen him four times in my life and so far he’s gotten hit in the face with a door, been insulted in Spanish, caught my mother making out with Tyler’s dad, had to listen to me giggling like a moron, and had his chest practically maimed by my head. And every single time, he’s been nice to me. Even after I ran into him tonight, he still smiled down at me with those dazzling blue eyes of his and said “Hi Mia…”

Luckily, things got better once I got over the initial shock of him actually remembering my name and saying hi to me. He was actually really happy to see me because he also couldn’t see anyone that looked familiar to him. Arielle had invited him and he wasn’t really sure who else was coming. I found it really surprising that a person as cool and amazing as Julian could be friends with someone as stuck up as Arielle. I would have asked him how that was possible, but it really wasn’t my place. I didn’t have the right to butt into his business like that. I might have a few friends here and I might be related to one of the most popular families in town, but I’m still pretty much an outsider in Riverside.

So I agreed to be Julian’s “buddy” for the rest of the night. Of course, it was a pretty easy thing to agree to, seeing as how the only reason that I came to the party in the first place was to see him. We spent like twenty minutes walking around the party to see what was going on. There was some kid puking in the indoor pool, this girl dancing on top of a table, another girl passed out in front of the bathroom with some weird kind of makeup on their face, and this other kid randomly did a backflip in the middle of the living room and fell right into the coffee table.

We got tired of walking around after a while, so we decided to go outside and sit down. That’s when the best thing that could have ever happened did: he held my hand! We were making our way through this large crowd of people to go outside and he just sort of grabbed my hand and took it in his. That was the highlight of my night. I know it’s a really crazy thing to get excited about and I’m probably reading way, way too much into it. For all I know, he was just holding my hand to make sure that I didn’t get lost. But that’s still a good thing, right?

We wound up sitting outside and talking in a gazebo. We also wound up talking about gazebos. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him, so I mentioned that I had never been in a gazebo before. He laughed and told me that he actually had a gazebo in his backyard. His dad built it for his mom shortly after his little sister was born. Then he told me that I could come over some time and sit in it if I wanted to. He also said that it’s much cooler than Denny’s gazebo because it has a swing in it. I wish I had time to go over there….it sounds really nice….

We talked for a while after that. It was like everything we said led to yet another random topic. We talked about his sister, baseball, hot dogs, the beach, and pets. He was telling me this really cool story about how his dog ran and stole a pair of underwear off of their neighbor’s clothesline when Arielle came up and interrupted our conversation because she needed Julian for something.

After he left, I found Harper and Devyn. I was going to catch them up on what happened, but then we heard a bunch of kids chanting about a fight, so we went to see what it was about.

It happened so fast. Tyler and this jock were fighting. I shouldn’t have stepped in. I shouldn’t have. I thought I was doing the right thing. I wanted to stop it. He looked he was going to hurt him. I didn’t want my friend to get hurt, I swear. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to push my friend into the window. I didn’t. I was just trying to break up the fight. I didn’t want to hurt him. Seriously, I would never…..

Then we heard these loud sirens. Almost everybody started running. One of the neighbors had called the cops. Julian was going to stay, but Arielle started crying about how Tyler was scaring her and kept begging Julian to take her home. They sent an ambulance around for Tyler. Harper, Devyn, and I wound up riding in the ambulance with him. On the way, Harper called his mom, who met us at the hospital. She was really upset. She got even madder when Tyler’s dad showed up a few minutes later with my mom. She didn’t want my mom or me there. There was a lot of yelling.

I knew she hated my mom for ruining Tyler’s birthday party. I knew she didn’t like me hanging out with Tyler. We ran into her and her husband at the pizza place the other night. They rolled their eyes at us.

Tyler’s fine. Thank goodness. He needed a bunch of stitches, but the doctor said that he was pretty lucky. He got to go home.

I thought everything would be alright after that……

Later on, we were back at Tyler’s house. Harper and Devyn had gone home. Tyler’s mom was going to stay with Tyler at their house while his dad took us home. He was really tired. He went right to sleep. His mom was still mad…..she was still upset…..

Mom said told me to go upstairs and sit in Tyler’s room until it was time to go. I couldn’t…..I had to know what was going on…. I shouldn’t have listened….I shouldn’t have…..

Tyler’s mom was yelling again about my mom being around. His dad was yelling back at her not to talk to my mom like that. Then she started yelling about how Tyler should live with her because she’s not that irresponsible and started going on about how she’s going to call a lawyer in the morning. I lost track of the argument for about a few seconds…..they can argue pretty fast…..

I almost forgot that my mom was in the room until Tyler’s mom went back to yelling at her. She started going on about how my mom left town and how people were worried about her. People kept making such a big deal about her being gone. After a while, some people started thinking she was dead. She thought that was my mom was dead. She actually yelled out loud that my mom was supposed to be dead. Then she went on about how I almost killed Tyler and called me a “little bastard”.

That’s when it happened. Mom finally yelled back at her. She yelled that I wasn’t a bastard. The way she phrased it was shocking. She didn’t just say that her daughter wasn’t a bastard. She said that OUR DAUGHTER wasn’t a bastard. At first, I was really excited when she said that. I thought it meant that Mom was going to marry Tyler’s dad and we were all going to move to Riverside and I could go to Julian’s house and sit in his gazebo any time I wanted to.

Turns out she wasn’t speaking metaphorically….

That’s right. Tyler’s dad is my dad too. My father is no longer a figment of my imagination….

There was even more yelling after that revelation. Tyler’s mom started yelling about how my mom just had to have everything and that giving Tyler’s dad a daughter was just the icing on the cake for her. Before I could try and think about what that meant, Tyler’s dad yelled back that giving birth to his daughter must have not been that big of a deal for my mom since she told me that he was dead and never even bothered telling him about me at all.

That’s when it dawned on me. That’s why he was looking at me so funny the other night, because he believed that she told me that my father was dead. It’s not true! It was just a random story that I made up when I was bored one day! I didn’t know anybody from Australia! I didn’t know that Mom knew anybody from Australia, let alone that it would turn out to be my own father…..

I wanted to run down the stairs and tell them the truth about what I said, but I was too scared. I couldn’t listen to it anymore…..I couldn’t listen to the yelling….. I wound up going upstairs like I should have done in the first place.

Nobody said anything when Tyler’s dad drove us home later on. I guess I should stop calling him Tyler’s dad now…..I should start practicing……

Tyler’s dad is my dad. Tyler told me that his parents were high school sweethearts just like everybody else’s parents. Tyler’s a year older than me, which means that his dad and my mom…..

No wonder his mom hates my mom so much. I thought she was just this crazy lady who yelled at my mom for no reason. Now I get why….

Everybody else has this cool epic story of how their parents got together. I can’t even have that any more. My mother was an evil cheerleader that slept with someone else’s husband. There’s nothing really epic about that.

That’s probably why she ran away too; because she found out she was pregnant with me. I guess she didn’t want everybody to know about what she had done…..

If I didn’t exist, she would have stayed here. She wouldn’t have had to leave her home, her family, or her friends. If I didn’t exist, my mom’s old boyfriend Rex probably wouldn’t have cheated on her. They would probably still be together.

If I didn’t exist, my father wouldn’t be yelling at my mother. Everything was going great between them before he found out that I was his daughter. Yet another one of my mother’s relationships that I’ve ruined…..

I almost killed my brother. My brother might not get to live with my father anymore because of me.

Yeah, writing about this hasn’t really helped much……

I have to leave now. I’m not sure where I’ll go yet, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll just go wherever the wind takes me or something like that. It’s better this way. I’ll write back once I get settled.

Bye.

Mia

[Dani]

August 28, 2026

Hi,

So my plan to run away didn’t turn out the way that I had thought it would.

Like I said, I was going to go wherever the wind took me. Well there isn’t much wind since its summertime, so I just sort of ran as far as I could go. I actually had no idea where I was going. After a few hours, all I saw was a bunch of trees. Eventually I wound up at a lake where I ran into Julian. I was surprised to see him because I had been walking for at least half a day. I assumed that I had left Riverside already.

I wound up staying and talking to him for a little bit. I didn’t plan on it, but Julian asked me why I was walking through the woods carrying a backpack and a suitcase. He was really bummed out when I told him that I was running away. He was also a little upset that I was leaving without saying goodbye to him or any of my other friends. He felt that he deserved an explanation as my friend.

Of course, I wound up telling him the whole story. I told him everything. I told him about my childhood in Philadelphia, how I spent most of my life assuming that my father was dead, how I found out that he wasn’t, and why I had to run away. Then I made him promise not to tell my mother where I was. The last thing I wanted was my mother finding out where I had gone. I was running away to make things easier for her. A part of me was worried that she’d try to follow me.

After I finished my story, Julian told me one of his own. He said that he didn’t grow up around his biological father either. He hadn’t seen him since he was really little and he doesn’t want to see him either. He considers his “real” father to be his stepfather, which is why he has his last name. He wouldn’t really say too much about his biological father, but the impression I got was that his biological father wasn’t exactly the greatest person in the world. He kept rolling his eyes and mumbling under his breath a lot. He did mention that his biological father didn’t want him. I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want him. Then again, I can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t want Julian around them.

Then he pointed out that my father probably wanted me around. He thinks that if my father didn’t want me around, then he wouldn’t have cared that I thought he was dead. It made sense, but I still figured that he wasn’t too thrilled with me, seeing as how I had managed to knock my brother through a plate glass window. He had every right to hate me for doing that, even though it was an accident.

I guess Julian saw how upset I was because he changed the subject and apologized for leaving me alone at the party. He said it was because Arielle was an old friend and needed his help. He’s known her for a while because their relatives were friends or something. Then he went back to telling me the story about his dog that he was telling me at the party. It actually cheered me up for a few seconds.

Julian’s family lives next door to this really mean old lady. She’s always cranky and yelling at everybody. When Julian’s sister Emilie was little, she was actually terrified to leave the house at night because she thought that the mean old lady was a witch. One day, their family’s boxer dog Shadow got loose and ran through the mean old lady’s yard and through her clothesline. When Shadow finally came home, he had this big piece of cloth around his neck. Julian’s mom thought that it was a bandana at first until she picked it up and discovered that it was a pair of really huge granny panties.

He had to leave not too long after he finished telling the story. He just said goodbye. He didn’t even try to talk me out of leaving or anything. I was a little upset about it, but I figured that it was for the best. Since I was leaving, it was probably a good thing that nobody would miss me.

I walked for a few more hours through the woods before stopping to rest. It was starting to get dark, so I curled up with my backpack and went to sleep. I can’t remember how long until I woke up. All I know was that I felt something on my shoulder. I woke up really fast because I thought some random thing had crawled on me. Instead of some weird creature, I saw my father standing there looking down at me. At first I thought he was just an illusion or something. I had thoughts about my father a lot when I was a kid. Since I had no idea what he looked like when I was younger, he always looked kind of blurry in my dreams. I figured that I was having one of those thoughts again, except that I could actually see my father clearly because I had actually met him.

It wasn’t a dream though. My father was actually right there. He actually looked happy to see me. He said that everybody was worried about me. I could hear my mother in the distance, screaming my name at the top of her lungs. I just sat there in shock. I couldn’t believe that my father was actually out looking for me. I was worried that my mother would be, but it never occurred to me that my father would be too. I thought he hated me, but he was standing right there, holding his hand out and telling me that everything was going to be all right.

So I went with him to find my mother. He said that it was a good idea, considering that she was wondering around the woods at night and was afraid of bears. Mom was even more emotional when she saw me. She started crying and hugging me. She also went on about some huge story about how she lost me in Nordstrom’s when I was three years old and nearly had a heart attack. She eventually found me playing on the escalator. She had promised herself that she’d always make sure that she knew where I was at all times. Then she started freaking out because she had broken her own promise.

Then we went back to my father’s house. We made a lot of phone calls on the way. My entire family had been freaking out and was out looking for me, along with half of the town. Julian had kept his promise not to tell my mother that I was running away, but since I only said my mother, he texted my brother Tyler right after he had seen me and told him where I was. Tyler told my father, who told Mom, which then led to them going through the woods and finding me. The four of us wound up having a long and eye-opening conversation.

First of all, he didn’t get Mom pregnant while he was married to Tyler’s mom. He showed us this old photo album with a picture of their wedding in it. Tyler was in the picture with them. They didn’t get married until he was two years old, which means I was already born by then. The rest of the story…..well it’s complicated.

If you ever want to have a conversation that’s both awkward and entertaining at the same time, ask your parents about how you were conceived. Trust me, I know.

Okay, I didn’t ask them to tell me that story. I really didn’t. And they didn’t really go into the super gory details of the process, but it was still weird.

My father thought that it would be best to be open and honest about everything. Since I’m fourteen, I was apparently mature enough to hear the truth. Tyler was there too because my father figured he had a right to know how he suddenly gained another sister in the past twenty four hours.

Well, the storytelling didn’t exactly go that way. I can understand that parents feel weird saying the word “sex” in front of their kids and they have to call it something else, but “fun” probably isn’t the best word to use.

My father met Tyler’s mother at an arcade or something one night and they “had fun”. He misplaced her phone number and wound up taking my mother to the movies several weeks later and had fun, but not a lot of fun. As soon he said that, Mom got upset until she remembered what the word “fun” was supposed to mean in this case. Told you, it’s not a good term to use.

Eventually Tyler’s mother turned back up and told him that she was pregnant, but he still liked Mom, so he wound up seeing both of them. That part of the story was kind of rushed through. There was also a lot of debate over what actually happened. I guess my parents gave up on the “mature discussion” idea because the next few minutes consisted of them saying “did not” and “did too” back and forth at each other. The one thing I managed to get out of it was that eventually my father decided that he’d rather be with Tyler’s mother instead of mine.

Then Mom filled in the rest of the story. She didn’t leave town because of me. She left town because she was upset over my father and a bunch of other things. She wound up living back east with Grandpa and his family. She was there for about a month before she found out that she was pregnant with me. Grandpa and his wife were very upset when she told them the news. Grandpa’s wife already had ten kids, plus they were raising the kids and grandkids of one of them. They didn’t want to take care of another one, so they told Mom to get rid of me. Mom refused to, so they kicked her out.

She didn’t really have anywhere to go, so she just got in her car and started driving. Eventually she wound up in Philadelphia. She didn’t have a lot of money and wound up staying in a shelter at one point. Mrs. Murphy, our landlord’s wife, volunteered there and offered to let Mom stay with her, which is how I wound up being born and growing up in their house.

Then she started describing how beautiful I was when I was a baby. I was named after a character in an old movie called The Princess Diaries that Mom liked when she was a kid. Since my father used to call her “Princess”, she thought it would it would be fitting to name their daughter after a princess. She had no idea that I’d grow up to be a person that wrote in a diary all the time. Sometimes she’d watch me while I was writing and cry a little.

My middle name came from another movie character named Isabella Swan. She was in these vampire movies that were really popular when my parents were teenagers. I guess they weren’t very good movies because my father made this really strange face when Mom explained how I got my middle name.

Oh yeah, I was a condom baby. That’s one of the main reasons that Mom didn’t tell my father about me. She didn’t think that he would believe her. She didn’t think that anybody would. There’s this joke I once read on the internet that said “your birth certificate is an apology letter from a condom factory”. Yeah, so not funny anymore…..

So my father started going on about how Mom should have called him. Mom said that she was too scared to tell anybody, especially him. She started going on about how people called her selfish and something about how my father was working all these hours to support Tyler and how he’d have to work even longer and harder if she sprang a baby on him. I wasn’t really sure what she was saying. It’s hard to understand her while she’s crying.

Then she said that she regretted it and that she was going to tell me the truth when I turned eighteen. That made my father even madder. He had gotten electrocuted on the job a few years ago and nearly died. He could have died without realizing that he had a daughter out there somewhere. Then he said that if Mom thought that she could just waltz back in his life after fifteen years with a daughter and just waltz back out again, then she’s “got another thing coming”.

So after an even longer discussion, it was eventually decided that we’d stay in touch and that we’d come back to visit during the summer and holidays. I didn’t want that at all. I wanted us to stay in Riverside. I complained about it to Mom the next day when she was packing all of our stuff to leave.

She kept promising me that we’d come back to visit. She said that we couldn’t stay, that our life was back in Philadelphia. Then she reminded me about how I was going back to school in a few days and how much fun it was going to be. That’s when I just let it all out.

I told Mom that I hated my school. I told her all about how I got called “a dirty mutt”. I told her about how I spent all of the school mixers sitting against the wall by myself. I told her about the disastrous time that I had at the father-daughter picnic with her ex-boyfriend Rex. I told her about how I didn’t have a father and how I had to imagine that he was dead because it was better than thinking that he was some evil monster that wanted nothing to do with me. I told her that my father wasn’t an evil monster and was this cool Aussie guy that rode a motorcycle and actually wanted to see me. I also started yelling about how I was lonely all of those years and yet she had known that I had a father, a brother, a grandmother, aunts, uncles, and like a million cousins out there somewhere, but didn’t tell me.

When we were in the car later that day, Mom apologized to me. She started crying and said that she had tried very hard to give me a good life, but she had failed miserably. Then she pulled up in front of my father’s house and said that the biggest mistake that she ever made was keeping the two people that she loves more than anything in the world apart from one another.

Yeah, Mom loves my father and me more than anything in the whole wide world. Yet, we’re here in Riverside and she’s three thousand miles away in Philadelphia. It makes perfect sense to me.

I get to stay here in Riverside. I should be happy. I wanted to live here. I wanted this to happen.

Now I know what they mean by “be careful what you wish for”…..

I gotta go. I can’t bring myself to write anything else right now.

Mia

[Dani]

October 31, 2026

Hello Journal,

Happy Halloween!!! It’s been a while.

So much has happened since I last wrote in here. My life has changed so much that I feel like I have to re-introduce myself. So here it goes yet again…..

My name is Mia Isabella Arthur. (My initials spell my first name, how awesome is that?) I was born on April 13, 2012. I’m fourteen years old. I live in a town in California called Riverside. Well technically, it’s called Riverside Township, but you’d only need to call it that if you tried to send us a care package or something. There’s actually a much larger city further south called Riverside, which is part of an entire county called Riverside County. People who live here just refer to our town as Riverside and the other places as Riverside City and Riverside County.

After fourteen years, I finally have a father. It’s pretty cool. I can actually say “my father” without feeling like I’m making something up. I can walk through my house and call out “Dad” and actually have someone respond. I know that sounds pretty minor, but that’s huge for me.

I live with Dad and my older half-brother Tyler. Actually, he’s not that much older than me. We’re only nine months apart, but he still likes to refer to himself as my “big brother”. He’s pretty cool for the most part. We’d probably get along all the time if it weren’t for the fact that we have to share a bathroom in the morning.

We have a dog named Scotty. He’s a reddish brown and white Siberian husky. We got him at the pound last month. He’s one of the nicest dogs ever. Whenever I come home from school, he jumps on me and licks my face. He’s always happy to see me. The people down at the pound told us that his breed of dog tends to get bored if they’re left alone and that they crave company. I guess Scotty destroying an entire twenty-four pack of toilet paper while we were gone one day was his way of saying that he was lonely. Luckily, he’s been good for the most part since then.

Mom’s still back in Philly. Even though I like it here in Riverside, I still miss her. I talk on the phone and video chat with her all the time, but it’s not the same. She’s trying to take time off of work to come and visit, but she’s not sure when. I hope it’s soon…..

I’m currently a sophomore at Riverside High School. It’s weird going to a school without nuns and not having to wear a uniform all the time, but I like it. My favorite subject is biology. We get to cut stuff open. Some people get really freaked out by that sort of thing, but I think it’s pretty cool. The other day we cut open a cow’s heart and this guy got so freaked out that he literally fell into it face first.

History’s not too bad either. My teacher, Mrs. White, can be a bit of a snob, but she seems pretty decent. We’re currently doing some project about the history of Riverside. Because she’s like seventy years old and has lived in Riverside her whole life, she’s kind of passionate about the subject. She goes on about how Riverside used to be a nice quiet village until the early 2010s when it got invaded by people from a place over on the east coast called Mabtown after their town was hit by some random hurricane. She refers to people who were here before that time as the “natives” and the people who invaded Riverside as the “refugees”. She makes it sound like the refugees damaged the town or something. It’s hard to listen when she says that because she’s talking about my parents, my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, and a lot of my friends’ families. In fact, there are only like four or five kids in my history class that aren’t related to the “refugees”. That’s because there was also a massive teen pregnancy epidemic several years ago that they blame on the “refugees”.

Yeah, that’s right, a teen pregnancy epidemic. It sounds pretty insane, but it’s true. Apparently Mabtown had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country at the time of the hurricane. When the “refugees” moved here to Riverside, they wound up having the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. Epidemic is a really strange way to describe it, but my grandmother said that it spread faster than an outbreak of chicken pox.

I was a result of the epidemic. My brother Tyler was a result of the epidemic. My friends Harper and Devyn were a result of it. Like half of the school was a result of the epidemic. Because nobody wants something like this to happen again, we have to have mandatory sex education classes at the beginning of every semester. They put the boys in one room and the girls in another room. Since we’re not really taking it for a grade, people usually don’t pay too much attention in that class. It’s basically just a bunch of facts that get repeated over and over again. It’s really awkward as hell when you’re a condom baby and you have to keep hearing about how condoms are ninety-seven percent effective. I feel like I’m some weird side effect or something.

My new friend Sadie Wolff was a result of the epidemic too. We’re both in Mr. Slotkin’s English class. We’re also both Hufflepuffs. That’s the discussion group we got put in for this book that we have to read. We have to read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for English class. It’s about this boy that’s a wizard and has to go to school for it or something. I don’t know. I’ve barely read it. In fact, I have character analysis and vocab due for it on Monday. I should probably get on that at some point…..

Anyways, like I said, it’s about this boy that’s a wizard. There are eight books in the series. You read the first one during freshman year, the second one during sophomore year, the third one during junior year, and the fourth one during senior year. You’re supposed to like them so much that you go and look up the rest of them once you start college. I doubt that Aunt Molly is reading them at her college right now. Then again, I doubt she reads much of anything.

Since I was at a different school last year, I had to read the spark notes for the first Harry Potter book. It’s a very confusing book. All I understand is that it’s about a boy named Harry Potter that just found out he’s a wizard and has to go to a special school. It would be great if that was all I had to know instead of having to do chapter summaries and lead discussions for my Hufflepuff group. Ewww….

I found the book to be so boring that I came home from school one day and just yelled out “I HATE HARRY POTTER!” That’s when Dad called Grandma Rae long distance. Grandma Rae is Dad’s mother. She lives in Australia. That’s where Dad’s family’s from. Even though Dad’s lived here most of his life, he still kind of has an accent. His accent drives women crazy. It’s kind of creepy seeing everyone from your cranky old math teacher to the girl at the supermarket checkout making goo goo eyes at your father and telling him what a nice voice he has.

Anyways, Dad made me get on the phone with Grandma Rae and tell her just how much I hated Harry Potter. I wished I hadn’t. Apparently she loves Harry Potter. As soon as I told her how much I hated it, she started giving me this long lecture about how Harry was the greatest thing ever and how I shouldn’t hate it. She sounded so upset. I hope she doesn’t think that I’m a horrible person or something. I haven’t met her yet and I want things to be good when I finally do.

Oh yeah, back to my friend Sadie. I’m so glad that I met her. We have so much in common. Not only are we both new to Riverside this year, we’re both living with our fathers for the first time in our lives. Sadie’s story is much sadder than mine though. Her and her twin brother were born here in Riverside, but moved away when they were babies because their parents broke up. Their mom was so upset over the break up that she took them all the way across the pond to England to live with her family. Like me, Sadie and her brother grew up without seeing their father, but the difference is that their mother actually told them what happened, so they grew up thinking that their father didn’t want to see them. A few months ago, Sadie’s mother died in a house fire, so her and her brother got sent here to Riverside to live with their father, stepmother, and half-sister.

I feel so bad for her. Yeah, my mom’s not here right now, but I can actually pick up a phone and call her. I know that I’m going to see her again at some point in my life. I can’t even think about what it would be like if she were gone forever.

Sadie has family in town like I do, but she’s also stuck with the misfortune with having Arielle Tanner as her cousin. I would want to crawl in a hole and die if Arielle Tanner were my cousin.

Arielle Tanner is my older brother Tyler’s girlfriend. She’s a tall red-headed cheerleader with radioactive boobs. No, seriously, they’re radioactive. Harper and I have gym class with her and saw her while changing. We decided that in order for a teenage girl to have boobs as big as hers, they had to be radioactive. She’s always picking on me. She’s a cheerleader, which gives her a reason to do so. She always calls me “freshie” because I’m supposed to be a freshman and she feels the need to remind everyone that I’m too young to be a sophomore. As if starting over again at a new school wasn’t difficult enough…..
I especially hate it when she does it front of Julian Mayes. He’s only two grades ahead of me, but he’s three years older than me. Actually he’s two years, five months, and one week older than me, but who’s counting? Well besides me, I mean.

Julian loves Harry Potter. He keeps telling me how good it is. His mother read it to him all the time when he was little, so he grew up with it. I don’t think I could have dealt with that. Although if Mom read it right before bed, I would probably have fallen asleep right away.

Because Julian loves Harry Potter so much, he’s offered to tutor me in English. So every Tuesday and Friday, I get to ride in Red Rusty and go to his house for a few hours to study. Red Rusty is Julian’s truck. It’s red and yeah, rusty. He just got it a few months ago. His dad’s a mechanic and he likes restoring cars and stuff, so he thought it would be fun to get Julian an old car for them to work on together. Julian says that it’s actually a lot of fun. I can’t imagine having fun working on a car with my dad. He’s not really a car person anyways. He does drive a motorcycle though. I even got to ride on the back of it a few times. One morning I even got a ride to school on it. All of these kids were standing in front of the school and looked at me like I was cool. It’s too bad he couldn’t have given me a ride at my old school. Sister Mary Theresa would have fainted.

So Julian’s tutoring me in English. I think it’s a good idea because I pretty much listen to everything he says anyways. I still find Harry Potter boring, but at least it gives me an excuse to spend time with Julian.

Sometimes on Fridays, we do other things besides study. One time I did really well on a bunch of practice questions, so he treated me to a milkshake at Palmer’s. I don’t think that would count as a date, but it was fun to pretend in my mind that it was. We also hang out at the dog park sometimes. My dog Scotty and his dog Shadow are like best friends now.

Tonight we’re going to the Halloween dance together, which should count as a date, but I don’t think it will. Dad’s making Tyler and I dress up as Harry Potter and his friend Hermione because he thinks it will help us like the story more or something. I told Julian about it and he decided that it would be fun to dress up like Harry’s friend Ron. I’m still not too familiar with the book, but I remember Ron and Hermione not getting along and him calling her names. So Julian’s going to spend the whole night making fun of me. My costume’s hideous enough for him to do that anyways. I have to wear this big black and blue cape, which weighs like ten pounds. I also have to put my hair like hers. She has this terrible perm that looks like she stuck her finger in a light socket and dumped a bucket of water on her head. It took me awhile, but I was finally able to get my hair to look like hers.

I showed Mom my costume a few minutes ago during one of our webcam chats. She nearly had a heart attack when she saw my hair. She kept asking me if I had let Dad fix my hair.

Anyways, I better go now. I need to find a way to make myself look more presentable to Julian despite my heavy cape and bad perm.

Mia

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