My aunt and uncle have always done everything they can to make me feel like part of their family. But as much as I try, it’s never been easy for me to completely let them in. In my experience families are fragile things. And being part of something—really part of it—means it can be taken away. It means you have something to lose. And I’ve already lost way too much.
Maybe it’s true that I’m more of a peninsula now—attached but apart, connected but separate—but that can be a lonely business too. And I want more than that. I want to be absorbed into their little continent. I want to stop thinking that the worst could happen if I am. I want to be more daughter than niece.
I want to belong.
But that means trying harder. It means letting them in and including them when it comes to the big stuff—like turning down tens of millions of dollars. And maybe the fact that Ididn’tis a sign. Maybe it means I’m even further adrift than I thought.
Once, not long after I arrived in Chicago, I heard Leo ask his mom if I was an orphan. They were reading Harry Potter before bed, as they did every night. Aunt Sofia had offered to start again from the beginning so that I could follow along too, but I told her I thought the books were stupid—even though the truth was that I’d already read the first three with my dad and just couldn’t imagine returning to those pages without him.
“Harry’s parents died,” Leo was saying that night as I passed by his room on my way to brush my teeth, “and that madehiman orphan, so…”
“Yes,” Aunt Sofia said, her voice brisk. “But it’s different, because Alice has us.”
“Harry had an aunt and uncle,” Leo reminded her. “But they didn’t want him.”
“Well, we want Alice,” she said. “Very, very much.”
“So she’s not an orphan, then?”
There was a short pause, then Aunt Sofia cleared her throat. “Tell me this,” she said. “When you think of Harry, what’s the first word that comes to mind?”
Leo’s answer arrived right away: “Wizard.”
“Exactly. So he’s an orphananda wizard. Both things are true, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, that’s how it is for all of us. We have all sorts of words that could describe us. But we get to choose which ones are most important.”
Leo paused to consider this. “So Alice could be a wizard too?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Aunt Sofia said, laughing softly. “But maybe it’ll be something else entirely, some other word we don’t know about just yet.”
“Like what?”
“That,” she said, “is up to Alice.”
Just after third period on Monday I run into Leo at our lockers, which are side by side. “Have you seen him yet?” he asks as I pull a few books off the top shelf.
“No, but he texted earlier,” I tell him. “He seemed disappointed it was mostly just paperwork. I think he was expecting a little more fanfare.”
“What, like balloons and confetti?”
I laugh. “Probably.”
“So does this mean it’s all official?” Leo asks, keeping his voice low, though nobody around us seems particularly concerned about what we’re saying.
“I think so. The ticket is claimed. The money will be here in six to eight weeks. And guess what? It turns out he’s the youngest winner ever.”
Leo’s eyes widen behind his glasses. “Really?”
“Well, he did win, like, twelve hours after turning eighteen,” I say, like it’s no big deal, though the wonder of it still hasn’t worn off for me either.
For the rest of the weekend, in between calls and texts from Teddy, I daydreamed about all the amazing things he could do with this money, all the doors it could open, all the people it could help. Last night he finally decided to take the lump sum, which means he’ll be getting a check for a little more than fifty-three million dollars soon.
Fifty-three million dollars.
The population of Chicago is only 2.7 million, which means Teddy could now afford to give every single person in the city—every postal worker and firefighter and nurse, every intern and bus driver and retiree—a twenty-dollar bill. I can’t remember the last time Teddy had evenoneextra twenty. And now this.
