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in the cupboard? It's locked!"
     
    "What do you mean?" I said to Damon.
     
    "It's true," he said. "Gina's ovaries are all screwed up."
     
    "Really?" I said, intrigued. The cold hard truth was that we group home kids lived and died for gossip about the counselors. They knew everything about us, but we hardly knew anything about them. So I loved it whenever I learned something personal or embarrassing about them. One of my happiest memories from Haply House was when someone had discovered that most of the counselors were making less money per hour than one of the kids was making working at Pizza Hut.
     
    "Really," Damon said. "And that's why they live in a run-down house with a bunch of juvenile delinquents."
     
    "Because Gina's ovaries are screwed up? What does that have to do with--?"
     
    "Think about it," he said.
     
    I did think about it. "What? You mean we're the kids they couldn't have?"
     
    He shrugged. "Makes sense, don't it?"
     
    Yolanda sulked because Damon and I were both ignoring her. "I want some cinnamon toast."
     
    Before I could ask Damon anything else about Ben and Gina, someone kicked open the front door again. I immediately tensed, because somehow I just knew it had to be Joy.
     
    Of course, she stuck her head in the living room too, and the first thing she said was, "I smell smoke."
     
    No one said anything, and I noticed that Damon's half-eaten slice of cinnamon toast had mysteriously disappeared.
     
    Joy stepped closer to Yolanda. "Bad girl!" she said. "Smoking inside again? I think you should be punished. Come on, hand em over. Matches too."
     
    Without a word, Yolanda slipped the pack of cigarettes from her pocket and passed them up to Joy. So that was her idea of making Joy "think" she was the boss, huh? But Joy knew that none of us would report her to the house counselors, for this or any of the other things she did. Call it the Group Home Code. The way we kids saw it, it was us versus the adults, and no one ever, under any circumstances, squealed to a counselor about anything another kid did. If you did, the punishment was far worse than anything the counselors could dole out--even worse than being sent to Rabbit Island. Once, at Bradley Home, a newbie had ratted out another kid for downloading Internet porn. The rest of the kids in the house had kept him covered in bruises for three weeks, until the counselors had finally been forced to transfer him to another home--where I'd heard kids there had given him a hard time too.
     
    Adults were always accusing us of not respecting rules, but it was only their rules we didn't respect. We had rules of our own, and we respected them a whole lot.
     
    Having gotten what she wanted from Yolanda, Joy turned her sights on me. "Have a nice day at school?" she asked innocently.
     
    My eyes never left the television. "Oh, yeah. Everyone gave me a real warm welcome."
     
    "It don't have to be like that, you know," Joy said. "Just be nice to me like my friend Yolanda here."
     
    Suddenly, I felt like I had a starring role in some chicks-in-prison flick. I was all set to start a cellblock riot right then and there. But I heard Ben's footsteps coming down the stairs. So rather than punch Joy in the face, I casually stood up to go close the window again.
     
    Ben stepped into the doorway of the front room. "Gina's not up there," he said, looking at me. "Did you actually see her?"
     
    "No," I said. "I just saw the door closed, and I thought I heard her inside." Then, with Ben staring right at me, I sniffed the air twice. Joy was looking at me too, so I knew she saw me do it.
     
    Ben hesitated, still preoccupied with finding his wife. But some part of him had noticed me smelling the air, just like I hoped. He sniffed too.
     
    "Hey!" he said. "Who's been smoking inside?"
     
    "Not me," I said, sitting back down to watch television.
     
    "Not me!" Damon said.
     
    "Not me," Yolanda said.
     
    "Joy?" Ben said, facing her.
     
    "It wasn't me!" she