But Alice knew: It was about the money. In the end, everything was about money-in her house, in the Fuller house, even in the rich kids’ houses. Parents just had different vocabulary words for it-some fancy, some plain-and different ways of talking about it. Or not talking about it, as the case may be.

In the Fuller family, they screamed and yelled about money, even stole from each other. Earlier this summer, Ronnie had caught her youngest older brother going into her bank and tried to bite him. He had just pushed her down, then taken a hammer and smashed the bank, a Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even though she had a little plug beneath her feet. He didn’t have to break her to get what was inside. And even when the money was freed-mostly pennies and nickels but also quarters, a few of those dollar coins, from when they put the woman on the coin and nobody wanted her-Matthew had kept pounding and pounding on Belle until she was nothing but yellow powder.

Alice and her mother did not fight about money, did not even speak about it directly, not even when her grandparents visited from Connecticut and said things like: “Well, this is the life you made for yourself.” Once, Alice ’s grandfather, Da, had given her a five-dollar bill when she told him she didn’t have the kind of scrunchie that all the other girls had. It was the only time her mother had ever spanked Alice, and they both cried afterward and agreed it would never happen again. Her mother would not spank, and Alice would not make up stories to get money from Da.

That had been back in the third grade, though, when neon scrunchies were important and Alice hadn’t yet learned to be good.