"I dunno," Becca replied. "When do you think my mom will call?"

Mal rolled her eyes, without letting Becca see. "She said she'd call after dinner," she told her, for what felt like the millionth time. "How about helping us find some things now? It'll keep your mind off missing your family."

"My family!" Becca wailed. "They don't love me. Nobody loves me. I'm all alone." Becca

was, at the moment she said that, surrounded by Pike kids. Almost everyone was in the kitchen, looking for things like egg timers, bottle caps, and toothpicks.

"You're not alone, Becca," said Claire helpfully. "You're with us!"

"You're with us, and we're with you, next time maybe we'll go to the zoo," Vanessa rhymed. Becca didn't crack a smile.

The scavenger hunt finished up right around dinnertime, just as Mal returned from the BSC meeting. The triplets won by a mile. They'd been able to talk Mrs. Pike into giving them the shoelaces out of her favorite sneakers. That item had completed their list. Mal gave them each a quarter for a prize.

Dinner in the Pike household is never boring. Mr. and Mrs. Pike don't believe in fighting with the kids over what they eat. There's always plenty of food on the table, of all different kinds. That night, for example, the triplets were eating make-it-yourself tacos, Vanessa and Claire were eating the taco filling over rice, Margo was having a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich (the only thing she eats these days, according to Mal), and Nicky was just eating taco shells with nothing in them. Becca wasn't eating at all. She sat at the

table with her hands folded in her lap, doing her best to look like a pathetic, unloved orphan.

"Becca," Mal said, "does anything here look good?" She happens to know that Becca loves tacos.

"I'm not hungry," said Becca.

Mal tried to tempt Becca with whatever food she could find in the kitchen, but Becca refused it all. (Except for the chocolate pudding, I guess.)