"Sure!" I said. Supposedly air conditioning is bad for dancers, because it can tighten your

muscles. But I have to admit, I love it on really hot days.

So we drove home comfortably, without any perspiration or glow.

Our house is on a street shaded with big maple trees. But it might as well have been theSahara desert when we got out of the car. The hot, steamy air was almost enough to make you choke.

"Hi, Daddy! Hi, Jessi!" squealed my sister Becca from inside the front screen door. She ran outside, wearing a one-piece bathing suit with strange, multicolored designs on it. (No, not some fancy designer swimwear. Becca is eight, and she decided she could make her solid white suit look a lot better with markers.) "Can we play in the sprinkler?" she asked.

"Seee-gahh! Day-eee!"

That last voice was my little brother, Squirt. I had to laugh when I saw him running across the lawn. His teeny legs were doing about a hundred steps per second, but he was moving forward so slowly. Squirt is almost a year and a half old. He's been walking for a few months, and now he's starting to talk. For example, I'm pretty sure "Seee-gahh! Day-eee!" meant "Sprinkler, Daddy!"

My aunt Cecelia suddenly appeared at the door, holding a pair of turquoise jellies. "John

Philip, come in here and put on your sandals!" (John Philip Ramsey, Jr., is my brother's real name. But he was so puny at birth that the nurses in the hospital called him Squirt, and the nickname stuck — except with Aunt Ce-celia sometimes.)

Aunt Cecelia is my dad's sister. She moved in with us to help take care of Squirt when my mom got a job. Aunt Cecelia is sometimes hard to take — and that's a nice thing to say, compared to the way I used to talk about her. I used to think she was a cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger's mother. When she first got here she was bossy and mean and awful. She treated Becca and me like babies, and tried to control our lives. But we "had it out" and things have gotten a lot better.