All my talk was probably wasted, though. See, Emily is our adopted sister. She's two years old and she came to us from Vietnam. So first of all, she doesn't talk much, and second, she's just beginning to understand English.

I told you I have a wild family. Here are the people in it: Mom; my stepfather, Watson Brewer; my seventeen-year-old brother, Charlie; my fifteen-year-old brother, Sam; David Michael (he's seven); Emily; Karen and Andrew, who are Watson's kids from his first marriage (Karen is seven and Andrew is almost five); and Nannie. Nannie is Mom's mother, my grandmother. She moved in with us after we adopted Emily. Nannie's husband had died years earlier, Nannie was tired of living alone, and we needed someone to help care for Emily, since both Mom and Watson work.

As you can imagine, we need a pretty big house for all these people. Luckily, Watson just happens to be a millionaire. Honest. He really is. So after he and Mom got married, my family moved across town to live in his mansion. The house is so big that everyone has his or her own room, even Karen and Andrew, who only live with us every other weekend.

What happened to my real father? He walked out on Mom and my brothers and me not long after David Michael was born, and we hardly ever hear from him. He usually forgets our birthdays. Sometimes he even forgets to send us Christmas presents or cards. All I know about him now is that he's living in California somewhere. Or at least he was the last time he bothered to call. We live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, so my father is about as far away from us as he can get without leaving the continental United States.