When I was little, I had to share a bedroom with at least two others on a quiet night. Troy, Finn, and I were delegated to a small bedroom at the end of the hallway that had two beds, a mattress on the floor, and a couch-like piece of furniture that often housed two of our sisters. When you think of the tetris game that would have been our childhood home, you have to remember that not all of us were always there. On any given night, it was liable to change based on almost any factor, like oh -... The weather. My parents lumped the youngest together, regardless of any kind of gender or age gap that they potentially should have been worried about. Oh, no, don't worry sweetheart you don't need privacy you're just a 10 year old little girl! My ass. I think it would have probably been better to simply build some kind of dog house like fixture in the back yard, and delegate the boys as the tenants of said housing. We would have loved being able to sit around and play in the dirt until whenever. Instead? The house was often stuffy and cramped and there was never enough space to breathe. The heat was never on, and there was no air conditioning, no fans. I'm pretty sure camping or roughing it in the back yard (ha) could have been more luxurious than sharing a single bathroom upstairs with give or take 6 or 7 others at any given time. But then again, my eldest sisters didn't live with us after a short period of time and the girls became sparse at points. And the boys, too. By the time we had grown up enough that no one supervised us, we often found ourselves sleeping on the beaches. The sand was the gateway to an escape we couldn't afford, and it was gifted to us by sheer proximity. When I was old enough, I moved into the compound mostly to get away from the overcrowded interior of the small house we lived in, but that escape lasted hardly any time. In the United States, things changed again and it was open space and independence that was almost suffocating.

When I'd moved to the city and away from Savannah, it had been a relatively large adjustment, one that I hadn't really thought twice about even when I had decided to make the move. To be honest, I hadn't expected to be on my own for all that long, anyway. Where one of us went, the rest often were sure to follow. At least, some of us. A handful of my sisters had stayed in Africa, and the rest were in our American hometown. Troy was on his own mission, and a totally different story. Needless to say, I wasn't surprised when Finley had showed up on my doorstep a handful of days after I'd moved in, prepared to stay with me. As gracious and wonderful as I am, of course I obliged his... request, allowing him to occupy my spare room. And as every time we had stolen a tent and pitched it somewhere together, or slept on the beach, our occupation of the same space was as natural as it had always been. What had felt unnatural was the opposite â€" the absence of space between my brother and I, or any of my family really.

Now let me tell you I can sleep through almost anything thanks to the environment I had grown up in. Along the way, I had learned when I could sleep that heavily and when I needed to retain some kind of awareness. Had I accepted this idea when Finn had shown up the night before, I might have had some kind of sanity upon being woken up. Instead? I had been dreaming of something as farfetched as you could believe, wearing Church as a face hat. I wasn't a fan of sleep, and it wasn't something I accepted as a need very often. This particular chance at sleep was over long before I wanted it to be, though, and as Church launched himself into the air with all four legs straight out and his tail a bushel of fuzz, a sickening smack woke me up. The wooden spoon was met with a really violent curse, and I shot up in a way I hadn't since the Hunter had stepped into my home in the middle of the night. Of course I wouldn't recognize that Finn was in my room and not Azrael, making it blatantly obvious by the way the door would sandwich him the threshold and the door itself, rigging a nice little trap.

"How are you even alive you little ... " I cursed, trying to figure out what was on my face. What the fuck was Mr.Martha Stewart trying to make? "...I want three reasons why I shouldn't squash you in the door. You have 10 seconds, and... go!"