Free So B. It by Sarah Weeks

here and now?” She pulled an aluminum pie tin out of the bag. “Who says pie’s not for breakfast?”
    I was hungry and I had never tasted homemade pie in my life. Bernadette wasn’t a baker. She wasn’t a fryer or a broiler, either. Shemade decent scrambled eggs, but other than that and coffee and Jell-O, I don’t remember her making anything much from scratch. We ate mostly frozen or canned things heated up. Alice’s pie had little strips of dough woven like a basket across the top, and the edges were pinched up in perfect, even little waves all the way around. It was beautiful.
    “My grandmother was in the 4-H,” she explained as she watched me lift a forkful of pie into my mouth. “She won ribbons for her pies, and she passed on all her secrets to me because I’m her favorite grandchild.”
    I didn’t know the first thing about baking pies, but for reasons I couldn’t understand, all of a sudden those secrets Alice’s grandmother had passed on to her made me so jealous it hurt.
    “My grammy bakes too,” I said. “She’s the best baker in the world. But she doesn’t bake pies. Just cakes—the kind with lots of layers with frosting in between and pink roses on top. We’re big cake eaters in my family. All of us.”
    As I talked, I ate pie. Bite after bite, unable to stop myself, just like the lying.
    “Cake, cake, cake, that’s all anybody ever thinks about at my house,” I said through a mouthful of pie.
    Alice watched as I boll-weeviled my way through that whole pie. When I finally pressed my fork down on the last bite in the bottom of the tin pie plate, she smiled and said proudly, “Did you ever taste a flakier crust, Heidi?”
    I shook my head and licked the fork clean. I felt sick.
    The kittens under my sweater had grown restless, and their little claws were catching at the stitches in my sweater as they squirmed, so I took them out and put them back in the bag. Alice had a thermos of milk with her; she poured some in a little dish and put it in the bag for them. I was thirsty and wished she would offer me some too, but she’d brought it for the kittens, so I kept quiet.
    “When’s your birthday?” Alice asked me once she had resettled in her seat. This time she didn’t wait for an answer. “Mine’s October second,” she said. Then, ticking off on her fingers, she continued, “My mother’s is October tenth, my sister’s is the thirteenth, mybrother’s is the eighteenth, and Daddy’s is the twenty-seventh. We’re all five of us October Wilinskys.”
    October Wilinskys. I felt another jealous pang. I looked at Alice and wondered—would she understand if I told her about my birthday? Did she know anyone else who had to guess about when they were born? How could an October Wilinsky possibly understand about that?
    “Who named you Alice?” I asked, and braced myself for another pang because I was sure she would know.
    “It’s a Wilinsky tradition,” she began. “The name Alice has been in the family for generations. There are scads of us. My grandmother and my great-grandmother on my father’s side were Alices, and there are two uncles who married Alices, and gosh, there must be at least three other Alices I can’t think of right now.”
    The thought of all those Wilinskys, running around happily naming their babies after each other, made me antsy, and again I felt driven to bend the truth like a soft twig.
    “I was named after the movie,” I told her. “The one with Shirley Temple in it.”
    “Really? Oh, I love Shirley Temple,” Alice said, clasping her hands together with delight. “All those wonderful curls, and that cute little pout. I’m a big fan.”
    “My grammy knows her,” I went on, trying my best to make it sound like that was no big deal, just one of many interesting things about me.
    “She knows Shirley Temple? You mean personally?” Alice asked.
    My chest swelled with pride. I was discovering something else about lying. When people believe what you