Free Takeover by Diana Dwayne

starting to think that I would never see any of these people again without a sheet of bulletproof glass between us. That thought feels a little melodramatic, but the fact of the matter is: I was arrested for murder yesterday.
    The kitchen is a chaotic mess when I follow James in to see what he’s fixing up for dinner. He tells me that he’s okay, that he’s not overwhelmed and that he’s certain that he can handle cooking for so many people. The problem is that I didn’t ask. So, after I finally take over the chore of cooking for what amounts to fifteen hungry people, things go a lot more smoothly.
    The menu is simple, but there’s more than enough food to feed the mob. It’s the Pearson way of cooking. “Other families may serve fancier dinners,” my mother always used to say, “but they don’t have seven kids and a husband to feed every night.” It’s about an hour of stress and delegation before dinner is finally ready. As I start bringing out plate after plate of grilled chicken, salad, potatoes, green beans and bread, I start to feel bad for my mother. The poor woman had to do this for years.
    We finally gather around the table which, at the moment, is little more than the serving area as there are nowhere near enough seats for everyone. I find a spot on one of the steps leading from the upstairs to the living room, and everyone else somehow finds a place to be. Maybe they’re not all sitting, but that’s nothing unusual.
    “So,” Luke says through a mouth half-full of chicken, “did you make any friends in jail?”
    “Luke!” my mom, Darla, scolds.
    He holds up his hands and is already laughing at what he’s about to say. “I was just wondering if she could tell us all whether she met any nice people in there.” He sighs, trying to keep a straight face. “I hear they have wicked pillow fights in the joint.”
    Most of my family just ignores him. He kind of has that effect on people. It’s not that he can’t take anything seriously; it’s more that he knowingly and willingly refuses to. “No,” I respond, “I did not have a pillow fight in jail. Could you pass the beans?”
    He smiles and walks over to the table. As he’s bringing me the beans, he smiles again and says, “So, you didn’t have a prison wife? I thought that was common courtesy.”
    “There were an odd number of us at the time,” I say, taking a spoonful from the dish and placing its contents on my plate. “Maybe if I’d been in there longer, but those are the breaks.” I’ve found the most effective way of getting Luke to stop teasing is to play along.
    “Ah,” he says, scrambling for a comeback, but not finding one. He walks the beans back to the table and resumes his spot close enough to the chicken to make sure he’s the first to get seconds should the situation turn hostile.
    “You know,” Jordan, Matthew’s wife, says, “I heard that almost fifty percent of inmates are wrongfully accused. Is that true?”
    I guess she’s asking me. “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “Again, maybe if I’d been in there a while longer, they would have gone over it at orientation.”
    Jordan’s a lot of things: she’s a great mother, she’s an extremely over-protective mother and she’s an overbearing know-it-all when it comes to matters of children, motherhood, parenthood and other child-related matters. She’s also extremely gullible when it comes to just about everything else. “I didn’t know they had orientation in jail,” she says. “Do they have like a video and everything?”
    Half of the people in the room are chuckling under their breath, but I simply respond with, “I had court this morning, so I had to miss it.”
    Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m always this snarky; I’ve just learned how to get through a family occasion without wanting to shoot myself. Or them. The order on that changes depending on my mood. I’ve heard that’s a common sentiment.
    The rest of dinner is a lot of the