We had had a swim and we had eaten ginker cake and we were sitting on the rocks beside the Fitzgerald-Trout siblings' favorite fishing stream when they began to tell me their story. Kim, the oldest, spoke first. "Kimo and I think what happened to us should be called 'The Family Calamity,'" she said.
"Family because it had happened to the five of us," Kimo chimed in. "And calamity because that's a word for when things go really wrong."
"Did things really go that wrong?" I asked.
The childrens' five sets of eyes in their five brown faces looked at me like my question was absurd.
"Um, yes," said Kim in a voice that exposed just how hard she and her siblings found it trying to make a grown-up understand anything important. "We're only telling you this because we want to make sure that what happened to us doesn't happen to any other family, ever."
"Write that part down," said Toby, the youngest boy, pointing to my notebook. He was holding his baby sister, Penny, in his lap and she seemed to be nodding in agreement.
I was about to put pen to paper when Pippa added, "You should put the word monster in the name too, because a monster was definitely part of the problem."
"Yeah. Plus, it sounds way cooler." Toby grinned at his sister.
"Okay," I said. "'The Family Monster Calamity.'" I wrote it in big letters at the top of the first page of my notebook. "Tell me how it started."
That's when they all began to talk at once. Kimo said something about their boat being taken and Kim said, "It was all the secrets." I couldn't make out what Toby or Pippa were saying, but it didn't matter because as soon as the baby spoke, they all stopped talking.
"What did Penny say?" I asked them.
The baby herself answered, saying, "Wimo."
"She's talking about the limousine," Toby explained. He looked more than a little sheepish.
Kim stared at me gravely. "Penny's right. The limo was the first secret between us."
Pippa wiped her glasses on her T-shirt and said matter-of-factly, "The limo, yes, the limo. That's where you should start our story."

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Excerpted from Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts by Esta Spalding
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