Excerpt: We Are The Square Root Of Minus One.

My family used to be a happy family. Sounds like a cliche, I know. Tolstoy has a famous opening, something like "all happy families are alike in their happiness, while each miserable family it miserable in it's own way." I know I'm slaughtering the quote, but it's not the point. The point is that our family used to be very unique in our happiness. I mean, quintuplets. What's not unique about that?

I remember, at our sixth birthday party, there was a huge party, and people came from news stations, and newspaper places, and all that. People always ask why on earth I remember it, but it doesn't surprise me or my family. I've always been known as the one who remembers every last unimportant and stupid little detail, from the age of three days or so. We were born on September first, and our birthday was also the first day of first grade, and everyone made this huge deal of us turning six. I think my parents still have some of the news pieces on tape, showing how cute we were, five little six year olds, all red haired and perfect, smiling hugely and laughing gayly. It's not only what was captured on camera, though. We really were happy. Me, Aislinn, Emer, Gwen and Connall. And our parents too. Though I think they were probably a little exhausted. But we were good kids. We've always been good kids. I remember that whole day. The first day at school. Our school wasn't a huge school. It was the neighborhood elementary school, and the neighborhood wasn't very big either. The whole school, first through eighth grade, was about three hundred students. There were two classes per grade, and each had less than twenty students. Our parents were very insistent that we stay together. And so it ended up that we were a quarter of the class. But we were best friends, we always had been. We often joke that it's a good thing our school had a uniform, or else our parents would have one more place to dress us up in the same outfits for. So, in this case, school did it for them. Everyone stared at us all day in school. The teachers couldn't tell the difference between any of us, except Connall. Poor Connall. He was asked so many questions in class and everywhere, because he was the representative that everyone could recognize. We still have a photograph of the five of us on the school steps at the end of our first day, because our parents forgot to take a picture at the beginning. Even I can't tell the difference between us all.

Poor Connall. Growing up with four sisters the same age couldn't be easy. We all got our periods at the same time, we all got our ears pierced the same day, we would always buy our new clothes together. We're different. We really are. And now that we're teenagers, our parents can't make us look alike anymore. But Connall was always a little bit on the side. I think he and Emer were the closest. The rest of us and him, we kind of just lived together, learned together, ate together, had red hair together. I know that sounds horrible. But he kind of pushed himself away from us. I couldn't for the life of me say when it started. But it became that none of us were completely surprised when he did what he did. I don't know why he did it. I don't think Gwen and Linn have any idea either. Only Emer really ever talked to him in the last few months. I know my parents are completely devastated, that he could just leave us like that. And in such an ugly way. Some day I'll try to understand. For now, we just have to survive, and it seems to be my responsibility to make that happen. Families, no matter how happy, will fall apart some how, some time. I think Tolstoy forgot that. That's not alike, that's never alike. Each family falls apart in its own way. In some families, it'll be everything. Every single thing in that family that made it happy just comes to a deafening crash all at once. The health, the money, the success, the friends. Every last thing that once made the family happy. For our family, it was only one thing that tore us apart from the inside out, making everyone miserable in their own way. It was Connall leaving. And they way he did.... I just can't get over it.