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enjoy showering. Brendan didn’t understand. Maybe they enjoyed standing naked in the rain.
    Mom’s insistence about his bathing habits had stopped. She no longer ushered him into the bathroom to shower during Jeopardy! or checked if his hair was clean after he finished. She no longer did much at all. Dad had said that Mom needed a lot of rest and understanding and that everyone would have to do a lot more around the house. In school, he had learned that thousands of African babies died every day from all kinds of diseases, even dehydration. Though Brendan hadn’t wanted another sibling anyway, he was sad when the baby died, mostly because of Mom’s reaction and haeactionthe way Dad, Tyler, and Delaney had walked around the house like zombies.
    The gods demanded a sacrifice.
    Dad wasn’t as good as Mom about forcing Brendan to shower and then checking on the shower’s effectiveness, but he tried his best. He made sure Brendan was up on school days in time for a bowl of cereal and maybe a few minutes of cartoons before handing him some money for lunch and telling him to have a good day. He always reminded Tyler to drive him and Delaney to school, but the second half of his senior year gave Tyler something called Late Arrival, which meant he didn’t have to get up until after his brother and sister were both on the school bus. Delaney always wanted Brendan to sit next to him on the bus, but he never wanted to. All she ever did was complain to her friends, through text-messages, how unfair it was that she was sixteen and didn’t have a car. Dad said she was smart, but Brendan didn’t see it.
    But those were weekdays; today was Saturday and Saturday was a unique day that had to be observed correctly. When the original calendar was created, Saturday was deemed a magic day--the Romans used it as the first day of the week, meaning it was symbolic of Creation Day. Most sacrifices to the gods (offerings of animals), which were meant to win the favor of the gods, were performed on Saturday. A holy day. A day to be respected and acknowledged. Or else suffer the consequences. He knew this was true because he had read it.
    Dr. Carroll had given him the book (along with little white pills meant to help him “focus”) back in October. The book was titled Finding God: a History of Appeasing Higher Powers and Fulfilling Man’s Destiny .
    Even on Saturday, however, showering was annoying, yet Brendan spent an extra long time, nearly fifteen minutes, during his Saturday showers to get his hair really clean and his nails dirt-free. He even scrubbed behind his ears, though he wasn’t sure how dirt could settle there in the first place. He rubbed soap over his face and furiously sanded it into his skin because Delaney had told him that twelve-years-old was the age when blackheads started forming, especially on the nose. He had asked her what blackheads were and she said they were like zits only they created craters in the skin and got filled with dirt, which got infected and could even rot skin enough for it to fall off. He figured she was lying, at least stretching the truth, but that didn’t stop him from soaping up his face and scrubbing until his flesh burned.
    After the shower came the clothes. He set them aside last night under his bed wrapped in a plastic shopping bag he had taken from the kitchen pantry. The clothes were clean and neatly folded and he had to make sure that none of the dust under the bed tainted them. The Romans had been very careful to always wear clean clothes (or togas) on Saturday because the gods found soiled garments displeasing. It was important not to anger the gods, the writer of the book (Jack Carter) had warned. When gods were offended and then got angry, horrible things happened. The baby’s death had been a horrible thing, at least for Mom and Dad, but maybe they had done something to anger the gods, and in response the gods had taken a sacrifice.
    Brendan knew death was a terrible thing, but he