Excerpt from 1. Bathyspheres

Squid’s got three mothers who can’t spank him.

That’s what my stepdad Wiley used to say when Squid got into the goo. Back when he was a baby, you had anything gooey and Squid’d find it. Peanut butter, craft glue, ketchup, little bits of melted tar on the street—smeared all over his cheeks faster than you could say ‘fudge.’ That was code in our family for ‘Squid is covered in something gooey,’ except you had to yell it out, FUUUUUDGE, like a swear word. Mum doesn’t know that people say ‘fudge’ to mean another f-word, so sometimes I’d yell it right in her face to make Jess laugh. Jess never did it herself, squeezed her eyes shut like she was jumping off a building whenever she yelled fudge. She didn’t yell nearly half as loud as me, either.

The problem with spanking was that it didn’t work. Mum only tried it once, in the supermarket. I was there and remember it perfectly. She’d let him out of the shopping cart to toddle around. He was just little. Only a couple months before he’d still had that mini-drunk-person sort of walk that made me want to follow right behind him, holding out my arms, thinking he could topple over any second. By this time he’d gotten to the stage where we had to actually run after him ’cause he’d take off when you weren’t looking. But we were in the cereal aisle and we didn’t think he could do any damage, so we let him scamper around. He liked to punch the cereal boxes, the ones on the bottom shelves that no one wanted anyway. So he was punching, punching away, and every box he could reach was getting a punch, Squid made sure of that. Mum was looking at the generic brand of Frosted Flakes, the one that came in a big milky-coloured bag with no box, so most of the flakes were crumbled into powder.