"Why doesn't your teacher make them stop?"

"There's more of them, they all agree with each other, he kind of agrees with them too, his wife has never liked me very much, and I was willing to leave."

"If she didn't like you she shouldn't have been taking care of you. I don't think your teacher was very good."

"She wasn't taking care of me. Her husband was my teacher, not her."

"Shouldn't she have been helping at least if you were a kid and living in her house?"

"She has her own apprentices. I think you're assuming my teacher was my 'parent' and he wasn't. He took apprentices who were old enough to mostly look after ourselves, and the older ones cooked and the medium-sized ones cleaned and we all studied."

"I think parents is better."

"Well, I'm glad you like having them."

"Yeah. I'm really glad Mama took me home."

"Why did you need to be adopted, if you didn't just happen?"

"I don't know. I've never met my birth parents and no one managed to figure out who they are. Maybe they died or maybe they didn't want a kid or maybe they couldn't afford to take care of me."

Sylvi thinks about that, then says, "Oh."

"But it doesn't matter because I've got my Mama and my Daddy and Raven and Erik and I don't want to be someone else's little girl instead."

"Well, then that's very convenient for all of you, then."

"Yes. Even if Erik needs to learn to stay out of my room when I didn't say he could come in."

"People going in one's room is annoying. I like to keep a diary and I do it in code so nobody can read it but me."

"I keep my diary on my computer and it's password protected but he keeps messing with my stuff."

"What do you do about that, then?"

"I'm trying to convince our parents to get a lock for my door. And I tell him to stop and he usually does for a few days until he forgets or something."

"If he's forgetting, you could put up a sign."

"That's a good idea."

"A sign didn't help me very much, though."

"Oh?"

"I had a sign on my room saying that people weren't invited in and sometimes people came in anyway."

"Why? Sometimes Mama comes into my room when I'm not there but that's different than when Erik does it."