The House Swap: Part One

Think Like
a Spy says that there are three main types of fingerprint patterns: the loop, the whorl, and the arch. I have
an arch print—it’s the rarest kind.

Willow pressed
her palm onto a plate covered with white paint and
pushed it down on a pale blue piece of paper to make
the chicken’s body; then she painted a yellow beak at the
side of her thumbprint, added a red crest on the top of
the thumbprint, and drew tiny eyes, legs, and feet with
a black marker.

After I found the calligraphy set that I got for my birthday under Willow’s pillow a few weeks earlier, I printed
out an article called “Is My Child a Kleptomaniac?”
from the Good Parents Make Great Kids website and
presented it to my mum and dad.

Mum and Dad believe in free-range parenting, which is good for our chickens but not
for my siblings.
As well as their generally casual approach to parenting, Mum and Dad didn’t seem to give much thought
to naming their kids.

Often called the heart stone, rose quartz is the
crystal of unconditional love.

Every day my parents act more and more polite around
each other, and the more polite they get, the more worried I am. I miss their silly bickering, which always used
to end in apologies, hugs, and often way too much kissing.

When I
was little, Dad used to describe our family as a perfect
triangle with me balancing happily on the pinnacle and
him and Mom smiling up at me from the bottom corners.

Our triangle family was always an equilateral triangle
in his drawings, but lately, we feel like a sad scalene
triangle with all different angles.

The pale pink stone looks like a shard of ice, and you’d think the ridges would feel sharp
and cold, but the crystal is smooth and warm.

When we get to the kitchen, Mom starts bustling around, pulling eggs, berries, milk, and juice out of
the fridge while I sit watching her, rubbing the rose
quartz crystal I keep in my pocket with my thumb.

“Maybe,” she says, cracking an egg. She hands me the
bowl and a fork. “Here you go. Whisk.”

I
use a slightly damp tissue to carefully wipe down the
keyboard and poke a cotton swab between the keys.

Willow insists we all wear party hats,
even Bear, because, well, she’s Willow. It’s easier to just
go along with her.

He’s laughing as
he watches Willow attempt to tie a large purple ribbon
around an apple, presumably Ruthie’s birthday present.

It’s not a mean laugh, though, and when he reaches over
to help her, I feel a burning sensation in my chest. I can’t
remember the last time my brother did anything nice for
me.

“No, I’m not. I just don’t like the beach.”
That’s the understatement of the year. I hate the
beach—the sand gets everywhere, it’s too hot, I always
get sunburned—even when I wear factor one gazillion
and one of those SPF shirts—and I’m scared of sharks,
jellyfish, sea snakes, puffer fish, stingrays, stonefish, and most other things that live in the ocean.

So that’s why my parents had a clearout a couple of weeks ago. I should have known something was
going on when Mum announced she was “decluttering”
and ended up taking seven boxes to the charity shop in town.

“Actually, they think the cottage looks adorable,”
Mum says. “The quintessential English cottage, the
woman said in her email.”

There are hay bales scattered across the lawn and
red and white balloons tied to the fence.

“You know that Madame Zelda is an intern from
Mom’s work, right?”

Let me get
a picture of the two of you for the Party Posse Instagram.

Nora’s mom flushes. “Um, I think that’s what she
said. I hope it wasn’t supposed to be a surprise.”

Maybe we’ll go to Hawaii like we did for Mom’s
birthday a few years ago. We went surfing and collected
shells on the beach and wore leis at dinner.

Madame Zelda smiles and beckons me over.
“Come. Let’s see what your future holds.”

I sit down at the small table and watch as Madame
Zelda rests her hands on a large purple cloudy glass ball
and gazes at it intently.

I just called you Sage like two minutes ago, and
according to Nico, Madame Zelda is an intern at Party Posse, so she’s bound to know who I am.

Either she isn’t an intern for Party Posse after all, or
she looks completely different without her fortune-teller
costume on, or Nora and Nico’s mom let her go home
early since she made her spend three hours sitting in a stuffy tent.

It is
almost the exact opposite of our house, which has mostly
bare white walls. Dad hates houses packed with stuff.
He’s a minimalist.

I would prefer to stay in an actual hotel—ideally, one
in New York so we could be with Dad.

Willow has one of those
suitcases on wheels that she rides on while someone,
usually me, pulls her. The suitcase has orange and black
stripes, tiger ears, and a tail. When she’s riding on it,
she smiles sweetly then roars at other travelers, who invariably think she’s adorable.

“Just make sure she doesn’t put anything in there
that will get us stopped at customs or ruin everything
in the suitcase,” Mum says.

After I’ve thoroughly searched Willow’s bag and
removed the cheese, a large jar of pickles, and a loaded
water pistol, I get on with my own packing.

“Max took my diary!” I yell, glaring at my brother.

“You trust them to do the right thing?” I splutter.
“Are you kidding me? Make them give it back now.” I
can feel treacherous tears prickling my eyeballs and try
to swallow the lump in my throat.

He got into so much trouble that he cried because ONE, according to Mum, Max felt genuinely horrible about what he did even though TWO, I knew Max was only crying because he felt genuinely horrible about not getting any allowance for a month...

Mom is in full-on planning mode for the trip to
England. Travel guides for Oxford and the Cotswolds appear, which she happily studies, marking the
pages of all the things she thinks we should visit with
brightly colored Post-its.

The family
tree templates I found on the internet all had boxes for
siblings.

I’m not the kind of person who
would ever listen at the door—at least I didn’t used to
be. I tiptoe back to my room, Pandora slinking after me.

I pick her up, slump down on my bed, and bury my
face into her long white fur.

When he comes in, he sits down on the bed next to me
and ruffles my hair.