Switched at Birthday

  There were mechanical Santas and reindeer flying across the street on wires, a giant tree made out of hubcaps and topped with a plastic dinosaur instead of a star, snowmen made from bike wheels painted white, a nativity scene populated entirely by teddy bears, and three toy trains that chugged from yard to yard on crazy winding tracks. One house had a Baltimore Ravens theme, the porch and yard filled with inflatable football players in purple and black Ravens uniforms.

  And then there was the Crab House, featuring a giant blow-up crab in a Santa suit in a sleigh pulled by eight smaller crab-deer. The tree was decorated with empty cans of Old Bay spice and National Bohemian beer. It was hideous, but it had always been my favorite house: The Crab House people gave away free hot chocolate and cookies from their front porch.

  “You really live in the Crab House?” I asked.

  “Don’t judge,” Lavender said. “It gets my dad through the holidays.”

  We walked up the steps to Lavender’s front porch, which was decorated with Indian corn for Halloween. I took a closer look at the scarecrow by the door. It had a crab head and red crab claws for hands.

  Lavender shrugged. “He’s really into crabs.”

  Christmas was less than two months away. What if I was still trapped in Lavender’s body by then? Would I spend the holidays on the Christmas Street — with Lavender’s family? In the Crab House?

  No. No way. That could not happen.

  We went inside. I smelled like bird poop. Nobody seemed particularly surprised.

  When Scarlet and I got home, Mom and Rosemary were in the kitchen having their afternoon snack while watching Judge Judy.

  “Lavender!” Mom hugged Scarlet. I wished she’d hug me too. Just for old times’ sake. “How was school today?”

  “Okay,” Scarlet said. “I’ll be right back. I’ve got to wash my head.”

  “Oh, Lavender, not again.” Mom turned Scarlet’s head this way and that until she spotted the bird poop she hadn’t managed to wipe off. “Do you need some help?”

  “I’ll help her,” I offered. I was glad not to be the one with bird poop on her head for once.

  “Who’s this?” Mom stared right at me, her own daughter, as if I were a stranger.

  “This is my friend Scarlet,” Scarlet said.

  “How nice!” Mom exclaimed. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Scarlet. What a treat!” She was clearly thrilled that “I” had such a normal-looking — or yeah, okay, great-looking — friend all of a sudden. She probably thought I was going through a lot of big changes and getting all mature and undorkifying. I hated to disappoint her, but when Scarlet and I finally switched back I planned to go right back to my old self. Mom was just going to have to accept it.

  “I’ve heard you make a killer grilled cheese sandwich,” I said, hoping it would inspire her to make us some.

  Mom practically batted her eyelashes at me. “I had no idea Lavender ever said anything nice about me. But she does love those grilled cheese sandwiches. Would you girls like some?”

  “Thanks,” Scarlet said. “We’ll be upstairs in my room.”

  “Plotting and scheming,” I added.

  “All right,” Mom said. “I’ll bring up the sandwiches when they’re ready.”

  Wow — even room service. She really wanted to impress my new friend.

  Rosemary sat at the kitchen table the whole time, blinking at us from behind her big glasses. She looked from me to Scarlet and blinked faster than usual. She sensed something was wrong, I could tell. She knew perfectly well that I would never be friends with a girl like Scarlet.

  “Hi, Rosemary,” I said.

  “How did you know my name?” She squinted at me suspiciously. “Lavender didn’t introduce us.”

  “I told her all about you,” Scarlet said.

  Rosemary knew this was fishy. “You did?”

  “Not all about you,” I said. “She just warned me that her little sister Rosemary was a pest. So I’d know to avoid you when I got here.”

  Rosemary blinked again. I’d just said a very Lavender thing, and Rosemary knew it.

  “We’d better get upstairs,” I said to Scarlet. “Or that bird poop will dry into your hair permanently.”

  “Ohh!” Scarlet wailed. We ran upstairs, back to my good old room. Scarlet’s room was fancy, but this was home.

  Or at least it used to be home. When I got to my room I found that Scarlet had made my bed and picked up all my books, records, and dirty clothes off the floor. I saw my rag rug for the first time in months. I’d almost forgotten I had a rug.

  “Hey.” I hardly recognized the place. “What did you do to my room?”

  “I cleaned it,” Scarlet said. “What a dump! I found chocolate milk cartons under the bed that expired a year ago.”

  “You didn’t have to take down my Don Ho poster,” I said, staring at the blank spot on the wall.

  “I didn’t like that weird guy staring at me,” Scarlet said. “Who’s Don Ho?”

  “Only the greatest interpreter of Hawaiian tiki lounge music who ever lived.” Didn’t she know anything?

  “I don’t really care,” she said. “If I don’t get this horrible stuff out of my hair right now, I’m going to scream.”

  “Don’t scream,” I said. “I’m not a screamer, and it will make Mom nervous and Rosemary more suspicious. Come on, the bathroom’s across the hall.”

  I led Scarlet to the bathroom and helped her wash her hair over the sink. Mom had bought me a special disinfectant shampoo just for mishaps like this.

  “Thank you.” Scarlet wrapped a towel around her head, turban style. I’d always wondered how to do that. “I feel better now.” She sat on the bed, which had been neatly made for the first time in about five years.

  I sat next to her. “Well, I don’t. It creeps me out to think of you rummaging around in my room, cleaning and straightening things up.” I shuddered.

  “That wasn’t what I meant when I said I felt better,” she snapped. “You think I like living in this pigsty?”

  “At least my room has character.” I was used to defending my pigsty against Mom, and I could be very touchy about it. “Your room looks like Barbie lives in it. Like a plastic dream house.”

  At the word plastic, she winced. “It’s not plastic, it’s clean,” she insisted, truly mad at me now. “It’s a million times nicer than this dump, and you know it.”

  Maybe, maybe not, but she’d never get me to admit it. “Let’s get down to business,” I said. “We’re the victims of some kind of weird syndrome and we’ve got to figure out a way to switch our bodies back.”

  “That’s the first thing you’ve said all day that makes sense.” She paused. “What should we do first?”

  I shrugged. “Start searching online, I guess.”

  I opened my laptop and we checked out “body swapping.” That turned up a lot of links to TV shows and a few spells.

  “Let’s try one of these spells,” Scarlet said.

  I read the one she pointed to. “That’s the lamest spell ever. That will never work.”

  “How do you know? We might as well try it.”

  I sighed and read the instructions out loud as Scarlet prepared the spell. “Step one: Close your eyes.”

  She closed her eyes. “You have to close yours too.”

  “How can I read the instructions if my eyes are closed?”

  “Okay — after you read them. What’s next?”

  “Step two: Relax.” She leaned against the pillows of my bed, breathing deeply. I couldn’t help it — this bugged me. “I don’t know how you can relax at a time like this,” I said.

  Her eyes flew open. “You just told me to relax!”

  “I know, but … never mind.” I looked at the instructions. “Step three: Think of the person you want to switch with.”

  Scarlet stared at me with deep concentration. Then she closed her eyes again. “I’m thinking of you. It isn’t pleasant. Next?”

  “Step four: Believe it wil
l work.”

  “I believe,” she said. “I believe this will work.”

  “Step five: Hope it will work.” I shook my head. “See, here’s where the spell really loses me. Hope it will work? That doesn’t give me much confidence….”

  “Be quiet and keep reading.”

  “Step six: Go to sleep. When you wake up, you will be in the body you were thinking of. Warning: This doesn’t always work.” I sighed.

  “You have to do it too,” Scarlet said. “Believe! You’re not believing. I can tell. You’re not even hoping.”

  “Oh, I’m hoping. But I’m not believing. When a spell warns you that it won’t work, it’s pretty hard to take it seriously.”

  She sat up. “We can’t fall asleep right now anyway. You have to go to my house and work Mom’s party.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “You have to.”

  “Not if I can find a way to get back into my body. Then you’ll have to work your mom’s stupid party.”

  “Gladly,” Scarlet said. “Anything’s better than this.”

  She didn’t have to be so mean about it. I started scrolling through the search listings, looking for something else that might help us. I found a lot of strange information about curses, trances, hypnosis, herbal cures, even weird diseases, but no answers to our immediate problem.

  “Let’s talk this through,” Scarlet said. “When did you first notice that you were me?”

  “When I woke up this morning.”

  “Me too.” She shuddered. “That was a horrible moment.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t so thrilled either,” I said. “That hot pink in your room nearly burned out my retinas.”

  She ignored me. “So yesterday was our birthday. Both of our birthdays. That can’t be a coincidence. We must have done something to trigger the body switch. But what?”

  We tried to figure it out for a good ten minutes. It felt like hours. Mom brought the grilled cheeses and some lemonade and left us to work on our “project.” I’d never seen her so polite. I think she was afraid if she made one wrong move, her lovely new daughter would turn back into a pumpkin and her lovely new daughter’s even lovelier new friend would disappear.

  If only it were that easy.

  “Maybe there’s something about turning thirteen,” Scarlet said. “After all, it’s an unlucky number.”

  “But then, why wouldn’t this happen to everyone else when they turn thirteen?” I asked. “I don’t think Zoe switched bodies with anyone in our class on her birthday. If anything, she switched with Cruella De Vil.”

  “Hey, that’s my best friend you’re talking about,” Scarlet said.

  I snorted. “Some best friend.”

  Scarlet frowned. “Well, she’s nice to me.”

  I considered disputing that but decided to keep my mouth shut on the subject. We chewed our sandwiches and thought some more.

  “Was there something unusual that happened to both of us yesterday?” I said. “Or something out of the ordinary that we both did?”

  “Let’s go over every minute,” Scarlet said.

  We went over the day in painful detail. The contrast between her birthday and mine was brought back to me in full force. I really didn’t need to relive the horror again.

  “Believe me, nothing that happened to you in school was the same as what happened to me,” I said.

  “All right. Last night. What did your mother make for dinner?”

  We went over all the presents we got, what the cards said, the food we ate, where we ate it. None of it was the same. Until we got to —

  “The cake,” Scarlet said. “What kind did you have?”

  “Devil’s food,” I said. “With pink icing. Store-bought.” Mom must have been busy that day because she usually baked our birthday cakes herself.

  “Wait a minute,” Scarlet said. “I had devil’s food cake too. With pink frosting.”

  We were getting somewhere. We could feel it.

  “Did you have thirteen candles?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I had one candle. Orange. Shaped like the number thirteen.”

  I grabbed her. “I had that candle too!”

  “That must be it!” she said. “It’s the only detail we both share.”

  “Maybe that’s what did it,” I said. “The cake and the candle. Or one of them. Let’s ask Mom where she got them.”

  We went down to the kitchen. Rosemary was gone, doing homework in her room. Mom was starting supper. Corned beef and cabbage.

  “Mom —” I said before I realized what I was doing. My hand flew to my mouth. Mom turned around smiled. She thought Scarlet was talking to her.

  “Mom,” Scarlet said, taking over, “where did you get the cake and candle we had last night on my birthday?”

  “Did you like it?” Mom asked. “I can try to get the same kind of cake tomorrow —”

  “Sure, it was great,” Scarlet said. “Where did it come from?”

  “You mean, where did I buy it?” Mom said. “At the ValueMart, of course.”

  “In the bakery section?” I pressed.

  “That’s the funny thing,” Mom said. “It wasn’t in the bakery section at all. I was wandering down the Household Cleansers and Pet Food aisle, looking for Handi Wipes, when I came across this little booth. One of those temporary promotional booths companies set up sometimes. It was decorated with orange paper flames and they were selling devil’s food cakes and candles. They only had number thirteen candles, for some reason. They were out of all the other numbers.”

  “Did the company have a name?” Scarlet asked.

  “It must have, but I don’t remember,” Mom said. “Why all the questions?”

  “No reason,” I said. “We were just curious, that’s all.”

  “Yes, but why? You didn’t seem so enthusiastic about the cake last night.”

  I’d felt she was trying to tell me something by giving me a pink cake. But I didn’t say anything about that now.

  Scarlet pulled me through the kitchen toward the back door. “We’re going out for a ride now, okay?” she told my mom.

  “Sure, honey. Be careful. And don’t be late for supper.”

  “I won’t,” Scarlet said. “Bye.”

  We went out to the garage, hopped on my bike and Rosemary’s, and pedaled as fast as we could to the ValueMart on Coldspring Lane.

  “We’ve got to get that candle,” Scarlet said. “That must be the secret. Did you hear what your mom said? They only had number thirteen? That’s pretty weird.”

  “It’s the best lead we have,” I said.

  It was strange to watch Scarlet up ahead of me, riding my bike in my body. Strange to see how I sat on a bike, how I pedalled. I looked kind of like a duck, if I was honest with myself. A duck on a bike. For some reason I flapped my feet when I pedalled. If I ever got my body back, maybe I’d try to cut that out.

  We parked our bikes and ran into the store. I knew exactly where the Household Cleansers were — Mom’s favorite aisle. Aisle Five.

  We walked down Aisle Five, scanning the rows of bottles and cans and bags of dog kibble. There was no booth selling cake. No desserts of any kind.

  “It’s gone,” Scarlet said.

  Just to be sure, we scoured the rest of the store in search of devil’s food cake and candles. We found plenty of cake, and some of the cakes had pink icing, but they weren’t the same. And the only candles they had were the regular kind, not the numeral-carved-in-wax kind. We even asked at the bakery counter and the guy working there said the store was out of them.

  We trudged out of the supermarket, discouraged.

  “Now what are we going to do?” Scarlet asked.

  “What about your house?” I said. “Could we find any clues there?”

  “I don’t think so. I had my cake at a restaurant. We left the box and the candle and everything there. They must have thrown it all out by now.”

  “My candle didn’t burn all the way down,” I said. ?
??Maybe we can still find the stub in the trash.”

  “So now we have to dig through the garbage?” Scarlet said. “Ew.”

  “Don’t be such a wimp. Maybe there was some kind of sticker on the candle, with the name of the company that makes it. That could help us figure out what’s going on.”

  She pedaled wearily. “Yeah, but digging through the garbage …”

  We left our bikes in the garage, where the big trash cans were. From the smell I could tell the garbage hadn’t been picked up recently.

  I opened one can, Scarlet opened the other, and we started digging. She gingerly picked through the scraps of paper and bits of food, wrinkling her nose at the smell. Even though she was in my body, she didn’t really look much like me. That was not the way I handled garbage. She glanced at me bent over the trash can, digging frantically.

  “Hey — watch the manicure,” she snapped.

  I rolled my eyes. “Our lives are at stake, and you’re worried about your nails?”

  “I just polished them.”

  Under a pile of orange rinds I spotted something soapy-white. I snatched it up. A wax stub. I could just make out the bottom of the one and the three.

  “I’ve got it!” I said.

  “Hooray!” Scarlet cried out.

  We studied the candle. I brushed away a bit of pink frosting. The wick had burned away completely.

  A stamp on the bottom said MADE IN KALAMAZOO.

  “What does that mean?” Scarlet asked.

  “It means there’s something rotten in the state of Michigan,” I said. “And we’re going to find out what.”

  Back in my room, we searched the Internet for candle manufacturers in Kalamazoo and found nothing useful. Instead we found out that the Michigan state motto was “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice,” which is Latin for “If you see a pleasant peninsula, look around you.”

  “What are we going to do?” I wailed. “How can a candle say Made in Kalamazoo if nobody in Kalamazoo makes candles?”