Switched at Birthday

  But up on the stage my mind went blank.

  Mr. Brummel stopped. “Are you ready, Lavender?”

  “Yes, I —”

  “Psst! Lavender! Here!”

  Charlie reached out and pushed a lyric sheet into my hand.

  “Thank you,” I said. Charlie nodded and sat down. I smiled at him. My hero.

  I glanced at the lyrics. From the first words, the song came flooding back to me.

  I nodded at Mr. Brummel. I was ready.

  He replayed the introduction, and I started to sing, quietly. My voice quavered.

  “Sing out, Lavender,” Mr. Brummel said. “You can do it.”

  I sang out louder. And even louder. My voice was strong. And it sounded good. Really good.

  I could sing!

  It was a wonderful feeling, like gliding through water. Like flying. I’d never realized that Lavender had this power inside of her. Why hadn’t she used it?

  People had teased me about my singing before, but I’d thought they were teasing me because they liked to tease. I knew I was no Adele, but I’d thought my singing was okay.

  Now I understood. I couldn’t sing before, not at all. I didn’t know what it felt like to really sing, with a powerful, clear voice.

  Maybe Lavender didn’t want to let anyone see how talented she was, but that wasn’t my style. If I had a voice like this, I’d use it. I’d love it! And for now, I did have this beautiful voice. I refused to hide it. I let it soar out over the auditorium.

  When the song was over, Mr. Brummel smiled. The audience was sort of quiet. Nobody booed or anything.

  “Lovely, Lavender,” Mr. Brummel said. I walked off the stage, down the aisle toward the back door, where Maybelle waited for me.

  Charlie reached out from his seat and touched my arm.

  “That was really good,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. Charlie turned his attention back to the stage and the next audition. My arm warmed where he had touched it.

  “Lavender, you were fantastic!” Maybelle whispered. We went out into the lobby. “I always knew you were a good singer but that was the best I’ve ever heard you!”

  “Thank you.” My body shook from the rush of excitement. “Do you think I have a chance at the part?”

  “Definitely,” Maybelle said. “Mr. Brummel would be crazy not to give it to you.”

  Another rush shot through me.

  What if I really did it — won the starring role? Opposite Charlie Scott! Endless hours of rehearsal. A kissing scene! Which we’d have to practice a lot. Over and over and over.

  I had a good chance. I could feel it.

  As long as I had Lavender’s voice. And that meant staying in Lavender’s body.

  “Woo-hoo!” I yelled. I jumped up and landed on the outside of my left foot.

  “Careful, Schmitzy,” Maybelle said. “You don’t want to twist your ankle right before rehearsals begin.”

  “What are you so hyped up about?” Kelsey asked. If I’d known Zoe and Kelsey were lurking in the lobby, I wouldn’t have woo-hoo’d.

  “You think you’re going to get the lead?” Zoe said. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Lavender has a great chance,” Maybelle said. “She’s a better singer than anybody in that room.”

  “So what?” Zoe said. “She still looks like a cavegirl. It’s The Music Man, not Planet of the Apes.”

  “She looks beautiful when she sings,” Maybelle said. “The music transforms her.”

  Zoe and Kelsey snickered. Even I thought that was a bit of a stretch. But I knew what Maybelle meant. I felt transformed when I was singing. I felt like a star.

  “You might get a part, but you’ll never get the lead,” Zoe said. “I’m doing you a favor, telling you this. So you won’t be disappointed.”

  “Even Scarlet has a better shot than you, and she’s terrible,” Kelsey said.

  That hurt. It hurt when they insulted Lavender, and it hurt when they insulted me. If they’d insulted Maybelle, that would have hurt too.

  “You’re in for a shock, Zoe,” I said. “Guess what: The casting isn’t up to you. Come on, Maybelle.”

  Maybelle and I walked away. Behind us, Zoe and Kelsey whispered and laughed. I knew better than to look back. It would only spur them on.

  But my confidence faded. What if they were right? I was Lavender now. Maybe I could sing. But I didn’t have the luck. I didn’t have the grace, the charisma that a leading lady needed. I had the Lavender Curse.

  “Don’t listen to them.” Maybelle stopped at the bike rack and unlocked her bike. “You’re going to get the lead, Schmitzy. I feel it in my bones.” She hopped on her bike. “See you tomorrow, first thing. I’m telling you, your name is going to be on that list!” She rode away.

  “Scarlet!” Lavender called to me from the auditorium. I waited for her to catch up.

  “Nice job,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying my voice. Yours turned out to be a dud.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I never realized what a bad singer I am.”

  “I guess things always sound better in the shower,” Lavender said. “Have you come up with any brilliant ideas about how we could get our real bodies back? I’m getting a little itchy in here.”

  “No,” I said. “Have you?”

  “If I do, you’ll be the first to hear about it.”

  “Same here,” I said. We both sighed. There was nothing to do but wait for Mr. Brummel to post the cast list in the morning.

  “Tell my parents how well the audition went,” Lavender said. “They’ll be happy.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “I wish I could see their faces,” Lavender said.

  To my surprise, I wished she could too.

  To celebrate the audition, Lavender’s mother took me shopping on 36th Street. She couldn’t believe it when I agreed to go. She was thrilled. But I loved shopping, and Lavender definitely needed some new clothes. The hard part was keeping her mother from suspecting that Lavender was no longer Lavender. She kept looking at me like I had two heads.

  We went to all the cute little boutiques. Finding clothes for Lavender’s short, stocky body was not easy. The salesgirls would say, “Oh, that looks great on you” about stuff that didn’t look great, in this condescending voice. Like they’d all laugh about it later over smoothies.

  I ignored them, picking out a new pair of jeans and a cute top to go with it. At Maroc I went straight for the best pair of boots, but when I looked at the price tag I wondered if Lavender’s parents could afford them. My mom would have bought them without a thought, but I knew Lavender’s family didn’t have as much money as we did, so I put them back. There was a thrift store down the street, where I found a pretty blue sweater and a great pair of platform sandals in Lavender’s size that cost a lot less.

  “What about contact lenses?” I asked Lavender’s mother. I was tired of wearing Lavender’s clunky glasses and thought she’d look better without them. “Are they too expensive?”

  “If you need contacts, we’ll find a way to pay for them.” Lavender’s mother could hardly contain her excitement. “What’s gotten into you, Lavender? I’m almost afraid to ask. I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “Maybe it’s better you don’t ask, then,” I said. That answer seemed to satisfy her. It sounded like something Lavender would say.

  It was fun shopping with Lavender’s mom. She was so proud of me, so eager to make me happy. We tried on funny hats and glasses; we laughed and joked. When I went shopping with my own mother, she didn’t like most of the clothes I picked out and criticized the way I looked in everything. Shopping with her wasn’t fun. It was a job. I felt sad thinking about it.

  When we got home, Mrs. Schmitz preceded me into the kitchen and said, “Ta-da!”

  Mr. Schmitz gawked at me. “Who’s this? Miss America?”

  “Stop it,” I said. “They’re just clothes.”

  Rosemary said, “Are you going to start acting all teenager
y now that you’re thirteen?”

  “Yes, I am, little punk,” I said. “So get used to it. You can learn from watching me so you don’t turn out all dorky like your sister.”

  Rosemary looked at me funny, blinking her big blue eyes behind her glasses, and I realized what I’d just said.

  “I mean, like I used to be,” I said. “Until I turned thirteen.”

  “Don’t change too much, Lavender,” Rosemary said. “I like the old, dorky you too.”

  “Dorkiness is our heritage,” Mr. Schmitz said. “Passed on from father to son and mother to daughter for generations of Schmitzes.”

  “What are you trying to do, curse me for life?” Sometimes I couldn’t believe this family. They actually prized being awkward and clunky. Like they thought it was a good thing, just because that was how they’d always been, and it could never change.

  “Someday you’ll realize that being a Schmitz is not a curse, Lavender,” her father said. “It’s just who you are.”

  “I don’t see the difference,” I said.

  But maybe I was starting to.

  “All hail Her Highness, Princess Plastic.” Ben bowed low before me, sweeping the floor with his hand, as I passed him on the way to dinner.

  I was not in the mood for this. “You should bow before me,” I said. “I deserve it. Because I’m the best ally you’ve got in this family.”

  Ben lifted his head in surprise. That was not the kind of answer he usually got from Scarlet.

  “Be nice to Scarlet tonight,” Scarlet’s mom said to Ben as we walked into the dining room. “She’s had a rough day.”

  How did she know that? I hadn’t told her anything about the auditions. As soon as I’d gotten home from school I’d gone straight to Scarlet’s room and shut the door. I guessed the pain showed on my face.

  But it wasn’t the pain that had tipped her off.

  “No makeup, baggy sweats on, and looks like she hasn’t brushed her hair all day,” she said. “I know my daughter, and that spells trouble.”

  I touched my tangled hair. “My hair does not spell anything. It’s artfully tousled.”

  I’d seen that phrase in one of Scarlet’s Seventeen magazines. I’d flipped through a few of them that afternoon, trying to forget the pain of the audition.

  Steve glanced up from reading messages on his phone to check on my hair. “Just looks messy to me. Put your game away and sit down, Ben. It’s time to eat.”

  Ben raised his empty hands — he wasn’t playing a game — and sat down at the table. “You’re the one who’s fiddling with his phone.”

  Steve typed a few characters and didn’t look up this time. “That’s different — this is important.”

  “Whatever,” Ben said. “But I wasn’t playing a game. If you looked up from your phone for two seconds, you would have seen that.”

  Now Steve put his phone in his pocket and lifted his head. “We’re going to have a nice family dinner now — right, Leigh? Right.”

  “Oh! Right.” Scarlet’s mom set a large plastic platter of roast chicken on the table. “Who wants rice?”

  Steve watched her. “Did you do something to your hair? It looks blonder.”

  She touched her newly dyed hair nervously. “Yes. Do you like it?”

  “Don’t let it get too light. It’s starting to get a radioactive glow.”

  She laughed a kind of fakey laugh, but I wasn’t sure Steve was joking.

  We ate takeout chicken — Scarlet’s family must have spent a fortune on takeout. Even the fancy dinner with the Mortensons had been bought at a gourmet catering shop. They had this big, shiny kitchen but they didn’t use it for much more than microwaving leftovers.

  “How was your soccer game, Scarlet?” Scarlet’s mom asked.

  “That was yesterday,” I said.

  “She auditioned for the school musical today,” Ben chimed in. I was glad someone was paying attention.

  “Oh.” Scarlet’s mom picked at a chicken breast. “How did it go?”

  “How do you think it went?” I was still feeling very crabby about it.

  “I’m guessing not so great,” Steve said. “Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Can you sing? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing,” Steve said.

  “I thought I could, but I was wrong.”

  Steve chuckled. “So I guess you learned your lesson, huh? Stick to what you know you’re good at. It’s not worth putting yourself out on a limb — you’ll only embarrass yourself.”

  “Steve’s right, honey,” Scarlet’s mom said. “There’s nothing worse than making a fool of yourself.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked. If making a fool of yourself was the worst thing in the world, then I had to be the lowest human in the history of mankind. I’d been embarrassed almost every day of my thirteen years. Did that make me a bad person?

  “Take that time Ben liked that girl in his class,” Steve said. “What was her name? Ina?”

  “Ida.” Ben began to slump in his chair.

  “Ida. Pretty girl. You had just gotten your braces then, and you had that skin problem —”

  “Dad.” Ben was sinking lower. His head was about level with mine at this point.

  “So you had the brilliant idea of writing a poem for her and asking her to a dance. I told you poetry was not your strong suit, but you didn’t listen —”

  “Please, Dad.”

  As much as I wanted to hear this story of Ben’s humiliation by a girl, I also began to get the queasy feeling that his father was embarrassing him all over again, and getting a kick out of it. Which made the story hard to enjoy.

  Steve would not let up. “I can still remember some of the choicer lines.” He started chuckling, and then lifted one hand in dramatic-poet fashion and recited:

  “You’re greater than Star Wars: Episode Three,

  Known as Revenge of the Sith.

  I would be so very hap-pee

  If you to the dance

  Me would go with.”

  I wanted to laugh. I really did. Because it was hands down the worst poem I’d ever heard. Also, if he was trying to do Yoda talk, he got it wrong. But Ben looked so embarrassed and miserable that the laugh died in my throat.

  Steve pressed on. “Do you remember what Ida said after you read the poem to her in front of your whole eighth-grade class?”

  “No,” Ben said. “But I bet you do.”

  “Come on, Ben. You remember. You sulked about it for days.”

  Ben didn’t answer. He had drifted so far down in his chair that his chin was almost level with the table.

  “I think we can all guess what Ida said,” I cut in. “Why do you have to be so mean about it?”

  The table went silent. The three of them stared at me, stunned.

  “I’m not being mean,” Steve said. “I’m trying to teach Ben — and you — a valuable lesson about dignity.”

  “By embarrassing us? How does that teach us dignity?”

  Scarlet’s mom looked like a deer facing a hunter’s rifle. “Scarlet, what’s gotten into you?”

  A little bit of Lavender, I thought. “I think any boy who writes a poem for a girl and reads it out loud to the whole class is pretty brave. Even if the poem happened to be about Star Wars.”

  “Scarlet, you don’t speak to me that way,” Steve said. “Go to your room and stay there. You’re going to have to skip dinner tonight.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “I’m a growing girl and I’m hungry after a long hard day at school. I’ll go to my room, all right, but I’m taking my dinner with me.” I loaded my plate with extra chicken and rice.

  I turned to Ben, but he wasn’t sitting up any straighter in his seat. He still looked miserable and embarrassed and not grateful that I’d defended him at all.

  I tried to send him a psychic message: Ben, we’re in this together. Or at least he and Scarlet were. They might as well team up and support each other.

  But I don?
??t think he got the message.

  I took my plate up to Scarlet’s room, where I could eat in peace.

  Now that I was alone, memories of my painful audition washed over me. Was it possible that Steve was right? I had made a fool of myself in front of the whole school. I’d lost my dream part. Marian. All because I was stuck in this body I never asked for.

  But then I looked around at Scarlet’s luxurious room, a monument to good luck and success. A charmed life. Her soccer trophies, lined up on a shelf. The grinning pictures of her with all her friends. The birthday gifts, still piled on her dresser. Charlie’s blue flowers, wilting in a vase. This was the bedroom of a girl who had everything. A girl who got what she wanted.

  What was I so worried about? I was Scarlet Martinez.

  I pinned my hair up in a bun and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked prim and pretty, the perfect Marian the Librarian.

  Maybe that would be enough. A few of the other girls at the audition were good singers, but none of them were mind-blowingly good except … me. Or rather, Scarlet. With my former vocal cords.

  But that old me was Lavender Schmitz. She didn’t look anything like pretty blond Shirley Jones, who played Marian in the movie. Lavender didn’t look like someone Charlie Scott would glance twice at, much less fall in love with.

  Maybe there was hope. Maybe, as Scarlet, I’d still get the part. So what if I couldn’t sing? Maybe I could lip-synch! I could act the part of Marian while Scarlet, in my body, stood behind the curtain and sang the songs for me, just like Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain. If only I’d suggested it to Mr. Brummel earlier …

  There was still a chance. If Mr. Brummel could overlook my voice, he might give me the lead anyway.

  Stranger things had happened.

  The next morning I woke up before my alarm went off. I threw on some Scarlet clothes and hurried out of the house without stopping for breakfast.