“What do you take me for, Guy, an idiot? Tell them it’s a homework assignment for Humanities—you’re trying to prove whether it’s true what they say about how you have to walk a mile in another man’s shoes to really know how he feels. Then, you move into each other’s houses, cozy up to your real folks, drop a few hints, and before you know it they put two and two together and—ta-da! You guys end up living happily ever after in your rightful homes.”
“You know, Buzzy, for an idiot you’re pretty brilliant,” I said.
“Why, that tongue of yours could charm the skin right off a rattlesnake, do you know that, sonny?” Buzz said, putting on his accent just like he’d done for Mrs. Dipnower.
Bob-o giggled.
“Come on, let’s get out of here and get some fresh air,” I said.
“Yeah, let’s go to the fort,” said Buzz.
“Cool!” said Bob-o, jumping to his feet.
Buzz and I exchanged a look. We’d never allowed anyone else in the fort, and Bob-o certainly wasn’t high on our list of people we might be interested in bending the rules for. But he seemed so excited that neither of us had the heart to disappoint him, so the three of us headed off, stopping briefly in the backyard to grab a couple of chicken legs and some lemonade.
CHAPTER TEN
As we walked through the field toward the fort, Buzz sidled up alongside me and whispered in my ear, “I hope he isn’t going to pick his nose in the fort.”
“As long as he keeps his hands in his pockets, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said.
“What about the stink?” he asked.
“The fort smells like an old sock anyway,” I said.
“Great. Now it’ll smell like an old sock with a dead fish in it. Nice combo.”
We walked on in silence for a little while. Bob-o was lagging behind, kicking stones as he went. Every now and then one of the rocks would skitter up the path and clip one of us in the heel, but since it didn’t really hurt we didn’t bother to tell him to knock it off.
“You know, Guy,” said Buzz as we neared the fort. “I didn’t think of this before, but if you switch places with Bob-o you’re going to have to sleep in his bed.”
I hadn’t thought of that either.
“We’ll just have to make a deal that each of us will clean our rooms and change the sheets before we make the switch,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I’m more worried about the bigger issues.”
“You mean like how you’re going to get his parents, I mean your parents, well, anyway, them, to figure out the truth about you guys getting switched?”
“Yeah.”
When we reached the fort, Bob-o caught up to us and we gave him the grand tour. He must have remembered the hands-in-the-pocket rule from his visit to my room and figured it would hold true for the fort as well, because he stuck his hands deep into his pockets before he came inside.
“So, what do you think, guys?” said Buzz. “Will a weekend be long enough to accomplish your mission?”
“Should be,” I said.
Bob-o shrugged.
“Don’t tell your parents about the assignment until Friday morning—that way there won’t be time for them to make a stink about it, or snoop around finding out what other parents think of it. Make sure you clean up your rooms and change your sheets and junk before Friday, okay?” Buzz looked pointedly at Bob-o. “Got that? You might want to open a window too.”
Bob-o blushed, and for a second I felt bad for him.
“Basically, you’ll have Friday night and all day Saturday to point out all the things you have in common with your real parents, then on Sunday—a week from tomorrow—you plant the seed about how babies sometimes get switched at birth, blah, blah, blah. Then all we do is wait for the lightbulbs to go off over their heads.”
“Maybe we should go over some of the similarities we want to be pointing out to our new parents,” I suggested.
“Good idea. Bob-o, for starters, make sure you dress the way you always do, because that’s a big thing you and Guy’s parents have in common,” Buzz said.
“And don’t change your hair,” I added.
Bob-o checked out his reflection in the screen on the old TV, carefully studying the cowlicks that stuck out in all directions like a pinwheel. Then he puckered up his lips, put his hands on his hips, and did an exaggerated fashion model pose. I laughed out loud, and so did Buzz, in spite of himself.
“The beauty of this whole thing is that it’s all genetic, Bob-o,” I said. “It’s not your fault that you march to a different drummer and have a wacky sense of style—I mean, you saw my mother tonight. You’re going to be happy with her, Bob-o, she’s very—”
“Colorful,” Buzz interjected. “And so is Wuckums. Wait’ll you get a load of the oyster trick. You’re gonna love the Strangs, Bob-o. Now, Guy, you already know you need to make a big deal of that left-handed thing, and just be as normal as you always are, right?”
“Do you have any pointers for me about how to act around your mom and dad?” I asked Bob-o. He turned away from his reflection very slowly and looked at me for a minute.
“They don’t notice anything. I once spoke in a Swedish accent for a whole day and they never said a word. They’re just going to leave you alone.”
“Sounds like heaven,” I said.
“Okay, everybody’s clear on the plan, right? Step one, clean up your room; step two, tell your parents about the assignment; step three, move in and impress your new parents with all the traits you have in common; step four, plant the seed for the switched-at-birth scenario; step five, wait for the lightbulbs to go on.”
Bob-o and I both nodded as Buzz went down the list.
“What are you going to be doing?” I asked Buzz.
“I’m going to be monitoring the situation, making sure everything goes smoothly.”
“Do you really think this plan is going to work?” I asked as we left the fort and headed back to my house with Bob-o bringing up the rear again.
“Sure it is. I thought of it, didn’t I? And you said yourself that for an idiot I’m pretty brilliant,” Buzz pointed out.
“Well, I have no idea how this whole thing is going to turn out,” I said, “but I do know this—I’ve been living a lie for the past eleven years, and it’s high time I did something about it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Getting my parents to agree to host Bob-o for the weekend was a cinch. My mother was so thrilled that I was letting her in on something having to do with school that she could barely contain herself. I basically stopped letting her help me with homework back in second grade when I discovered that I could do it faster without her “help.” Dad said he thought it was a very interesting assignment and wondered if the parents would be invited to come in and share their experiences with the class. I told him I thought that was unlikely, which is what is known as a major understatement.
Bob-o’s parents were fine with the arrangement too. My mother and Mrs. Smith had several phone conversations working out the details of what we would need to bring with us, and before I knew it I was standing on the porch of 2120 North Maple Street waving good-bye as my parents drove off with Bob-o in the backseat hanging his head out of the window like a dog.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith told me to go upstairs and put my stuff away. Bob-o had done a pretty good job of cleaning up his room, and I was relieved to find that there were clean sheets on the bed and only a hint of fishiness in the air. He’d left me a note explaining that it was fine for me to touch his stuff if I wanted to and telling me that if I felt like erupting the volcano, it was down in the basement with the instructions stuck in the top of it. He was a lot more talkative on paper than in person. At the top of the note he’d drawn a little picture of himself doing the muscleman pose. I laughed, kicked off my shoes, and lay down on the bed to daydream for a while about what it would have been like to have grown up in this room instead of my own. Boy, was it peaceful, I could hear the clock ticking and other than that, not a wh
ole lot. It was never this quiet at my house. My mother was constantly singing or banging or clicking around, and once my father came home from work the two of them never stopped laughing and yacking. The Smiths’ house, on the other hand, was the kind of place where a person could be alone with his thoughts, and since I had a lot to think about I felt pretty happy to be there.
I figured it was all right to snoop around a little. I was sure Bob-o was doing the same in my room. I opened his top drawer—white underwear. Second drawer—matched socks. Third drawer—T-shirts, all solid colors. When I opened the bottom drawer I noticed that the fish smell suddenly got much stronger, so I poked around in there a little to see if I could figure out the source of the stink. It didn’t take long. Bob-o likes those pants that have a million pockets in them, and when I pulled a pair of his jeans out of the drawer and held them up by the legs, you wouldn’t believe what fell out of the pockets.
Little balls of dried-up tuna fish. For some reason Bob-o had balled up tuna fish and stuffed it into his pockets. No wonder he smelled putrid—the guy was a walking compost heap. I stuffed the pants back into the drawer, kicked the fish balls under the dresser with the tip of my shoe, and pushed a big stack of books up against it, hoping that would help keep the smell under control.
I looked around some more, but there wasn’t anything cool on Bob-o’s shelves. He didn’t have any baseball cards or model cars. Pretty much all he had was a million science-fiction paperbacks. On the back of his door was a Star Trek calendar with hardly anything written on it. From the looks of it, the only regular social event in Bob-o’s life was his weekly visit to the allergist. After I’d been in Bob-o’s room for about an hour, Mrs. Smith knocked on the door. I was surprised I hadn’t heard her coming. It was probably a combination of the wall-to-wall carpet and the fact that she wore quiet shoes. She didn’t actually open the door, she just spoke to me through it.
“I thought I should let you know that we eat dinner at six fifteen, dear, so if you’re hungry now you might want to go downstairs and have a snack,” she said. I told her that I wasn’t really hungry yet, and she said she hoped I liked beef stew because that’s what they always have on Friday nights. Once we’d squared away the dinner menu, she went down the hall and I heard her close her bedroom door behind her. There was nothing left to do in Bob-o’s room, so I decided to go downstairs and check out the volcano.
The basement light was on already, and I could hear Mr. Smith puttering around down there. I went down and asked him if it was okay for me to erupt the volcano, which was sitting in the corner near the washing machine. He was very busy fiddling around with an old toaster oven he’d taken apart, so it took him a minute before he even answered me.
“Tell you what, young man,” he said, “that thing makes an awful stink when you set it off. How would it be if you find something else to do instead?”
“Okay,” I said. I thought maybe I might hang around a little longer down there and try to impress him with how normal I was, but he was sort of bent over his workbench with his back to me and I got the feeling he didn’t want to talk. I went back upstairs and tried to watch a little TV, but I was too restless to sit still for long. I found myself wondering what Bob-o was up to at my house. I wondered if my mother had tie-dyed his underwear yet or if my dad was doing his magic tricks for him.
The phone rang, which made me jump about a mile since it was so quiet around there. Mrs. Smith called down to me, “Guy, telephone call for you. Someone named Buzz.”
I took the call in the kitchen.
“Hey, Buzz,” I said, glad to hear his voice on the other end.
“Hey, big guy, how’s it going?”
“Great. Very peaceful. Very normal.”
“Bob-o’s room okay?” he asked.
“A little fishy, but otherwise okay,” I said.
“Good. Sounds like you’ve got things under control, so I’m gonna go check on Bob-o. I’m thinking maybe I better ride over there and sneak in the back ’cause if I call, your mom’s gonna ask me whose shoes I’m walking in this weekend and that could get complicated. I wouldn’t want to blow this thing for you.”
“Right.”
“Remember, you’ve got tonight and all day tomorrow to play up the genetic-link thing, okay? Show them how totally normal you are, and do everything with your left hand, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“’Bye, Guy.”
I hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen looking at Mrs. Smith’s copper-bottomed pans hanging neatly on the wall next to the stove. There was one empty spot where I could tell the stew pot simmering on the back burner normally hung. There was a cookie jar on the counter, but when I looked inside, it was empty. I walked back out into the living room and ran into Mrs. Smith coming down the stairs. I jumped. I was having a very hard time getting used to the fact that you never heard this woman coming.
“I hope you’re making yourself at home, dear,” she said, patting my arm as she went past me into the kitchen. I followed her.
“It’s a very nice home you have here, Mrs. Smith,” I said. “Very normal.”
“Cedar Springs is a lovely place to live,” she said as she lifted the lid off the stew and stirred it around a little.
I figured this might be a good opportunity to point out a few of those similarities between us, so I sat down on the tall kitchen stool and dove in.
“So, Mrs. Smith, I notice that you have very straight hair. Do you find it gives you problems in the winter time?” I asked.
“Not really, dear,” she said as she opened a cupboard and rummaged around in the spice bottles.
“Because, well, I find I get a lot of static when I take off my hat for instance. You know, my hair stands straight up. I thought maybe since your hair is just like mine, maybe you—”
“I never wear hats,” she said as she sprinkled something brown into the stew.
“How about being left-handed?” I said. “Does that ever inconvenience you in any way, because I find sometimes I—”
“No—no, it never bothers me,” she said as she picked up the spoon and began to stir again. Then she stopped stirring and looked over her shoulder at me. “Say, aren’t you and Bobby supposed to be walking around in each other’s shoes this weekend—wasn’t that the assignment?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answered carefully.
“Well, in that case,” she said as she tapped the spoon sharply on the edge of the pot, “you might as well run along now, dear, because Bobby would never stand here chatting with me while I cook. I’ll call you when dinner’s on the table, okey dokey?” Mrs. Smith smiled a tight little smile that made her eyes into little slits, and then she turned her attention back to the stew.
My mother likes to have company in the kitchen when she cooks, but clearly Mrs. Smith was more of a solitary chef. I went back up to Bob-o’s room and tried to read a couple of his science-fiction books. Too many aliens and weird slimy creatures for my taste, and besides, now that I knew about the tuna balls under the dresser, I kept smelling fish even though it was probably mostly in my mind. I wondered what Bob-o was doing at my house. I thought about calling him, but figured it would be safer to leave it up to Buzz to check on how things were going on that end.
At six fifteen on the dot Mrs. Smith called me down to dinner. Mr. Smith sat at one end of the table and Mrs. Smith sat at the other. I took a wild guess and figured the place set on the side was for me. The stew was pretty good and so was the salad. My mother has a habit of putting unusual things in salad, like seaweed and cut-up licorice, but the Smiths’ salad was your basic lettuce and carrots—no surprises. For a while I was happy just to sit there and eat. Nobody said very much except for “Pass the salt, please,” and other stuff like that. I knew I was supposed to be planting seeds all over the place, but I was having a hard time figuring out how to do it other than to keep reaching for things with my left hand.
Now that Mr. Smith was sitting right near me, I had a good opportunity to
check out the dimple in his chin. It was exactly like mine, so I figured that was as good a place as any to start.
“That’s a very unusual dimple you have in your chin, Mr. Smith,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said as he buttered a roll and bit into it.
“You probably didn’t notice, but I have one almost exactly like it myself,” I said, thrusting my chin in his direction.
“Very nice stew, Marie,” said Mr. Smith without looking at my chin.
“Some people think that a chin dimple is the same thing as a cleft chin,” I continued, “but as you probably know, they’re not the same at all.” Mrs. Smith refilled Mr. Smith’s bowl and sat back down. This was a lot harder than I had anticipated. I couldn’t tell if they were actually listening, but I went on anyway. “You know, things like dimples are a genetic trait that can be passed down from one generation to the next. Like straight brown hair. And left-handedness. It must be very hard for you to look at Bob-o with his curly red hair and his glasses and his unusual, um, unusual-ness and not to think, ’Wow, this kid practically doesn’t even look related to us at all, does he?”
Mr. Smith put down his spoon and looked right at me. Holy cow, I could practically see the lightbulb going on over his head! This was it, and I was ahead of schedule. They weren’t supposed to figure it all out until Sunday, but here it was Friday night and the pieces were falling into place perfectly. I guess some things are just too obvious to go unnoticed.
“Mrs. Smith makes the best darned apple crisp in town, young man. Would you like to try some?” he said.
That was it? Here I thought he was realizing that I was his long-lost son, but all he was doing was thinking about dessert? Surely Mrs. Smith was catching my drift. I turned to her and in desperation blurted out, “Didn’t it ever occur to you that when the nurse brought Bob-o and me in to you and my mom when you were sharing that room in the hospital that maybe by mistake she got us—”
The phone rang before I could finish. Mr. Smith answered it in the kitchen and handed the phone to me. It was Buzz, and he was out of breath.