Switch by Tish Cohen Page A

chime when I left earlier. Even we have an alarm—shouldn’t Nigel Adams?
    I slip back into their house, which is every bit as quiet as it was when I left, and creep back toward Joules’s room. With any luck her father is still asleep, if he’s even home at all. You never know with rock gods—maybe they go out and prowl around Hollywood for days. I haven’t encountered a single sign of life in the place, and suddenly I realize I know almost nothing about Joules’s existence. As in, is there an evil stepmother? A crazy aunt locked in the attic? Okay, I guess I know the house pretty well—thereis no attic. Still, it would be helpful to know who else lives here, whether they’re still asleep and if I can shower and get myself to school without having to see any of them at all.
    It has a smell, this house. Like that awful kind of cheese fondue I once had at a restaurant—all tangy and sharp, it’s as if whiskey has fermented beneath the floorboards. That odor is depressing as hell, let me tell you.
    My own house, well, it’s hard to say how it smells. You can’t really smell your own house. You’re in it all the time so your nasal membranes are dull to the scent and it’s easy to assume your place smells like nothing. But it smells like something, I guarantee it. The best you can hope for is that it doesn’t reek of fermented booze. No one’s going to tell you if it does, so that’s really all you can do. Hope.
    Anyway, it’s depressing how people’s houses have these smells. And the families never even know it. Not even the ones who are rock stars.
    There was once this foster child who came to live with us, her name was Tracy. The cool thing about Tracy was that she was the same age as me. That had never happened before. She moved in when we were both nine. I overheard Mom say she was from an abusive situation, which might have meant one of her parents abused the other, or that they abused the kids—Tracy had a brother who got sent to another house because he was nearly eighteen and didn’t need much care. Donnie. He wrote her all these letters but I never met him. Anyway, Tracy was obsessed with my dollhouse. Every day she wanted to play dollhouse, even though I thought we were getting too old for it.
    Mostly we played after school. Tracy always had to pull all the hand towels out of the hall closet and spread them out on the floor. Then we had to put all the dollhouse furniture on the towels as if they were rugs. We never actually used the dollhouse at all. It made the house seem more like a castle, Tracy said. That’s what we started to call it. Playing castle. Tracy only stayed a few months, then she got sent back to her folks. But I missed her. It’s no fun to play castle by yourself, not when you’re nearly ten. You feel like a baby. So I asked Mom one day if Tracy could visit. Mom didn’t answer me. She got up from the table and started doing the dishes. It wasn’t until she was putting them away in the cupboard that I could see her cheeks were wet from tears.
    I’ve always thought I should have asked, but I just sat there like an idiot and said nothing. Sometimes you know the answer already. Sometimes silence is all you can handle in this rotten world.
    What made me think of her, Tracy, in the first place were all the rugs scattered in Joules’s house. Tracy would have taken one look, thought “castle” and started moving all the furniture around. For sure that’s what Tracy would have done.
    As I tiptoe toward the hallway that will take me back to Joules’s room, I hear a man clear his throat in the kitchen. Then he calls out, “Bit of a late night, isn’t it, Jujube?”
    I spin around to see Nigel Adams, the man himself, made of stringy black hair and a face that looks like a pile of unfolded laundry. Each eyebrow is as thick as the tail of a frightened cat, and his eyes are ringed with the remains of last week’s eyeliner. He’s much bigger than I thoughthe’d be—seeing Nigel