inspiring. Everyone in the family has tried to tell him this on different occasions, but he brushes off the criticism. I think he might have the morning playlist for the entire summer already picked out.
Over the music, Ellie—four years old and full of Big Emotions—is screaming about who-knows-what. There are days when I feel like Ellie’s life is just one big tantrum. No, I won’t take a bath. No, I don’t want to put on socks. No, I hate Goldfish crackers. Hey, Lucy is eating my Goldfish crackers, it’s not faaaaaiiiir.
I hear a loud thump and something crashes downstairs, immediately followed by my mom’s shrill scream. “Lucy! I said, not in the house!”
“Sorry!” comes Lucy’s not-really-that-sorry-sounding apology. A second later, I hear the back screen door squeal on its hinges.
Lucy, thirteen years old and embittered to be going into freshman year after the summer, where she’ll officially be back on the bottom of the social pecking order, was probably switched at birth with our actual sibling. At least, that’s what Jude and I have theorized. Lucy is popular, for starters. Like, weirdly popular. And not that cliché teen-movie type of popular. She doesn’t wear high heels to school, she doesn’t spend all her free time at the mall, and she is neither ditzy nor mean. People just like her. All sorts of people. From what I can tell, in my limited knowledge of Fortuna Beach Middle School’s current social circles, she has a connection to pretty much all of them. She plays nearly every sport. She has a functional knowledge of pep rallies and fundraisers and other school events that Jude and I have habitually avoided. It can be unsettling to watch.
The only group she doesn’t seem to have much connection to is us. She has no interest whatsoever in music—she hardly listens to it on the radio and often puts in her headphones so she can listen to the latest true crime podcasts rather than Dad’s record of the day. She’s the only one in our family who’s never even tried to learn an instrument. (Whereas I took piano for two years, and Jude gave the guitar a real shot. Neither of us ever got any good and we both gave up by the end of middle school. The poor keyboard my parents picked up for me at the local pawnshop has been collecting dust in a corner of our living room ever since.)
And then there’s nine-year-old Penny, who loves music, but not the kind my parents have done their best to brainwash us into loving. Instead, she likes pop and R & B and some alternative, the kind of Top 40 hits that don’t usually show up in a record store. She’s the only reason I have any knowledge of contemporary music at all, and to be honest, my familiarity is still pretty sparse. In fact, if my parents hadn’t dragged us to see Yesterday, a movie inspired by the Beatles, I probably still wouldn’t know who Ed Sheeran is.
Ironically, Penny is also the only one of the Barnett kids who plays an instrument. Sort of. She’s three years into learning the violin. One would think that, even being a kid, she would have made some progress in three years, but the sounds she squeaks out of those strings are just as ear-bleeding now as they were the day she started. I can hear her practicing in the bedroom she shares with Lucy as I put on the most vivid red lipstick I have. I need the energy today. I’m not sure if she’s trying to play along to the Kinks or cramming for a lesson. Either way, it’s bringing back my headache. I huff in irritation and start to close the bathroom door.
A foot appears from the hallway, stopping the door in its path. It bounces back at me.
“Hey,” says Jude, leaning against the door frame. “Can you taste the freedom in the air?”
I smack my lips thoughtfully. “Funny. It tastes just like Crest extra whitening.” I cap my lipstick and drop it into my makeup bag. Squeezing past him, I duck into my bedroom. “Did you make all your plans to lay siege to Goblin Cavern or whatever?”
“The Isle of Gwendahayr, if you really must know. I’m designing it to include a series of ancient ruins that all hold clues for a really powerful spell, but if you try to chant the spell in the wrong order, or you haven’t gotten to them all yet, then