Аманда Хокинг - Switched

Most parents start out filling the beginning of the baby book perfectly, but then forget as time goes on. Not mine. Mom had put one or two pictures in, and that was it. Most of the handwriting was either my father’s or Maggie’s.

My foot prints were in there, along with my measurements at birth and a copy of my birth certificate. I touched it delicately, proving that my birth was tangible. I had been born in this family, whether Mom and I liked it or not.

“What are you doing, kiddo?” Maggie asked softly from behind me, and I jumped a little. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay.” I tried to cover up my baby book, feeling as if I had been caught doing something naughty. I turned to look back at her and smiled meekly. Wrapped in her house coat, Maggie yawned and ran a hand through her sleep disheveled hair. “What are you doing up?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Maggie replied with a smile. She sat down on the floor next to me, leaning against the back of the couch. “I heard you get up.” She nodded to the pile of albums on my lap. “You feeling nostalgic?”

“I don’t know really.”

“What are you looking at?” Maggie leaned over so she could peer at the photo album. “Oh, that’s an old one. You were just a baby then.”

I flipped open the book, and it went it chronologically, so the first few pages were of Matt when he was little. There were lots of pictures of Mom, Dad, and Matt, and they all looked ridiculously happy. All three of them had blond hair and blue eyes. They looked like something out of a Hallmark commercial or something.

Maggie looked at it with me, making clucking sounds at my dad. She gently touched his picture once and commented on how handsome he was.

Even though everyone agreed that my father had been a good guy, we rarely talked about him. It was part of our way of not talking about Mom and not talking about what happened. Everything before my sixth birthday didn’t matter, and that just happened to include every memory of Dad.

About ten pages into the book, everything changed. As soon as pictures of me started to appear, my mother began looking surly and sullen. In the very first picture, I was only a few days old. I was wearing an outfit with blue trains all over it, and my mother glaring at me.

“You were such a cute baby!” Maggie laughed. “But I remember that.

You wore boys clothes for the first month because they were so sure you were going to be a boy.”

“That explains a lot,” I mumbled, and Maggie laughed. “Why didn’t they just get me new clothes? They had the money for it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie sighed, looking far away. “It was something your mother wanted.” She shook her head. “She was weird about things.”

“What was my name supposed to be?” I couldn’t remember. When I was younger, people had talked about it, but nobody ever reminisced about my childhood anymore.

“Um… Michael!” Maggie snapped her fingers when she remembered.

“Michael Conrad Everly. But then you were girl, so that ruined that.”

“How did I get Wendy from that?” I wrinkled my nose. “Michelle would make more sense.”

“Well…” Maggie looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Your mother refused to name you, and your father… I guess he couldn’t think of anything.

So Matt named you.”

“Oh yeah.” I faintly remembered hearing that before. “But why Wendy?”

“He liked the name Wendy,” Maggie shrugged. “He was a big Peter Pan fan, which is ironic because Peter Pan is the story of a boy who never grows up, and Matt was a boy who was always grown up.” I smirked at that. “Maybe that’s why he’s always been so protective of you. He named you. You were his.”

There was a picture of me when I was about two or three, and Matt was holding me in his arms. I was lying on my stomach with my arms and legs outstretched, and he was grinning like a mad man. He used to run me around the house like that, pretending that I was flying, and call me “Wendy Bird,” and I would laugh for hours.

As I got older, it became more and more apparent that I looked nothing like my family. My dark eyes and dark frizzy hair contrasted completely with them. In every picture with me, my mother had these completely exasperated look on her face, as if she had spent the last half hour fighting with me before the picture. But then again, she probably had. I had always been contrary to everything she was. In the pictures of my fifth birthday, I covered all my gifts in cake and stood in my underwear, and my mother stood directly behind me, looking as if she wished she were anywhere else in the whole world.

“You were a strong-willed child,” Maggie admitted, looking at the picture of me naked at my fifth birthday. “You wanted things the way you wanted them. And when you were a baby, you were colicky. But you were always an adorable child, and you were bright and funny.” Maggie gently pushed a strand of hair back from my face. “You were always worthy of love. You did nothing wrong, Wendy. She is the one with the problem, not you.”

“I know,” I nodded.

But for the first time, I truly believed that this all might be entirely my fault. If Finn was telling the truth, as these pictures seemed to confirm, I wasn’t their child. I was something else entirely. I was exactly what my mother accused me of being, and she was just more intuitive than everybody else. It was my fault because I wasn’t even human.

“What’s wrong?” Maggie asked, looking concerned. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” I lied and closed the photo album.

“Did something happen last night?” Her eyes were filled with love and worry, and it was hard to think of her as not being my family. She had been the closest thing to a mother I had growing up, and she had done a very good job, all things considered. “Did you even sleep?”

“Yeah. I just… woke up, I guess,” I answered vaguely.

“What happened at the dance?” Maggie leaned back against the couch, resting her hand on her chin as she studied me. “Did something happen with a boy?”

“Things just didn’t turn out the way I thought they would,” I said honestly. “In fact, they couldn’t have turned out more different.”

“Was that Patrick boy mean to you?” Maggie asked with a protective edge to her voice.

“No, no, nothing like that,” I assured her. Even though it would be easier to just blame everything on Patrick, he had been nothing but a gentleman, and I didn’t want to badmouth behind him back. Besides that, I had probably used some kind of mind control thing on him, and that didn’t seem right to do that and then talk shit about him. “He was great. But he’s just a friend.”

“Oh.” Understanding flashed across her eyes, and I think she had gotten the wrong idea from that, but whatever kept her from asking more questions. If she wanted to think that I had a crush on Patrick and he didn’t reciprocate, that was fine by me. “Being a teenager is hard, no matter what family you come from.”

“You’re telling me,” I muttered.

Upstairs, I heard the sound of Matt getting up and moving around.

Maggie shot me a nervous look, so I hurried to pack up the photo albums. He wouldn’t exactly be mad at me for looking at them, but he definitely wouldn’t be happy either. And first thing in the morning, I did not want to deal with a fight with my brother, on top of worrying about whether or not he was really even my brother.

“You know, you can talk to me about this stuff whenever you want,” Maggie whispered as I slipped the albums back in the cardboard box. “Well, at least whenever Matt isn’t around.”

“I know,” I smiled at her.

“I suppose I should make you breakfast.” Maggie stood up and stretched, then looked down at me. “What do you even eat for breakfast?”