Be Careful What You Wish For ✔

1. A Warning

The fact that it was storming in Grover Heights, usually one of the driest places on the planet, proved that Dad had chosen a lousy day to move back into our old house. During the long drive from Jeffersonville to Grover Heights, the sky loomed darker and darker outside my window. The rain only pounded heavier on the car roof as we neared the town. It was as though Grover Heights itself was telling us to turn back.

Rain splattered and smeared all over the windows as the van made a familiar turn into a very average-looking suburban neighborhood. Just as I remembered, it was filled with identical houses and cookie-cutter neighbors, the kind who yelled at you for running across their lawns or making too much noise on a Sunday morning.

“Well, what do you think?” Dad asked, eyeing us from his frontal mirror as we rolled past a man walking his dog. “I told you everything had changed to an unrecognizable degree.”

“Funny, Dad. Real funny,” I said.

“The one thing that’ll never change is my funniness, kid. And don’t you forget it.”

I rolled my eyes and uncrossed my sweaty legs with an odd little squelch.

My thirteen-year-old brother Joel, who was sitting next to me listening to his endless, creepy goth music, groaned without looking up from his iPod. “What are you, an old man?” he said in disgust. “Can’t you stop sweating so much? It’s gross.”

“I’m sorry it’s such a hot, humid day. Next time I’ll be sure to ask the weatherman to predict some cooler weather.”

“Mom, Anna’s being sarcastic,” Joel whined.

“Mom, Joel’s being goth-y.”

Mom whipped her head around to glare at us. She was a fairly short woman with a pretty cherub-shaped face, so she wasn’t normally frightening. Today, however, the glare on her face was definitely frightening.

“Three hours,” she said. “You two have been at this for three hours now. Aren’t you sick of picking on each other?”

“We’re here,” Dad announced, defusing the tension in the air by cutting the engine. “And it looks like we beat the movers, too.”

The rain had let up into a light drizzle. I got out of the car—but not before shoving Joel, who shoved me back—and soaked in the house and the rush of old memories it brought back.

There was the slight dent in the otherwise perfect garage door, where Zachary’s (excuse me, Zach’s) and my Ruby Goldberg project from the fifth grade had gone way, way wrong. There was my bedroom window with the curtains that were stuck in that odd halfway closed position, never able to close all the way to the end. There was the wobbly step on the front porch that had once made our neighbor old Mrs. Mitchell take quite a fall onto the concrete. It probably would have been more tragic if she weren’t so unlikable.

“This house really hasn’t changed at all,” I said in wonderment. Three years had barely put a wrinkle on our old home.

“Yeah, yeah, you sap,” Joel said moodily, shoving past me to get to the front door. “Let’s just get this moving in thing over with.”

“You really ought to take time to appreciate the more simple things in life, Joel,” I said, just because I knew it would annoy him.

“Simple things like your brain?”

“Simple things like talking to your family instead of living in that punk-rock world of yours all day.”

Unfortunately, before I could lecture my brother further, he and his dark spiky head had taken their punk-ness inside the house with a great slam of the door.