* * *

  Roxanne and I counted the days until they arrived, like convicts numbering the days till execution. Two weeks… one week… and finally the dreaded day was here. Similar to the beginning of most natural disasters, I could hear the neighborhood dogs bark as their car pulled up in front of our house. The doorbell rang, and we found them there, deposited on our doorstep, with three massive suitcases. It looked as if they were prepared for a long siege.

  Aunt Millicent was already running back to the car, which Uncle Bernard kept impatiently idling by the curb. “I’m sure you’ll all have a wonderful time together,” lied Aunt Millicent, trying to brush Bratt’s sticky fingerprints off her mink as she ran. She leapt into the car, and Uncle Bernard burned rubber even before the door was closed, in no small hurry to escape. So here they were, standing in our foyer. Seven-year-old Candida was in her typical pink frilly dress. She had a smile from ear to ear and looked like an emoji. Beside her stood five-year-old Bratt. His hair was even messier and his face dirtier than I remembered, which was quite an accomplishment. His real name had once been Brett, but so many people called him Bratt that even his parents started calling him that. In fact, they might have had his name legally changed, although I’m not certain. In any case, there stood Bratt with his left index finger lodged so deeply into his nose that he was pulling boogers from the next county.

  “Well, hello!” chimed Olga the nanny, throwing out her arms to greet my cousins as if they were normal children. Bratt gave her a grimace, revealing his missing front teeth.

  “I’m bored,” he said. “This place is boring. And you’re ugly.”

  Olga was not thrilled by the observation.

  Candida shook her head with a broad, knowing smile.

  “Bratt,” she said, “you’re so incorrigible.” Which was one of the tamer words people used to describe Bratt. Then Candida turned to my sister. She ratcheted her smile up a few notches.

  “Hey, Roxanne,” she said brightly. “I brought my Golly Miss Molly Happy Time Plastic Tea Set. Let’s go have a tea party!”

  Roxanne narrowed her eyes to slits. “I’d rather die,” she said, but Candida just giggled happily.

  “Oh, Roxanne, you’re so funny!” she said. “Isn’t she funny, Helga?”

  “Olga,” corrected our nanny.

  “Whatever!” said Candida, and she dragged Roxanne into the den for tea torture. As for Bratt, he was already swinging from the chandelier.

  * * *

  The day quickly became a festival of shattered glass and splintered wood, compliments of Bratt. Five broken banister rails, four demolished vases, three shredded sofas, two dented appliances, and that weird-looking bird he nailed with a baseball in our pear tree. At first, poor Olga tried to clean up after him, but nothing could prepare her for this challenge. As for Candida, she was accustomed to making her way through Bratt’s mounting debris, and she flitted around the house with a carefree smile so bright, you needed sunscreen. This was all to be expected—you have to understand, this was normal for our cousins. It was at dinner that things started to get weird.

  Olga, rather than put up with Bratt’s nagging, agreed to serve us all his favorite thing for dinner: Lamb-aroni. It was while we were picking through our Lamb-aroni that a frog fell out of nowhere into Bratt’s bowl. Tomato sauce splattered onto everyone.

  “What is this?” said Olga. “Who has dropped a frog into the Lamb-aroni?”

  “Oops!” said Bratt. Then he grabbed the frog, tomato sauce and all, and put it in his shirt pocket. This wouldn’t have bugged me in the least, because after all, Bratt has been known to bring worse things than frogs to the table with him. But you see, Bratt hadn’t had a frog in his pocket when he sat down, and for the life of me, I had no idea where that frog had come from.

  Then that night, while we were watching sing-along videos (at Candida’s request, of course), another strange thing made an appearance in the room. I saw it out of the corner of my eye as it came hurtling across the room, bouncing with a clink off the glass of the TV. Olga picked it up and examined it. It was a tiny glass unicorn, perfectly molded, and just the size of your fingernail.

  “How beautiful,” she cooed. “Isn’t that nice.” But when she asked us whose it was, nobody claimed it.

  It was as we were getting ready for bed that Roxanne pulled me aside and whispered to me.

  “I don’t know where that thing came from,” she said, “but I do know one thing: Candida sneezed just before it hit the TV.”

  * * *

  At around three in the morning, I was awakened by something cold and slimy hopping across my face. I brushed it away and sat up in bed. For a moment I thought it was a dream. But then I saw the covers undulating. I flung back the covers to find…

  … frogs!

  Not just one frog or two, but a dozen of them, hopping madly in every direction. It was almost biblical, if you know what I mean. A plague of frogs. I bailed out of bed.

  “Oh, Olga!” I called. “Amphibian alert!”

  Olga came running. When she saw the plague, she raced around trying to catch the frogs with a trash basket, but her efforts were wasted. There were simply too many of them…

  … and that was when I noticed where they were coming from. I was sharing my room with Bratt tonight. I had the lower bunk, he had the upper, and the frogs were all hopping down from his bed. The little snot-bucket had taken an entire collection of frogs to bed with him and didn’t tell anyone!

  Roxanne stood in the doorway, not wanting to join in our frogathon. And through all this, little Bratt slept, his mouth open and drooling.

  Candida arrived, dragging her Raggedy Ann doll by its red-yarn head. “Oh, I’ll take care of it,” she said. We were all more than happy to let her deal with her brother’s plague of frogs. “My poor brother,” she said, “he really is a holy terror sometimes.”

  “There’s nothing ‘holy’ about it,” mumbled Roxanne.

  Olga made Roxy and me some hot chocolate, and we left Candida alone to contend with the frogs. She got rid of them somehow, but I had no idea where she put them.

  * * *

  In the morning it was Roxanne’s turn.

  “Oh, yuck! No way!” Her yells woke me up at dawn, and I hurried into her room. There was a colony of ants running in black rivers up and down her walls and covers. But if Roxanne was tormented by ants, it was nothing compared to what they were doing to Candida, who had just awakened in the spare bed. You could barely see her beneath the moving army of insects.

  “Oh! Oh! Dear me!” cried Candida, while Roxanne screeched out much more colorful words.

  It took three cans of Raid and half the day to rid the house of the ants.

  “Where did they come from?” Olga kept mumbling as she sponged ant guts off the wall, but I knew that wasn’t the question we ought to be asking. The question was why had they come? This whole situation was a nuisance, and it was irritating to have nuisances that we didn’t create. Roxanne took it upon herself to solve the mystery, while I spent the day chasing after Bratt.

  I used to think that I had mastered being a royal pain, but I really had to hand it to Bratt: he was the true baron of butt pain.

  “See, I can play golf,” he said as he ran off swinging the club wildly. He proceeded to decapitate every plant in our garden.

  “See, I can drive!” he said as he backed Dad’s precious sports car out of the garage… and right into the fountain.

  “See, I can swim good,” he said, and dove headfirst into a scummy, stagnant pond in the woods behind our property. I think it was the pond that finally slowed him down, because just before dinner, he claimed to feel sick.

  “Feel my throat,” he ordered me. “Do I got swollen glands?” He showed his neck to reveal so many dirt rings that you could probably tell his age by counting them, like a tree. I reached out to feel his glands.

  They were swollen all right, but there was something else about them that wasn’t right, because as I held them beneath my thumb and forefinger… I could swear they were moving.

  There was something strangely familiar about the feel of Bratt’s swollen glands. They reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite place….

  * * *

  Shortly before dinner, Roxanne came out of hiding to report her findings to me. You see, she had been avoiding Candida all day because Candida wanted Roxanne to play with her Dental Hygienist Barbie. Roxanne would rather have swallowed hot coals.

  Roxanne called me into the den and shoved a little glass vial under my nose.

  “Sniff this,” she said, “and tell me what it smells like.”

  I took a deep whiff and cringed. It was an aroma all too familiar. “Candida!” I said. “It smells like Candida. What is it?” Roxanne leaned closer to me and whispered, “Equal amounts of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Plus a pinch of ground clove.”

  I wrinkled my forehead, not getting it. “That’s weird.”

  “But that’s not all. Take a look at this!” She revealed a small cup, inside of which were tiny, white, crystalline granules.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Taste it.”

  Reluctantly, I dipped my finger into the cup and lifted it to my mouth. The taste was unmistakable.

  “Sugar!”

  “It was all over Candida’s sheets,” Roxanne told me. “That’s why the ants came.”

  “She went to bed with candy?” I suggested.

  Roxanne shook her head. “Are you kidding me? Little Miss Perfect doesn’t even eat candy.”

  I thought it all through. There had to be a good explanation for this. “Sugar and spice…,” I mumbled.

  “… and everything nice,” added Roxanne. She opened her palm to reveal a whole menagerie of tiny glass figurines—the kind that seemed to fly across the room every time Candida sneezed. “That’s what little girls are made of.”

  My jaw dropped as it all began to come together, and I realized what Roxanne was trying to tell me. It made sense in its own strange and unusual way. I tried to recall what the matching nursery rhyme for boys was, and although I couldn’t recall the whole thing, I remembered enough of it, and now it finally dawned on me exactly what Bratt’s moving, swollen glands felt like.

  They felt like snails.

  Suddenly a cry rang out from the backyard, and Candida ran inside in a panic. For the first time in her life, the smile had left her face. I hardly recognized her.

  “You have to help! Hurry! Bratt’s hurt himself really bad. Inga!” she called “Inga!”

  “Olga,” I corrected, and calmed her down long enough to find out what had happened. Apparently her little brother had been out back chasing squirrels with a pitchfork when he tripped and had the kind of accident that only happens in a mother’s nightmares.

  We all ran out back to help our poor little cousin. Bratt was lying in the grass, crying his eyes out. He had a big hole in his side where the pitchfork had speared him, but he wasn’t bleeding. Not a drop. Instead he was wallowing in a pool of frogs and snails and furry, squirming things that I could not identify.

  “What are those?” I asked, pointing.

  Bratt snuffled, then shouted at me, “They’re puppy-dog tails, butthead!”

  Well, Olga took one good look at those tails and she was a nanny no more. She turned and ran off into the sunset, and we haven’t seen her since.

  Meanwhile, Bratt’s condition had gotten serious. His three primary ingredients were hopping, slithering, and squirming away faster than any one of us could catch them.

  “We have to get him to the hospital!” screamed Candida. “He’ll need a transfusion.”

  And although I shuddered to think where they would get enough puppy-dog tails for a transfusion, I did as I was told. I called 911 and put it in the hands of professionals.

  * * *

  Modern medicine is an amazing thing. I don’t know how the doctors did it, but they had Bratt stitched up and shipped back to us in less than a week.

  His parents, having heard about the accident, reluctantly cut their round-the-world vacation short.

  A week after the accident, we all sat at the breakfast table together. Candida sat primly, eating Shredded Wheat like a good little girl, and Bratt scarfed down Sugar-Frosted Cookie Dough cereal. Everything was back to normal.

  “Well,” said Uncle Bernard, ruffling Bratt’s tangled hair, “sounds like you had quite an adventure!”

  “It stunk,” grumbled Bratt. “The hospital was even more boring than here.” He hiccupped, and a small tree frog hopped from his mouth into the cereal.

  “Don’t open your mouth so wide, dear,” said his mother. She scooped up the frog and popped it back into her son’s mouth. “It’s rude.”

  Uncle Bernard sipped his coffee, then frowned. “A little sweeter,” he said. Then he tipped Candida’s head, and a stream of sugar ran from her left ear into his coffee. “I think you’ve learned your lesson, Bratt,” he said. “No playing with pitchforks unless it’s under adult supervision.”

  Bratt only grunted and continued to gum his soggy cereal.

  It was as they were leaving that I asked the final question that would solve the last remaining riddle about my cousins’ unique family.

  “Candida?” I asked as they were heading out the door. “How is it that your parents can afford a round-the-world vacation?”

  “That’s simple,” she said. “My parents are made of money.”

  Which explains why they jingle when they walk.

  The Soul Exchange

  Down the long, empty corridor, in the chrome-and-tile bathroom of Bloomingdale’s, Kiara closely examines a pimple in the mirror.

  Her face, in every other way, is perfect, but that’s not what Kiara sees. She sees the ugly whitehead on her cheek; Vesuvius about to erupt and wipe out Pompeii. She imagines half of Manhattan must know about the zit by now. Her stunning eyes, her perfect hair, her media-worthy smile mean nothing to her as long as that thing sits on her cheek.

  “It’s so ugly,” she mumbles. “I hate my face!”

  The lonely restroom is not so lonely. An old woman has entered. She comes to the mirror beside Kiara and tries, with bony, shaking hands, to put lipstick on her thin lips. Kiara notices how the crone’s rouge sits on her wrinkled cheekbones; splotches too round and too red. She looks like a clown. Kiara has no love, nor patience, for the elderly. To her, a woman like this has no business wearing makeup. What good is it going to do? You’d need a cement mixer to hold the makeup it would take to spackle in those wrinkles. You’d need a machete to cut through the hairy mole on her chin.

  The old woman steals a sideways glance at Kiara in the mirror. Her eyes are veiny and the pupils cloudy.

  “Can I help you?” snaps Kiara, her voice booming far too loudly around the gray-tiled room. “You know it’s not polite to stare.”

  “You have a pimple,” says the woman, her voice as rough as sandpaper. Probably from smoking, thinks Kiara. Stupid woman. It’s a miracle she’s even lived this long.

  “I know about the pimple,” says Kiara, striking an irritated pose. “So why don’t you mind your own business?”

  Kiara dots the solitary spot with foundation that perfectly matches her skin tone, but it’s still not enough to hide the miserable eruption. Still the old woman looks at her. The woman, Kiara notes, wears an ill-fitting coat that must have been very expensive once. Some sort of fur. But now it’s moth-eaten and mangy. She wears jewelry also—not the cheap imitation stuff, but the real thing. A diamond as big as an almond. What a waste for something so precious to be on someone so wretched.

  “I couldn’t help but hear you, dear,” says the old woman. “You sound very, very unhappy with yourself. You poor thing.”

  Kiara looks in the mirror again and grimaces at her own reflection. She wants to rip her awful face off and flush it. Her best friend and occasional enemy, Veronyka Knibbs, is prettier. She hates, hates, hates Veronyka Knibbs, but most of all she hates her own face, and the zit it gave birth to.

  The old woman smiles, and her thin lips disappear, revealing two rows of yellow teeth. “I understand what you’re going through,” the old woman says.

  “How can you understand anything?” snaps Kiara.

  “My bones may be old,” says the woman, “but my mind is still keen. I remember my youth.” Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a business card, holding it out to Kiara with a quivering hand.

  “Give him a call,” she says. “He’s sure to help. He knows what you need.”

  Then the old woman turns and limps toward the door. Kiara follows her out and watches as, cane in hand, the woman makes the long trek down the empty hallway to the department store.

  Kiara looks at the card. Burgundy lettering on a shiny gray background.

  Dr. Morgan Taylor Voyd

  Discorporeal Physician

  Extractions and implants while-u-wait

  Kiara has no clue what any of it means, but the chicken salad in her stomach doesn’t feel too happy about it. Suddenly she doesn’t feel like shopping today.

  * * *

  Tonight is pizza night for the popular crowd at East End Academy. On pizza night, they go out to Little Guido’s and eat pepperoni pies with extra cheese, then talk about all the people they hate, such as teachers, parents, and anyone who’s not at the table with them.

  Veronyka Knibbs is there, and as she arrives, Kiara says a silent die-slowly-and-painfully prayer to herself about Veronyka before they sit to eat. Kiara sits next to Tristan, her boyfriend of the month. But she’d much rather be sitting next to Veronyka’s boyfriend. He’s the goalie of the varsity soccer team. Tristan, on the other hand, is a junior like the rest of them. He’s captain of the JV wrestling team. Big deal.