Switcharound by Lois Lowry Page A

might handcuff myself to the doorknob of my bedroom and then swallow the key to the handcuffs."
    "But how could you build your computer if you were handcuffed to a doorknob?"
    "There's a problem there," J.P. acknowledged.
    "Can J.P. take all his electronics stuff to Des Moines?" Caroline asked her mother.
    "Actually, I was assuming he would. Even
hoping
he would, so that I can clean his room for the first time in five years."
    "J.P.," asked Caroline, "if you could take all your electronics gear, would you go? Because I guess I'm going, but I don't want to go alone."
    "If you get him to sign a paper that I won't have to play baseball," J.P. said. "I want a legal statement, notarized and everything. Last time I visited him he kept making me play baseball. He called me 'fella' all the time. I want it to say in the statement that he won't call me 'fella.'"
    "That's right!" Caroline said. "I'd forgotten that! And he called me 'princess'! He couldn't ever remember our real names! Make him promise not to call me 'princess,' Mom!"
    Joanna Tate nodded. "I'll call him," she said. "And you two can talk to him and tell him all of that. Write out a list of requests—like no baseball, and no stupid nicknames—and you can negotiate that over the phone.
    "I wish I'd been as assertive as you kids are," she added, "when he and I were married. Because—well, you want to hear something really disgusting?"
    Caroline and J.P. nodded.
    "He used to call me Jo-Jo," their mother confessed, cringing.
    "See?" said Caroline and J.P., like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. "SEE?"

    Caroline kicked the bedpost in frustration. She was packing. Or at least she was
trying
to pack. Packing was hard enough normally for someone who had never traveled very much. But packing to visit her father in Des Moines? Impossible.
    How could someone who had lived in New York City since she was two years old possibly pack to go to Des Moines? What kind of city was Des Moines, anyway? It wasn't even pronounced the way it looked.
    "You can't trust a city that doesn't pronounce its final consonants," Caroline muttered to her stuffed stegosaurus. She put him into a corner of the big suitcase, next to her folded pajamas.
    What did people wear in Des Moines? Farm overalls? Tough. She didn't have any.
    Dejectedly Caroline peered into her closet. School had ended for the year, but her school clothes were still hanging there: navy blue jumpers and white blouses, the official girls' uniform at the Burke-Thaxter School. J.P. wore a white shirt, with chinos, and a blue tie. They each had navy blue blazers with a B-T emblem on the pocket.
    No
way
was she going to take her B-T blazer to Des Moines. Caroline was no dummy, and she knew what would happen if she did. Big Turkey, the other kids would call her. That's what rival schools always said about Burke-Thaxter.
    Other kids. The phrase made her stomach churn. Would there
be
any other kids in Des Moines? Would she make friends? Because if not, she'd be stuck with J.P. all summer. And she and J.P. had hated each other since they were toddlers.
    Her father and his second wife did have a little boy, she remembered. When she had visited last, for a week, the little boy—What was his name? Something stupid, but she couldn't think of it—was just little, maybe about three. And that had been three years ago. So now he—Butchie? Was that it? Dutchie?—would be about six. A horrible age.
    She took her stuffed stegosaurus out of the suitcase. That bratty little Butchie or Kootchy or Whoever would probably find him and destroy him—good old Steg, who had seen Caroline through some very stressful times. Maybe he should stay in New York for the summer.
    She packed all of her jeans and one dress. Underwear. A sweater. Some shirts.
    She opened the bedroom door and called to her mother. "Should I pack my bathing suit?"
    It was J.P. who answered from his bedroom, where he was also packing. "Don't bother," he called back. "They're