Leo follows me to the door, but I’m too fast for him. Within seconds I’ve yanked my helmet onto my head, grabbed Kitty, shoved my phone into my back pocket, and torn onto the sidewalk faster than my rickety old skateboard has ever gone. Halfway home, the stupid thing Leo no doubt predicted happens: I roll right into a crack in the pavement, end up flying like a crash test dummy, and find myself a few mortifying seconds later on my very bruised butt with my skateboard lying in the grass of someone’s front yard.

I sit there, my heart beating in my ears, my mouth tasting like pennies from biting down on my tongue. I do a quick body-check and discover that, while the embarrassment may be lethal, the rest of me remains relatively unscathed.

Only after I pull myself up does my phone slip out of my back pocket, revealing one majorly cracked screen. I cringe, but that doesn’t stop the phone from unlocking, or opening to the page that’s been burned into my eyes ever since I saw it—a message request from a girl named Savannah Tully that reads, Hey. I know this is super weird. But do you want to meet up?

A message request from a girl named Savannah Tully, who the DNA site identifies as my full-blooded sister.

two

When you find out your parents have harbored a secret older sibling from you for all the sixteen years you’ve inhabited the Earth, the last thing you should probably do is suck in a mouthful of air and yell, “Mom!”

But I walk through the front door and do exactly that.

It takes her approximately ten seconds to reach me, and they are simultaneously the longest and shortest ten seconds of my life. Long enough to understand that what happened is going to fundamentally change me forever; short enough to decide I don’t want it to just yet.

“What happened?” she asks, her eyes widening at my knees. I look down and only then notice the matching bloodstains around the holes in my jeans, which have now ripped so wide they look like I’m trying to send my legs to another dimension.

I open my mouth. “I…”

Her arm is streaked with green paint from one of my brothers’ art projects, her wild brown hair yanked into a high bun, and she’s balancing a laundry basket on one hip and a large folder of depositions on the other. She stands there in all her my mom–ness, her brow furrowed and her teeth biting her lower lip, and suddenly the whole thing is absurd.

This is a person who tells me grisly, ridiculously personal details about her cases, knowing I won’t make a peep. This is a person who very frankly explained sex to me in the third grade when I interrupted one of her and my dad’s movie nights during the fogged-up car window scene in Titanic. This is a person who cried when she told me about Santa Claus, because she felt so bad for lying.

This is not a person who keeps secrets, and especially not from me.

“I—fell on my skateboard.”

“Are you okay?” Her eyes are already edging toward the first aid kit, which, between me and my three brothers, is stocked more regularly than any of our lunch boxes.

I wave her off, not looking her in the eye. “Fine. Great!” Which may have had a chance of sounding believable if I didn’t follow it up by nearly tripping over the mountain of Velcro and light-up boy shoes haphazardly piled at the door as I attempt to sprint toward my room.

“You sure?”

“Yup!”

A beat passes, one of those stretched-out ones like she’s going to call me out on something. I hover at the door of my room, bracing myself for it: I know you know the thing I didn’t want you to know! Like she saw it on my face as soon as I walked in, and only just put the pieces together with her uncanny psychic mom powers.

Instead she says, “Well, I left some of those flyers on your bed, if you get a chance to—”

“Thanks!” I cut her off, and close my door swiftly behind me.

I beeline for my laptop, as if opening a new screen will make the thing I saw on the other one go away. But to get to it I have to shove off the pile of aforementioned glossy, painfully colorful flyers propped on top of it, along with a Post-it Note that says “Looks fun!!” stuck on top.

They’re all for Camp Reynolds, this new summer program the school guidance counselor told my parents about. He tried to sell me on it too, cheerfully telling me over the human-head-size candy bowl he keeps in his office that it’s perfect for “kids like me”—a.k.a. kids whose college prospects are dwindling with every lost decimal of their GPA. It’s supposed to get students up to speed with the SATs and college application prep and all the other stuff that I’m going to be shoved into the cross fire of next year.

Until two hours ago, my life’s mission was getting out of it. But whatever sense of linear order my life has just got blown to pieces.

I shove the flyers onto the mattress, drumming my fingers on the keyboard as I wait for the laptop to wake up. Whoever this Savannah is, she can’t really be my sister. They swapped my spit out for someone else’s, or sent me the wrong results. I mean, the thing said I’m more likely than others to match musical pitches, and I’m so tone-deaf my brother Brandon—arguably the most agreeable kid to ever live—screamed bloody murder when I tried to sing to him as a baby. These are some other slightly Irish, unibrow-prone girl’s DNA results that got bungled with mine, and in a few hours we’ll all sit at the dinner table and laugh about the whole thing.