Switched Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Thanks Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Copyright

  For my parents

  Many many thanks to Wendy Loggia,

  Pamela Bobowicz, Kendra Marcus,

  Martha Jackson, Elizabeth Wollman,

  Caroline Wallace, Martha Atwater,

  Samantha Lee, Tiffany Aguilar, Mark Twain

  and, above all, Daniel Ehrenhaft.

  Prologue

  On a hot summer night in late July, a daughter was born to a poor family. The mother named her Laura and cradled the baby in tired arms. The father did not want the child and spent most of the evening in a local bar.

  On that same night, in the very same town, another daughter was born to a rich couple.

  They named the infant Willa and wrapped her in white cashmere. Nurses fussed and fawned over the baby, while her parents planned her future. It would be glorious.

  The two girls grew up. Side by side on life’s timeline, they learned to crawl, walk and talk within hours of each other. And every year they celebrated their births on the very same day and in the very same town.

  But although they were separated by only a few miles, the difference in their stations kept them apart. And so it passed that neither girl knew that the other existed.

  1

  Mr. Clean cleans your whole house and everything in it.

  —Mr. Clean Slogan

  “Guess what happened this morning?”

  Laura shook her head as her mother steered their battered station wagon through the posh streets of Darien, Connecticut. “I have no idea.”

  “When I woke up there were two crows on my windowsill.” Laura’s mother’s voice practically fizzed with excitement. “They were just sitting there, staring at me. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “We need to buy a bird feeder?”

  Laura watched as her mother stuck her arm out the window to signal for a left turn. She tried to think of a time when the blinkers had worked properly, but she couldn’t remember that far back.

  “No, no . . . it’s a sign!” her mother insisted, pulling her hand back inside and rolling up the window. “It means tonight’s the night. It makes sense, too. The jackpot’s up to twenty-four million. Can you imagine? Twenty-four million! Remember, sweetie, you’ve got to play to win. Now we just have to choose our numbers, then after work I’ll stop. . . .”

  Laura shifted in her seat. How did her mom manage to be so upbeat? She stole a glance at her mother’s hands. After years of cleaning and scrubbing, they were every bit as coarse and chapped as her own. But while Laura felt self-conscious about her perpetually chipped nails and red fingers, her mother didn’t even seem to notice.

  Laura glanced back at the familiar pile of cleaning supplies loaded into the backseat. She knew every product—their ingredients, slogans and effects—by heart. They were practically an extra appendage at this point.

  How am I going to survive a full year of scrubbing toilets for the rich and not-so-famous? she wondered.

  Laura Melon had grown up cleaning houses. Raised by a single mother, she’d been working for her family business—Darien Full Service Home Maintenance—since preschool. She didn’t really have a say in the matter. Laura and her mom were the company’s only employees.

  Most kids dragged brooms and mops around the house, pretending to help their mothers. But Laura actually did help. She’d accompanied her mother on every job, helping her polish and clean the homes of their wealthy clients. By the time she was four, Laura knew how to get vegetable oil stains out of a tablecloth (don’t rub, just sprinkle the spot lightly with baby powder, then launder). And when she was five, she’d stopped addressing her Christmas cards to Santa and switched to Mr. Clean.

  The older Laura got, the more she cleaned. She cleaned after school, on weekends, during the holidays and over summer vacations. And somewhere along the line, she’d made an important discovery. Monumental, in fact.

  She hated cleaning.

  She hated the way ammonia made her eyes water. Hated how the work was so mechanical and mindless; she could clean an entire house without ever really turning her brain on. Hated having to stick her hands into other people’s lives—touching their dirty clothing and half-eaten food. And most of all she hated the fact that, once she stepped inside a mansion, she instantly became invisible to its residents.

  Laura glanced out the window. The homes were getting larger now, the front lawns more expansive, the grass rich and velvety.

  The farther we drive from our apartment, the nicer the neighborhoods get. Laura pictured the musty two-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother, on the outskirts of a town famous for its estates. Their place was boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. And no matter how hard they cleaned, it always looked dusty.

  Laura wanted out. She had to leave. Because if she was miserable cleaning now, at sixteen, she couldn’t imagine what life would be like at twenty-seven. Or thirty-seven. She had a plan, too. It was brilliantly simple. So simple, in fact, that the entire plan could be summed up in just two syllables: college.

  If she had a degree, she’d be able to get a better job—something that didn’t involve a scrub brush and a bottle of Fantastik. She’d probably even be able to help her mom out.

  Yes, education was the only answer. Otherwise, Laura’s hands might as well become Brillo pads.

  She had the grades, too. Having taken every single Advanced Placement course available, she’d sailed through high school with a perfect 4.0. True, she’d spent all her free time working with her mom, so she had no extracurricular activities, but hey, she had a good excuse. Laura smiled as she thought of an Ajax-free four years. And then reality set in, coating the pleasant images like a thick layer of dust.

  Her smile fell away as doubt rolled in.

  Had she made the right decision?

  The station wagon turned onto a long driveway lined with trees and paved with cobblestones.

  Laura’s mind wandered back to last fall, when her plans had begun to unravel. She and her mother had sat down and examined Laura’s college account. The situation had been bleak.

  Though her mother had tried to squirrel money away, life kept getting in the way—there were the station wagon’s frequent trips to Midas, slow summers for the business, and cleaning equipment that decided to break at the worst possible moments—and she’d been forced to dip into the savings quite a bit. As a result, the balance was underwhelming. There wasn’t even enough for Laura to attend UConn full-time for four years.

  Her mother had urged her to take out loans, but Laura had refused. The money would have to be repaid—with interest
—and Laura knew that her mother would feel obligated to help. She’d always worked so hard to avoid debt. How could Laura force it on her now, after all these years?

  Looking for better news in the form of a scholarship or grant, Laura had met with her high school’s college counselor, Mr. Atkins. Sweet, sympathetic and stretched so thin he was practically transparent, the frazzled teacher had assured Laura that she was definitely one of his strongest applicants. Unfortunately, if she were to step outside of her own high school, she’d see that there were actually a lot of students like her: students with great grades, great test scores and great recommendations. They were all desperate to go to college and were also looking for the least financially painful way to get there.

  Basically, everyone was fighting for the same baby pool of money.

  “There just isn’t that much to go around,” Mr. Atkins had explained as he sifted through the contents of his bagged lunch and fished out a sandwich. “You don’t mind, do you? Budget cuts. I don’t get a real lunch break anymore.”

  Laura had shaken her head.

  So, between healthy bites of a turkey sandwich, Mr. Atkins had suggested that Laura strongly reconsider her position on the whole loan situation. That was how most of his students financed college—especially with the current administration cutting out so much of the educational support system.

  “You’re a strong candidate, so there’s a good chance that you’ll get some aid,” he said. “But between funding and your savings, you need to prepare yourself for some sort of gap.” He swallowed. “Because it’s going to fall on your shoulders to close that gap. And believe me, it can be quite large.”

  Never in her life had Laura felt more trapped. She’d always been strong. But now her resolve seemed to slip. Her bank account was small and, by extension, the world less accessible.

  So Laura put her plan—and her mind—on hold for the year. She would graduate early and spend what would have been her senior year working full-time with her mother to save enough money for UConn. She had more than enough credits to get her diploma, and as for UConn, well, it was cheap, good and close to her mother.

  When she broke the news to Mr. Atkins he shook his head. He still thought she was making a mistake about the loans, but in the end it was her decision. And at least she was going to college. At a high school that had a fifty-two percent graduation rate, Laura’s was a success story.

  So here she was. Laura Melon, full-time housecleaner. The problem was, it was only June and already she felt as if she were drowning in buckets of Murphy Oil Soap. Her mother had suggested she take some night courses to help the year go faster. At the time, random classes had just sounded depressing—Laura wanted to be a full-time college student, not a part-time one.

  It’s too late now anyway, she thought glumly. Registration’s closed at New Canaan Community.

  “Oh, oh . . . this is just gorgeous,” her mother crooned. Her voice shook a little on each word as the station wagon bounced along the stone drive. “These new clients, the Pogues, they have quite a place.”

  “It’s just a drive . . .,” Laura began, then stopped as the car approached its final destination. She looked up at the enormous Tudor estate and inhaled sharply.

  With the ease of a seasoned professional, she quickly calculated the number of windows per floor. Her eyes ran up and down the grand facade, soaking up the impressive number of columns, turrets and wings. And then she exhaled.

  It’s gonna take forever to clean this place, she thought as she unbuckled her seat belt.

  But on the bright side, at least the Pogues would be able to spring for their own supplies.

  2

  The debutante is the final result not only of carefully paired bloodlines but of schooling and coaching and, of course, selection.

  —The Debutante’s Guide to Life

  I was definitely switched at birth, Willa Pogue thought as she leaned back against the sofa’s dark leather cushions, trying desperately to find a comfortable position. She was, once again, at her family’s Darien estate, sitting in her father’s study waiting for her world to finish falling apart.

  It was a painfully familiar scene. Every time she disappointed or disgraced her family in some way, Willa’s presence was requested at Pogue Hall. Once firmly ensconced in her father’s wood-paneled study, she was then subjected to the now infamous “What it means to be a Pogue” lecture. Although Willa had heard the speech so many times she’d lost count, she knew it was the most common interaction she had with her parents.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Willa asked the room. Her voice bounced off the walls, disappearing into the dark oak. She leaned her head against a velvet pillow, then straightened. Her family crest was embroidered across the front. Yanking the plush cushion onto her lap, Willa narrowed her eyes slightly as she considered the bold red and yellow shield. There was also a Latin phrase scrolled across the crest, but Willa could never remember what it meant. And after a year of studying Latin in school, she still couldn’t translate a simple sentence.

  Willa sighed and shoved the pillow under her legs. She and boarding school just didn’t mix. Actually, she’d clashed with every school she’d ever attended. Over the years she’d been “excused” from dancing school, equestrian class, elocution lessons and Gymboree (the teacher had insisted she was making lewd gestures). She never tried to mess things up—she was just really good at it.

  So today, after she’d been called to the headmaster’s office and handed her final report card—three big fat Fs and two incompletes—it had suddenly occurred to Willa that maybe she was simply leading the wrong life. Maybe she couldn’t “get” being a Pogue because she wasn’t actually a real Pogue after all.

  Logic certainly supported her argument. As her parents lived to point out, the Pogues were known to excel. At everything. They all graduated from Shipley Academy—the esteemed institution where Willa had been floundering for the last three years—and then went on to Yale. From there, the sky was the limit! Name the field—politics, finance, academia—there was most definitely a Pogue outshining the competition at this very moment.

  What Willa was never sure her parents completely understood was that the Pogues didn’t hold a patent on the hyperachievement gene. Boarding school was packed with Einsteins, Monets and Spielbergs, kids whose chief complaint was that the drudgery of class and homework got in the way of their extraordinary lives.

  Willa, it seemed, was the exception to the rule. She knew she was mediocre. She didn’t even really mind. She just wished her parents—and everyone around her—would leave her alone about it. And she wished that the path her parents had chosen weren’t so hard.

  One thing was certain. She was definitely not Yale material. She’d realized as much after flunking a fifth-grade social studies exam (when asked to fill in a map of the country, she’d left the entire Midwest blank—the Dakotas never made the six o’clock news anyway).

  “I can see your grade-point average isn’t the only thing you let slide this semester.”

  Willa snapped her head back up and found herself gazing into the icy eyes of Sibby Pogue. She could feel the dissection begin as her mother took a careful inventory of her hairstyle, weight and wardrobe, her gaze lingering over Willa’s ripped jeans and worn flip-flops. Willa felt her cheeks flush slightly. It was weird how she’d grown up under her mother’s harsh scrutiny but could never get used to it.

  “You know,” her mother said, her mouth twisting into a thin frown, “when I was your age I was never larger than a size two. Never. All my ball gowns had to be specially ordered. Did I ever mention that?”

  About a thousand times,Willa wanted to scream.

  But instead, she simply said, “Yes.”

  Willa looked at her mother, sleek and polished in a mint green cotton suit. Her black hair was pulled into a neat French twist, and round diamond studs glittered in her ears. Her light makeup was, of course, perfect.

  Willa ran her fingers through her thick blond h
air. She wasn’t bad-looking—she knew that. She was nice and tall, and when people complimented her it was always about her hair or the green of her eyes.

  But I certainly don’t look like a Pogue, she thought.

  She glanced down at her legs and swallowed as color crept into her cheeks and fanned out over her face and neck.

  I am not fat, she reminded herself. Broad does not mean fat.

  It was true, too. Willa knew that her weight wasn’t really all that significant. If someone were to describe her—anyone in the world besides Sibby Pogue—it would never be in terms of her size. She wore a six in the summer and an eight in the winter, and she’d noticed that lots of girls in her dorm were around the same size, give or take a few pounds. Sure, she was no feather, but she was no elephant, either. Her hips and shoulders were solid and blocky, but if it hadn’t been for her mother’s constant digs, Willa wouldn’t even have thought twice about the way she was built. Most people were even larger than she was.

  But, of course, Willa was not most people. She was a Pogue. And Pogue women were ultrathin and elegant, yet strong and athletic, the sort of hostesses who could create a tasteful floral arrangement while playing mixed doubles.

  Even though her mother hadn’t been born a Pogue, Sibby fit right in. Willa, however, held the dubious honor of being the first large, uncoordinated heir in a long line of graceful, rail-thin, ultrasporty Pogues.

  And her mother never let her forget it.

  The study door opened and Willa’s father entered the room, his brown suede loafers pounding the floor as he walked. He wore seersucker pants and a cashmere sweater that was just a few shades lighter than his hair. Willa knew her father was considered handsome—people were always telling him he looked like George Clooney—but she could never fully appreciate his looks. Not so much because he was her father as because his face was locked in a permanent scowl whenever he was with her.

  Willa looked up at him. He was definitely in “deal-with-Willa” mode. His features were twisted into a tight glower and his cheeks were beet red.