Dedication

For Lily, Hally and Baz

1

Uncle Herbert Is a Bad Person

KATE KNEW ONLY TWO THINGS ABOUT HER UNCLE Herbert: He was very rich and totally irresponsible.

That was it. You’d think there would’ve been more—he was her uncle after all—but the thing was, she’d never actually met Uncle Herbert. She’d never even seen a picture of him. He was her mother’s brother, and her mother and Uncle Herbert didn’t get along.

Which was weird when you thought about it. I mean, Kate had a younger brother, Tom, and he was gross and horrible, but she couldn’t imagine not actually, you know, seeing him once in a while. But apparently with grown-ups that was a thing.

Uncle Herbert never came to visit. He never called. Where did he live? What did he do all day? Kate imagined him doing weird rich-people things, like traveling to remote islands, and collecting rare exotic pets and, I don’t know, buying an entire gingerbread house and eating it all by himself. That’s what she would’ve done.

But it was all a big mystery. The only thing Kate’s parents were clear on was that Uncle Herbert was lazy and that he had too much money and no sense of responsibility. It made Kate wonder how such a lazy, irresponsible person could’ve gotten his hands on all that money, but adults never explained contradictions like that. They only ever changed the subject.

Which isn’t to say that Kate’s parents were bad parents. They really weren’t. Parenting just never seemed to be right at the top of their list of priorities. They went to work early and came home late, and even when they were home they were always staring at their phones and their computers and making serious worky faces. Unlike Uncle Herbert, they worked all the time and were extremely responsible, though they never seemed to have much money to show for it.

Maybe that’s why he annoyed them so much. Either way, they never seemed to have much time for Kate.

Kate had plenty of time for Kate, though. Sometimes it seemed like too much. She rode her bike, and played video games, and did her homework, and played with her friends, and once in a while she even played with Tom. She wasn’t one of the kids in her class who had a special talent—like drawing, or juggling four beanbags at once, or identifying rare mushrooms and telling the difference between the ones you could eat and the ones that would kill you—though she often wished she was. She read a lot; she had to be told, with tiresome frequency, to close her book during dinner. Her parents sent her to piano lessons and tennis lessons. (They sent Tom to cello lessons and hapkido lessons.)