“Mom wants us up for something else!” she calls. “So get up!”

I bet she made me birthday pancakes. I sniff and smell something delicious. Maybe waffles.

Outside my window, the leaves are bright green and the birds chirp extra loudly. It’s like the whole outside woke up for summer vacation. Better yet, for my birthday. Warm, sunny days stretch out before me. No more getting up early to catch the bus. No more homework. No more math class with Mr. Drake, who hates me because I never show my work and he thinks I cheat because I still get the right answers. No more worries! Plus I’m a teenager now. I can get more babysitting jobs. I can save money for a better bike than the crappy one my dad scavenged from the dump when I was eight. I can —

“Rachel, would you get up?” Ivy yells through my door again. “The new neighbors are here!”

I peer through my window. Across the street, a moving truck pulls into the long driveway where construction has been going on all year. The house was built on a long, sloping hill in the field we’ve used for sledding every winter and riding my old pony Rainbow in the summer. It was designed to look like a rustic barn, but we peeked through the windows after the workers went home one night and there is nothing rustic about it inside. There are fancy marble counters in the kitchen, and the bathrooms are like the ones you only see on TV, with glass bowls for sinks instead of regular old white porcelain ones. The floors are so polished, they showed the reflection of the windows, as well as our heads, when we peeked through the glass.

“Wow,” I remember Micah saying the first time we looked in.

“They must be loaded,” Ivy said.

“Why on earth would they move here?” I asked.

They were a mystery, and the whole neighborhood was speculating about who these people could be and where they might come from. Behind the house, they’d built a real barn, with stables, several little sheds, and what looked like a chicken coop. They seemed to be planning on having lots of animals, which Ivy was very excited about. Micah and I made up a whole story about the types of animals they’d have. We decided the new neighbors were rare animal collectors and they’d have tigers and zebras and things, but that got Ivy all upset, so we stopped.

The cat meows from the foot of my bed when I get up and step into my slippers. George hates being woken up as much as I do.

“I’m coming!” I yell.

I pull my hair into a ponytail. “Go back to sleep,” I tell George. “It’s summer!”

He walks in a circle and settles down again in his little nest in the squares of sunlight coming through my window.