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back to throw her book at her brother. Dan yelped and bolted into his room, slamming the door. A handwritten sign on the front read FORT NO-NERDS .
    Amy sighed and lowered the book back onto her lap. At this point she was just pretending to read — she couldn’t actually concentrate on the sentences in front of her while she waited for Grace’s call. In her pocket, her cell phone felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, and she kept imagining she felt it ringing. But it never did.
    Dan was always a little exasperating this time of year — even more than his usual day-to-day annoying — but this holiday had been especially trying for the two Cahill siblings.
    Amy looked around, taking in the tiny apartment. Paper Christmas decorations and streamers were strewn along half the room. They cut off abruptly, though, the streamers falling limply to the carpet. Frida, their most recent au pair, had been hanging them when Amy and Dan’s guardian called to lay her off.
    Amy and Dan were orphans. Their parents had died in a fire years ago. Though they were legally in the care of their great-aunt Beatrice, she opted to have the siblings housed apart from her, hiring a constant and varied stream of live-in au pairs to watch over them. They never lasted very long. Beatrice had a habit of quickly firing them, often for no reason at all.
    Dan emerged from his room after a few minutes. He’d switched out the ninja getup for a sweater, jeans, and his backpack, but he still had the mask hanging around his neck. He held a plastic throwing star up in a defensive position.
    “Try anything with the book, and you’re getting this right between the eyes,” he said.
    “If you throw that anywhere near my face, dweeb, they’ll be burying you in that goofy costume.”
    Dan narrowed his eyes. “You are a worthy rival, nerd-san.”
    Amy smirked and shook her head. “Listen, I wouldn’t worry,” she said, as a sort of peace offering. “I’m sure Grace is busy with something important. Maybe she’s getting us a really incredible present . . . a little bit late.”
    She wished there was more she could do for Dan. Her little brother would never admit how sad he was, but she knew. Earlier in the day she’d presented him with his Christmas present to try to cheer him up, a huge pack full of bottle rockets. It had taken her months to save up for the gift and convince Frida to do the actual purchasing for her. Still, it was worth it to see Dan get excited about something, even if just for a little while. She knew that presents weren’t everything. Every holiday story since holiday stories began had drilled that point home. But they didn’t hurt, either.
    Dan shrugged and lowered the throwing star. He shook his backpack off and dug through it, pulling out the pack of bottle rockets.
    “Can we shoot some of these off while we wait?”
    Amy thought about it for a moment. “You wouldn’t rather do it at Grace’s house, with all that space in the yard?”
    “I have some ideas I want to try out,” Dan said with a grin. “Like, what happens if you tie two, or even three rockets together, end to end, so they’re all pulling in opposite directions?”
    “Someone gets hurt, probably,” Amy said doubtfully.
    “Or something even cooler than that.”
    “We should probably just wait for Grace,” Amy said, looking back down at her biography.
    Dan crossed his arms. “You know what? I’m tired of waiting. If we aren’t important enough for her to pick us up on time
on Christmas
, I don’t see why she should keep me from having fun. I’m going out.” He replaced the rockets in his backpack and slipped it over his shoulders, then stalked over to the apartment door and opened it.
    “Wait, what?” Amy said, looking up from the book. “No! What should I say to Grace?”
    “Tell her I’m busy with something important.”
    Slam
.
    Suddenly, Amy was alone in the apartment. Alone with Tchaikovsky.
    Fine. If Dan wanted to act like a brat, that