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gonna love the Strangs, Bob-o. Now, Guy, you already know you need to make a big deal of that left-handed thing, and just be as normal as you always are, right?”
    â€œDo you have any pointers for me about how to act around your mom and dad?” I asked Bob-o. He turned away from his reflection very slowly and looked at me for a minute.
    â€œThey don’t notice anything . I once spoke in a Swedish accent for a whole day and they never said a word. They’re just going to leave you alone.”
    â€œSounds like heaven,” I said.
    â€œOkay, everybody’s clear on the plan, right? Step one, clean up your room; step two, tell your parents about the assignment; step three, move in and impress your new parents with all the traits you have in common; step four, plant the seed for the switched-at-birth scenario; step five, waitfor the lightbulbs to go on.”
    Bob-o and I both nodded as Buzz went down the list.
    â€œWhat are you going to be doing?” I asked Buzz.
    â€œI’m going to be monitoring the situation, making sure everything goes smoothly.”
    â€œDo you really think this plan is going to work?” I asked as we left the fort and headed back to my house with Bob-o bringing up the rear again.
    â€œSure it is. I thought of it, didn’t I? And you said yourself that for an idiot I’m pretty brilliant,” Buzz pointed out.
    â€œWell, I have no idea how this whole thing is going to turn out,” I said, “but I do know this—I’ve been living a lie for the past eleven years, and it’s high time I did something about it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    G etting my parents to agree to host Bob-o for the weekend was a cinch. My mother was so thrilled that I was letting her in on something having to do with school that she could barely contain herself. I basically stopped letting her help me with homework back in second grade when I discovered that I could do it faster without her “help.” Dad said he thought it was a very interesting assignment and wondered if the parents would be invited to come in and share their experiences with the class. I told him I thought that was unlikely, which is what is known as a major understatement.
    Bob-o’s parents were fine with thearrangement too. My mother and Mrs. Smith had several phone conversations working out the details of what we would need to bring with us, and before I knew it I was standing on the porch of 2120 North Maple Street waving good-bye as my parents drove off with Bob-o in the backseat hanging his head out of the window like a dog.
    Mr. and Mrs. Smith told me to go upstairs and put my stuff away. Bob-o had done a pretty good job of cleaning up his room, and I was relieved to find that there were clean sheets on the bed and only a hint of fishiness in the air. He’d left me a note explaining that it was fine for me to touch his stuff if I wanted to and telling me that if I felt like erupting the volcano, it was down in the basement with the instructions stuck in the top of it. He was a lot more talkative on paper than in person. At the top of the note he’d drawn a little picture of himself doing the muscleman pose. I laughed, kicked off my shoes, and lay down on the bed to daydream for a while aboutwhat it would have been like to have grown up in this room instead of my own. Boy, was it peaceful, I could hear the clock ticking and other than that, not a whole lot. It was never this quiet at my house. My mother was constantly singing or banging or clicking around, and once my father came home from work the two of them never stopped laughing and yacking. The Smiths’ house, on the other hand, was the kind of place where a person could be alone with his thoughts, and since I had a lot to think about I felt pretty happy to be there.
    I figured it was all right to snoop around a little. I was sure Bob-o was doing the same in my room. I opened his top drawer—white underwear. Second