Read Trylle 1 - Switched for Free Online Page A

jumped a little. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Wrapped in her house coat, Maggie yawned and ran a hand through her sleep disheveled hair.
    “It’s okay.” I tried to cover up my baby book, feeling as if I had been caught doing something naughty. “What are you doing up?”
    “I could ask you the same thing,” Maggie replied with a smile. She sat down on the floor next to me, leaning against the back of the couch. “I heard you get up.” She nodded to the pile of albums on my lap. “You feeling nostalgic?”
    “I don’t know really.”
    “What are you looking at?” Maggie leaned over so she could peer at the photo album. “Oh, that’s an old one. You were just a baby then.”
    I flipped open the book and it went chronologically, so the first few pages were of Matt when he was little. Maggie looked at it with me, making clucking sounds at my dad. She gently touched his picture once and commented on how handsome he was.
    Even though everyone agreed that my father had been a good guy, we rarely talked about him. It was our way of not talking about my mother and not talking about what happened. Nothing before my sixth birthday mattered, and that just happened to include every memory of Dad.
    Most of the pictures in the album were of Matt, and there were many with my mother, my dad, and Matt looking ridiculously happy. All three of them had blond hair and blue eyes. They looked like something out of a Hallmark commercial.
    Towards the end of the book, everything changed. As soon as pictures of me started to appear, my mother began looking surly and sullen. In the very first picture, I was only a few days old. I wore an outfit with blue trains all over it, and my mother glared at me.
    “You were such a cute baby!” Maggie laughed. “But I remember that. You wore boys’ clothes for the first month because they were so sure you were going to be a boy.”
    “That explains a lot,” I mumbled, and Maggie laughed. “Why didn’t they just get me new clothes? They had the money for it.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie sighed, looking far away. “It was something your mother wanted.” She shook her head. “She was weird about things.”
    “What was my name supposed to be?” I couldn’t remember. When I was younger, people had talked about it, but nobody reminisced about my childhood anymore.
    “Um… Michael!” Maggie snapped her fingers when she remembered. “Michael Conrad Everly. But then you were girl, so that ruined that.”
    “How did I get Wendy from that?” I wrinkled my nose. “Michelle would make more sense.”
    “Well…” Maggie looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Your mother refused to name you, and your father… I guess he couldn’t think of anything. So Matt named you.”
    “Oh yeah.” I faintly remembered hearing that before. “But why Wendy?”
    “He liked the name Wendy,” Maggie shrugged. “He was a big Peter Pan fan, which is ironic because Peter Pan is the story of a boy who never grows up, and Matt was a boy who was always grown up.” I smirked at that. “Maybe that’s why he’s always been so protective of you. He named you. You were his.”
    A picture of me from when I was about two or three with Matt holding me in his arms. I lay on my stomach with my arms and legs outstretched, while he grinned like a fool. He used to run me around the house like that, pretending that I was flying, and call me “Wendy Bird,” and I would laugh for hours.
    As I got older, it became more and more apparent that I looked nothing like my family. My dark eyes and frizzy hair contrasted completely with them.
     In every picture with me, my mother looked completely exasperated, as if she had spent the last half hour fighting with me before the picture. But then again, she probably had. I had always been contrary to everything she was.
    “You were a strong-willed child,” Maggie admitted, looking at a picture of me covered in chocolate cake at my fifth birthday. “You