Chapter One Chapter One
The sinkhole opened up in the middle of Sunday lunch. In the middle of the living room, too. The hole appeared just after Summer had shouted something really loudly, almost as if her shouting had made it happen. What she shouted, precisely, to the man at the other end of the table was “You’re not my dad!”

Which was accurate—Mr. Pattinson was her foster father—but perhaps not useful or kind, as her fourth-grade teacher would have told her. It was, in Summer’s opinion, deserved, though, seeing as Mr. Pattinson wouldn’t let her eat her roast beef with all the trimmings until she’d said grace, and she didn’t want to say grace.

“You’re not my dad!” she said, really quite loudly—and then the living-room floor fell in.

Not in a small way, either, if living rooms can even fall in different ways. No, the noise was exactly the sound of an entire room collapsing into a massive, great hole in the ground that hadn’t been there a moment before. Which is to say, it was loud.

They all got up from the table and rushed through to the living room in a tangle of limbs. Summer bashed into one of the Original Children, Oscar, or he bashed into her more likely. She almost tripped when the littler Original Child, Ethan, got under her feet in his haste to see the damage.

They all stood and stared.

For once, Mrs. Pattinson had nothing to say. (Mrs. Pattinson always had quite a lot to say and, when Summer had shouted, was opening her mouth, presumably to say quite a lot about politeness, when the living room turned into a crater.)

“Um…,” said Mr. Pattinson, which was actually something he said quite a lot.

Summer had pointed this out once, in what she thought was a reasonable response to him laughing about how much she supposedly said “like,” and it turned out Not to Be Polite. Mrs. Pattinson had strong views about what was polite and what wasn’t.

“That’s a big hole,” said Oscar. (Who could be relied upon to make the observation so obvious and stupid that no one else would bother to make it.)