Page 1 of Switch Back

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ROSEMARY

I could tell you that I never felt like I fit in with my family, but that’s something I think many people can say. I mean, sure, I am the lone redhead in a sea of golden yellow hair, the only leftie, and allergic to peanuts, but none of these things is something that could have prepared me for the news I was about to discover.

“Rosie?” a familiar voice penetrates my tunnel vision.

My fingers continue to fly on the keyboard of my laptop as my gaze darts briefly over to my best friend, Chasen, watching me with an expression of annoyance on his face.

“I’m almost done,” I say quickly, trying not to lose my train of thought.

“Hurry up.” He slumps down in the empty chair across from my desk. “I’m starving.”

Unable to sit still for even a moment, Chasen starts shuffling through some of the pile of mail on my desk. I ignore him as I work as quickly as possible to finish the last line of my article with a flourishing punch of the final key. Finally, I click save and send it off to my editor to look over. I was hoping to finish before Chasen picked me up for lunch, but the words come when they want to and not a minute sooner.

I look over at my best friend. He’s dressed in what he always wears—worn Wranglers, a white t-shirt, and a pearl snap plaid shirt. But that doesn’t stop nearly every woman in this office from shooting secret glances his way whenever he comes in here to pick me up for lunch.

“I see you dressed up for the occasion,” I tease him.

“Only the best for you,” he quips back.

Chasen is like a brother to me. When you grow up with someone from infancy and know every gross, dumb, and idiotic thing they’ve ever done in their life, it’s impossible to look at them in any romantic way. The Queen Bees—an elderly group of women who fancy themselves matchmakers in our small town of Fatesville—have long since given up any hope that Chasen and I would “come to our senses and get married.”

“What’s this?” he asks, holding up a plain white envelope with my name typed on the front.

I lift my pointer fingers to my temples and make a show of squinting like I’m concentrating really hard.

“Nope.” I shake my head. “Still no x-ray vision.”

Chasen rolls his eyes and flips the envelope around to look at the front again. “It says it's from someplace called DNAPlus.”

The name sounds familiar, but it takes me a moment to remember how I know the name.

“Oh, that’s the test I took a few weeks back after I wrote that article about the woman in her sixties who spent her whole life thinking she was an only child, only to take a DNA test and find out that she actually had six brothers and sisters living in Portland.”

“Oh yeah. I liked that story.”

"Yeah? Well, so did the company when they saw the article and sent me a free test to try for myself.” I laugh. “Mama was easy to get a sample from, but as you can imagine my father was a lot harder to wrangle.”

“Did you have to hog tie him?” Chasen laughs. He knows my father better than anyone outside our family. He’s my father’s lead farmhand and the son he never had. Stuck in house filled with Mama, my older sister Liz, me, and my younger sister Sophie. It’s not surprising he took Chasen under his wings to get a break from all the estrogen in the house.

"Maybe you're about to find out that you're adopted." Chasen waves the envelope at me.

I laugh too. “That would explain so much.”

“Open it and see,” he says before flinging the envelope across my desk at me like a frisbee.

I catch it before it flies over my shoulder. “I thought you were starving.”

“You’ve made me wait this long.” He shrugs. “I can’t wait a bit longer.”

I shake my head at him and tear open the envelope. There are three sheets of paper inside—a letter explaining their process and all the testing that was run on me and my parents that I provided, a sheet filled with colorful pie charts and bar graphs illustrating the regions on the globe found in my DNA and their respective percentages, and a biological test report.

“I don’t know what any of this means.” I pass the papers over to Chasen.

He takes them and starts looking them over.

“I was thinking instead of going to Hattie’s for the usual burger and fries, like we do all the time, we could change things up for once and go—”

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