The Smithfork kids were sitting on boxes, hanging their legs off the sides and sweating. It was a late August day in Manhattan, the kind their dad said you can taste, when the smells of the city linger in the mouth and nose. It was a day when the heat couldn't seem to find the energy to shove off and go somewhere else. In the window, an air conditioner grumbled fitfully, doing little to cool the bedroom.

Thump!

Brid lobbed another tennis ball at her stack of boxes. They were moving boxes, all different sizes, with the words
Moovin Magic
written on the sides. The kids were supposed to be unpacking, but instead they were seeing
who could topple over their stack first.

Nine-year-old Brid was determined to win. Her brothers, twelve-year-old CJ and six-year-old Patrick, were tossing balls at their own stacks, and their boxes were tipping just a little bit more than hers. This made Brid anxious. She hated to lose at anything.

Patrick let one fly and completely missed, knocking over a plastic robot instead. The robot fell off the desk and onto its side, making a big clatter on the wooden floor.

Smash!

Their two-year-old little sister, Carron, was napping in the next room. As the oldest, CJ was not about to be held responsible for waking her up early. “If you're going to miss so badly, dork, don't bother throwing,” CJ said. He pushed his wavy brown hair out of his face.

Brid thought about answering with something sharp and mean about how CJ had just gotten cut at tryouts for the soccer team at his new school, but she thought better of it and said nothing. There was such a bad mood hanging in the air. Their new home felt strange, and everyone was anxious about starting at a new school. Brid knew that antagonizing her older brother would end badly.

Brid was a willowy, wiry blond girl; she looked like a strong wind could push her over. Inside, she knew she was tough; she just hadn't been tested yet.

Moving into this neighborhood was supposed to have been a great thing for the Smithforks. It was one of the
fanciest neighborhoods in Manhattan, across the street from Central Park and surrounded by private schools. At least, that was what their parents said. In fact, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to CJ. He had a lot of friends in Brooklyn, and he loved his old school. He had pitched for the middle school baseball team, and now he wasn't even on any team. He had given up his wonderful old life for a Fifth Avenue existence he felt only his dad really wanted.

“I mean it. Keep it quiet,” CJ said. His voice trailed off.

It was Patrick's turn again. He raised his tennis ball and let loose, taking out the top box of his pile, which was filled with Lego pieces. They tumbled out of the box with a great crash.

Even though he was only six, Pat was tall, still in that in-between place where he sometimes looked babyish and sometimes like a real kid. “Nice, Shortstop,” said CJ. Rolling his eyes at Pat was all the encouragement Pat needed to lunge at his brother in an almost serious wrestling move.

Only one year ago the Smithforks were like families in East New York, Brooklyn. They lived in a brownstone house, built in 1880, that, except for plumbing and electricity, had not had much done to it since then. Their mom, Anne, loved architectural history, and she couldn't bear to modernize old buildings. To her, adding
conveniences to a building meant losing its original character. “Think of the family that built this house,” she would say. “Think how proud they were of this paneled wall, even if it has termites in it.” She had painted the old oak floors of their Brooklyn house green, and that's how they had stayedâwarped and greenâthe entire time the Smithforks lived there.

Maybe the best thing about their Brooklyn home was that they had a yard. It wasn't much of a yard, so small their mom said she could mow the lawn with her tweezers. Still, it was a piece of the earth that was theirs, and they could go outside whenever they wanted.

Now they were Manhattanites. It seemed everyone lived in apartments here, stacked one on top of another just like the moving boxes. Worst of all, their mom was too busy to spend her days with them the way she always had. She was meeting with interior decorators and shopping for furniture, and she had hired Maricel, a stern woman from the Philippines, to be their nanny. Maricel was efficient and professional and used to working with families more structured than their own.

Their father wasn't strict at all. Mr. Smithfork used to be poor and now he was rich. After college, when his friends went to work for investment banks on Wall Street, Bruce Smithfork couldn't pull himself away from gamesâspecifically, video games. Not only was he good at playing them, he liked to invent them. He started a
company in their Brooklyn basement called LeCube, and his game, the PeeWee, was a big seller.

Then something happened that changed everything. Bruce Smithfork sent the PeeWee to one of his friends for his fortieth birthday. His friend, who worked on Wall Street, liked it so much, he told Mr. Smithfork that his game was better than any game he had ever played, and Mr. Smithfork should take his company public. What he meant was for Mr. Smithfork to sell half of the LeCube company to the public, giving the family a lot of cash and allowing the company to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Within weeks, their Brooklyn living room filled with men in suits. They spread long rolls of paper on the scuffed-up coffee table and punched numbers into calculators. They drank a lot of coffee.

Finally the day came when the men in suits left, and Mr. Smithfork rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The kids couldn't believe it when he came home and said, “Hey, we're millionaires!” He swung their mom, Anne, around, and they all went out to eat at a diner. They ordered whatever they wanted and didn't take home the leftovers. After that, Bruce Smithfork went to work every day in a Manhattan office and wore a suit. He had real employees, rather than his own kids, to test his games on. He had shareholders who insisted his company grow and make more and more money.

Anne Smithfork spent most of her time getting ready to move the family out of Brooklyn. She searched Manhattan for the perfect apartment; she shopped for furniture and curtains and schools for the children. She was rarely around during the day anymore.

Still, until moving day, they were all sort of happy. On that day, Brid lost her appetite and Patrick cried. CJ just kept reading books and said little. Together, they watched as every item they owned was boxed and piled into a moving truck and driven away from their house with its tiny fenced-in yard and the security bars on the windows.

The day after their stuff left, it showed up again in their new home, a Fifth Avenue apartment on the top floor of a historic building. The apartment had gotten tangled in an inheritance battle and remained empty for many years. For the better part of seventy years it had been sitting silent and abandoned, as if waiting for something to happen. It was a huge space, and even though it had been cleaned, it seemed dusty and old. It had bedrooms for all the kids and their parents, a home office for Mr. Smithfork, high ceilings, and mahogany paneling and other fancy woodwork. There were words written on some of the walls in fancy script. Their mom said in the 1920s and 1930s it had belonged to one of the richest families in New York, and there were some rules saying the walls couldn't ever be removed.

All this change was too much for the Smithfork fam
ily. It made them anxious, and when they got anxious, they fought.

After the Lego crash, Brid and CJ pummeled Patrick with tennis balls. Patrick fired back, hitting Brid in the face. Brid lunged at CJ, and they both toppled over onto the floor, slamming into a metal grille that covered the room's heating unit. A painful cracking noise came from the wall.

The grille had been framed in wood, and when it was hit, the frame splintered all over the place. For one long moment, the three kids held their breath and watched as the grille rocked back and forth. Then it tipped and smashed dramatically downward, clattering onto the rosewood floor.

“Nice,” said Brid to her brothers, in the moment when everyone was trying to figure out how much damage there was and how much trouble they all would be in. She got off the floor and, with difficulty, lifted the heavy metal grille. Neither brother stood to help her. As soon as she had the grille back upright, it slipped from her fingers and banged on the floor once again. She gasped.

“What?” the boys said together.

Brid just pointed. “What is that thing?” she said, covering her mouth with her hands.

Their baby sister started to cry in the room next door.