We were officially the weirdest family on the block.

The thing was, life had already been bad enough for me before that crummy afternoon when Uncle Danny parked his rusty Ford Escort in the driveway and started unloading pet carriers filled with furry brown ferrets into our garage.

But that didn’t stop our two wiener dogs (Babs and Roger) from going ballistic, barking and leaping as high in the air as their stubby legs could carry them (like they’d actually know what to do with the ferrets if they caught them). And it didn’t stop Grandma from rushing outside in her pink nightgown, practically foaming at the mouth because all the commotion was ruining Oprah.

When she saw the ferrets, Grandma let out a high-pitched scream that sounded almost exactly like the teakettle she boiled every afternoon. Then she started raving about a rat infestation.

And she kept going, even when Uncle Danny told her over and over again that they weren’t rats at all (which they weren’t. In fact, aside from their creepy hunched backs, they were surprisingly cute, which I realize is kind of beside the point), but Grandma was too busy freaking out to listen.

Dad pulled into the driveway, his Honda still making the funny banging noise that not even his mechanic could figure out. He looked confused as he climbed out of the car and adjusted his belt. (His belly was bigger than I’d ever seen it and even though I liked the solid roundness of it, Mom said it “had to go.” For weeks she’d been trying to make him do morning calisthenics and pour flaxseed on his cereal.) His dark hair was neatly combed, the way it had to be at the bank, and his eyebrows were squished close together with concern.

He squinted through his new glasses to get a better look at the situation, and that was when he spotted the ferrets. His face, which was usually a completely normal color, turned the most amazing cartoon red. I half-expected steam to shoot out of his nostrils and I was sure that if anyone so much as tugged on his earlobe, his whole head would have exploded.

This all came as a shock because Dad was usually the calmest person within a twenty-mile radius.

Actually, make that forty miles.

Mom called him “the voice of reason.”

I watched him take a deep breath, so deep he could have spent the next two weeks underwater.

And in the water was exactly where I would have rather been right then (and all the time, as a matter of fact).

The pool was the only place where I felt like nothing else mattered, and as I glanced away from my crazy front yard to the Elliots’ house, knowing there was a beautiful crystal blue one (with a slide and a diving board!) behind the fence that no one even used, it almost drove me bonkers.

Some people didn’t even know how lucky they -were.

But I knew exactly how unlucky I was.

I sighed and turned my attention back to Dad, who was about to speak. When he did, he sounded like he was choking.

He asked Uncle Danny why on earth he’d brought the ferrets to our house when Danny himself was barely welcome in the spare bedroom. After all, Dad reminded him, he owed my parents over two thousand dollars in rent and they were starting to wonder if he was ever going to pay it back.

Uncle Danny didn’t have a chance to say a word in his defense before Dad threw in a bit of guilt by reminding him that the money was supposed to go toward braces for my older brother, Kenneth. Even though Dad didn’t say it out loud, we all knew what that meant: Kenneth would spend the tenth grade as bucktoothed (and weird-looking) as he’d been in the ninth.

Maybe even worse.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been bad enough, but Kenneth went to Edgevale High School, home of the Edgevale Beavers.

You do the math.