“He’s reading a book called Great Warlocks of the 18th Century, and to get this ball rolling before Dean Devlin shows up and rains on our private parade, I snort and ask, “Good book?”I forget I’m pretending to be sitting behind my two-thousand-ninety-eight-page Highlights of Modern Chemistry book, so he snorts back. “Better than yours.”

“If I’ve got a Dad, and his name is Wormwood Rot, and he’s in some heavy metal rock band called Grave Dirt . . . then I’m definitely meeting him!She stares at me awkwardly, and I’m about to ask again—maybe even insist—when she says, “Honey, why do you think he’s on the news? Wormwood, I mean . . . your father? Becca, he’s . . . dead.”