5/20

It’s been years since I’ve written in a diary. Twenty-seven years, to be exact. Wow, it makes me feel old. I didn’t even write the year down, because I’m in denial.

In any case, I decided today to read through this old diary of mine. It was from my senior year of high school, back when I was still Morgan Winters. It’s Morgan Summers now. Fun change, isn’t it? Like the seasons…from the single life to the married life. Winter to summer. Maybe backwards metaphorically, but that’s really not the point.

Anyway, the last time I wrote in this book, I was eighteen years old and about to graduate from high school. A lot has happened since then. I went to college, got my bachelor’s, got married, had two kids…and now they’re as old as I was when I wrote this. Nate is actually older…he’s nineteen, and Jed’s seventeen. Wow. I feel really old. Forty-five. Crazy.

So the point of this diary was to keep track of my senior year, and the walking cliché that my life had become. It was ridiculous…I was madly in love with my childhood best friend, I was engaged to a complete stranger, I had to do a school project with my arch-nemesis who just happened to be my ex-boyfriend…the list goes on. But I suppose the most important one was the fact that I was a girl disguised as a boy at an all boys’ school. After that year, though, I thought the clichés were done with me. And they were, for the time being. Except that twenty-seven years later, they decided to come after my sons.

Taliesin Nathaniel and Jedidiah Everett Summers. My sons. Odd names, I know. You have to understand, my parents think we still live in the eighteenth century, and my in-laws are convinced that the Arthurian era is still happening. And Hawk and I were silly enough to promise that his parents could name the first child and mine could name the second. We did well enough, though, and we saved poor Nate with his middle name. Jed didn’t really need saving, thankfully…Jedidiah isn’t a name you stumble across every day, but Jed works for him. And we weren’t about to call him Everett. Though it does have a nice ring to it.

In any case, those are my boys. The first was born about three years after Hawk and I got married, which happened about four months after we graduated college. We’d been engaged for eight years before that, though, so we weren’t jumping the gun too much.

I keep forgetting that this is about the boys, and not Hawk and me. Though I guess most of this story is about Nate and Alex, not Nate and Jed. Jed’s a good boy, though he’s certainly not above a bit of mischief here and there. Well, lots of mischief recently, but he’s home right now so we can straighten him out. He spent the last few months at boarding school…the very school that I met Hawk at. We thought it was fitting. Nate graduated from there, too.

Anyway, Alex. Actually, Alexander Mercer, son of the British prime minister. And he got involved with my son. Lord only knows how. The funny thing about Alex, though, is that by some incredible chance, he happens to look almost exactly like my son Nate. It’s very difficult to tell them apart. Even I had trouble, and I’m his mother. It’s thoroughly ridiculous, but if it wasn’t, I don’t suppose the clichés would have attacked my poor son.

As it was, he bumped into Alex one day, and of course they decided to switch places. After all, what identical yet unrelated kids wouldn’t? The ones with sense, I suppose, but no sons of mine can really be expected to have too much sense. Nate’s better off in that department than Jed is, and probably more than I am, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t give in to ridiculous schemes every now and again. My poor husband…three such impetuous people in the same house. I don’t know how he handles it.

Still, one might’ve thought that Alex had enough common sense…being the son of a politician and all. Though maybe that doesn’t guarantee common sense. Natalie certainly doesn’t seem to think so.

Natalie…I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s just confusing, I suppose, looking back on all this. I knew some of it while it was happening, but I had to get Nate and Jed to tell me the whole story afterwards. Not to mention the part where I pried Alex for information. The way he tells it, it all started rather simply. He had just started talking to this girl online, and he had just hired this other girl to be his maid, when he bumped into Nate and decided that they would just have to switch places. Certainly not that complicated. He wouldn’t think so, of course. Boys…what will you do with them?

Let’s see…I suppose it must all have started in January, before Jed headed back to school. Nate was in the house with us, too, instead of at his apartment, and I believe Alex had just moved into his own little house in the States. And that’s when all the trouble began.