Seventh grade brought changes, all right, but the biggest one didn't happen at school — it happened at home. Grandpa Martin came to live with us.

At first it was kind of weird because none of us really knew him. Except for Mom, of course. And even though she's spent the past year and a half trying to convince us he's a great guy, from what I can tell, the thing he likes to do best is stare out the front-room window. There's not much to see out there except the Hwang’s front yard, but you can find him there day or night, sitting in the big easy chair they moved in with him, staring out the window.

Okay, so he also reads Tom Clancy novels and the newspapers and does crossword puzzles and tracks his stocks, but those things are all distractions. Given no one to justify it to, the man would stare out the window until he fell asleep. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just seems so … boring.

Mom says he stares like that because he misses Grandma, but that's not something Grandpa had ever discussed with me. As a matter of fact, he never discussed much of anything with me until a few months ago when he read about Tiffany in the newspaper.

Now, Tiffany Hwang did not wind up on the front page of the Mayfield Times for being an eighth-grade Einstein, like you might suspect. No, my friend, she got front-page coverage because she refused to climb out of a sycamore tree.

Not that I could tell a sycamore from a maple or a birch for that matter, but Tiffany, of course, knew what kind of tree it was and passed that knowledge along to every creature in her wake.

So this tree, this sycamore tree, was up the hill on a vacant lot on Collier Street, and it was massive. Massive and ugly. It was twisted and gnarled and bent, and I kept expecting the thing to blow over in the wind.

One day last year I'd finally had enough of her yakking about that stupid tree. I came right out and told her that it was not a magnificent sycamore, it was, in reality, the ugliest tree known to man. And you know what she said? She said I was visually challenged. Visually challenged! This from the girl who lives in a house that's the scourge of the neighborhood. They've got bushes growing over windows, weeds sticking out all over the place, and a barnyard's worth of animals running wild. I'm talking dogs, cats, chickens, even snakes. I swear to God, her brothers have a boa constrictor in their room. They dragged me in there when I was about ten and made me watch it eat a rat. A live, beady-eyed rat. They held that rodent up by its tail and gulp, the boa swallowed it whole. That snake gave me nightmares for a month.

Anyway, normally I wouldn't care about someone's yard, but the Hwang’s mess bugged my dad big-time, and he channeled his frustration into our yard. He said it was our neighborly duty to show them what a yard's supposed to look like. So while Seulgi and Joy are busy plumping up their boa, I'm having to mow and edge our yard, then sweep the walkways and gutter, which is going a little overboard, if you ask me.

And you'd think Tiffany’s dad—who's a big, strong, bricklaying dude — would fix the place up, but no. According to my mom, he spends all his free time painting. His landscapes don't seem like anything special to me, but judging by his price tags, he thinks quite a lot of them. We see them every year at the Mayfield County Fair, and my parents always say the same thing: “The world would have more beauty in it if he'd fix up the yard instead.”

Mom and Tiffany’s mom do talk some. I think my mom feels sorry for Mrs. Hwang— she says she married a dreamer, and because of that, one of the two of them will always be unhappy.

Whatever. Maybe Tiffany’s aesthetic sensibilities have been permanently screwed up by her father and none of this is her fault, but Tiffany has always thought that that sycamore tree was God's gift to our little corner of the universe.

Back in the third and fourth grades she used to clown around with her brothers in the branches or peel big chunks of bark off so they could slide down the crook in its trunk. It seemed like they were playing in it whenever my mom took us somewhere in the car. Tiffany’d be swinging from the branches, ready to fall a