The Weenie became Dewy’s greatest antagonist. “Hey, Dewy,” he’d say, giving Dewy a soft punch on the shoulder. “How about a sing-along? She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes . . .”

Our mother would laugh at this, a reaction that only solidified Dewy’s determination.

In the meantime, I was the one who suffered most. Mom and the Weenie had each other, and Dewy had his own imagination, but I had nobody and nothing. Because of Dewy, I’d made little effort with the boys in my own grade. As a result, they thought I was a jerk. Maybe they assumed I thought I was better than them, but they would have been wrong. It was Dewy who was better than them. What kid my age could build a rocket out of pop cans, or properly dissect a dead pigeon so as to remove the tiny heart unscathed? While they were playing basketball and dreaming of sports cars, Dewy was intercepting police radio waves and fine-tuning his hot-wiring skills. We had a dream to steal Mom’s station wagon and drive until we reached an ocean. We’d never been outside of Kansas and liked to muse about what awaited us past the state line: mountains and deserts and cities with skyscrapers. Dewy had a plan to work for the FBI in Washington, D.C., while I made big money fishing salmon in Alaska. Now, even a tiny adventure seemed unlikely. Dewy would barely look at me.

He broke his silence only once. It was early in his protest, and we were sitting together on the back porch. Mom had given us half of a watermelon to share, and we were hauling out the pink meat with an ice cream scoop. She and the Weenie had gone inside, to take showers.

“Why didn’t you go silent with me?” Dewy asked.

I put down the scoop and stared at him. “You’re talking.”

“I want to know why you didn’t go silent with me. I thought we were in this together—like with the wallet. Didn’t you hear what Mom said? About us not having friends?”

“She said you didn’t have any friends.”

“She meant the both of us,” he said. “It’s always the both of us.”

I looked at him, at his chapped lips and the dark pimples that had begun to appear on his jaw line. I wondered, for the first time, if he might not grow up to be good-looking. “Maybe I don’t want to do everything you do,” I said. “Maybe I don’t want everyone to hate me.” I waited for a speech—something eloquent and mean and convincing—but there was only the sound of a distant lawn mower.

“Give me this,” he finally said, and wrenched the ice cream scoop from my hand. He ate the rest of the melon on his own.

Everyone was nervous for Dewy’s birthday. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that Mom and the Weenie were already out of the house when Dewy and I woke up. The Weenie had somehow convinced our mother to go to church with him, a ritual Dewy and I considered blasphemous. Dewy had long ago converted me to atheism, and so it was painful to think of our mother dressed in some ridiculous outfit, kneeling and singing among lunatics. And yet, we’d come to enjoy having the house to ourselves on Sunday mornings. We’d eat whatever we could find for breakfast—cookies, whipped cream, string cheese—and then position ourselves in front of the new television like monks before an altar. Occasionally we’d go through Mom’s room, searching for things to steal or destroy. Otherwise, we took it easy, pretending we’d landed in some alternate universe where children were masters over the adults.