“Yes,” said me and Murphy together.

We didn’t want a stepfather. What would be the point?

Because life with Mom wasn’t so bad. First off, she home-schooled us, and that meant I had a refuge from other kids. This was a good thing, because the ones I’d met around the neighborhood never took much of a liking to me. We had our lessons in the woods, or by the creek, or anywhere else Mom could get sunshine and creatures.

Mom would take us to the library every two weeks with one instruction: “Load up.” Murphy always got practical stuff—field guides, nonfiction about explorers, maps of foreign places. I went straight for the poetry. Like I said, poets were the weirdos having visions, the ones taken up to a higher brainspace. I taught myself Allen Ginsberg and Emily Dickinson and John Berryman and Langston Hughes. I taught myself Rimbaud and John Donne and T. S. Eliot. I taught myself Gwendolyn Brooks and Rilke and Walt Whitman and Georg Trakl. I spent an entire year reading Frank O’Hara, wishing I were somebody else. I ordered books mentioned in other books through interlibrary loan, because reading on actual paper from thick ancient hardback volumes was best, preferably outside, even by lamplight.

Mom never quite knew what to do with me, and that hurt, always. I knew Mom would have preferred another Murphy, running around, trying to break boards with jump kicks, instead of me, reading Gérard de Nerval in a field somewhere.

Like the time she took Murphy and me spelunking in Arkansas. I barely spelunked. While Mom and Murphy plunged deeper and deeper into the underground labyrinth, hand in hand, their laughs bouncing around the cave walls disturbing bats, I mostly just sat at the mouth of the cave with my headlamp, imagining things. I watched the darkness, so thick it seemed to swirl, a whirlpool of empty space, and I wondered and wondered.

It was one of the happiest days of my life.

Things went wrong whenever Mom tried to force me to be normal, to get me to make friends or something.

For example, Mom tried to throw me a birthday party when I was ten. Even at that age, everyone seemed to know there was something off about me. I mean, kids hated me. All of them, without fail. I couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t mean or anything, and maybe I was even a little smart. They liked Murphy just fine—she always had her pick of friends. But for whatever reason, all the kids on our block hated me, and I knew it. I didn’t want Mom to throw a party for me. I knew something horrible was going to happen, that I was going to find a way to embarrass myself. But Mom insisted. She said I needed friends.

And I did need friends. Hell, I wanted friends probably more than anything on this earth. Somehow Mom cajoled the neighbors into sending their children over. Maybe Mom promised them food, cake and ice cream, party favors, I don’t know. It was Mom’s idea to give me a piñata. She said her mom had given her one for every birthday and that smashing it was better than eating whatever candy fell out. It was a bright pink armadillo, which I thought was cool. Mom slung it up over a tree limb in our front yard, and I donned the blindfold, and all the neighborhood kids crowded around me, watching.