It was true. One morning, I woke up in my bed and was surrounded by fifty or sixty photocopies of my brothers’ butts, all taped to the walls in my room. It took me a few seconds to figure out what they were, these strange white moons, and then I screamed. The triplets ran into the room, laughing. My mom yelled up to see what was going on, but seemed to give up when none of us replied.

They told me how, the night before, they’d gone to the high school and pried open the lock to one of the storage buildings out back, packed to overflowing with old equipment. They’d seen the copier, plus dozens of boxes of toner, and even some stacks of paper, and thought it might be worth something. So they loaded it into the van they all shared and brought it home. And, drunk, they decided they’d make copies of their asses. “Things got out of hand,” Andrew admitted. “There’s like, three hundred copies of our butts.” I told them to get out of my room, and then I spent the next five minutes ripping down the photocopies, wadding them into balls, and stuffing them into my wastepaper basket. But there were too many of them, and they spilled out onto the floor, slowly opening like flowers, my brothers’ bright white asses.

The copier was an old model from the late eighties, and nobody that my brothers knew wanted to buy it, and then they broke it after sitting on it a hundred times and they spent a whole day arguing about which one of them had ruined it. It was this huge piece of junk now, and my mom had told them a hundred times to get rid of it, and they told her that they would, but they just covered it with a tarp and forgot about it. That was how it worked. If you couldn’t see it, if you pushed it into a dark corner, it didn’t exist. But here it was. I was claiming it. It was mine now. Ours.

“This could be pretty cool,” Zeke admitted.

“Well, maybe, but my dumbass brothers broke it. We could try to fix it, but maybe we could just go to the library and use that one.”

“Broke it how?”

“They broke it so it doesn’t work anymore,” I said, though it didn’t really seem to register with Zeke.

He looked at the machine, opening the lid, and then rubbed his chin. “Did they read the manual?” he asked.

“Did my brothers read the manual? Are you serious?”

“Did they?”

“No!” I shouted. “They broke it with their asses and that was that.”