“Great!” we both shouted, way too loud. I’m sure my mom thought we’d been tentatively exploring each other’s bodies, which made me want to gag, but she just nodded. It was a weird thing. Before the divorce, my mom had been kind of strict, the triplets constantly wrecking shit as she sternly tried to wrangle them. She had no patience for people who might complicate her life or create more work for her, was always rolling her eyes at how stupid everyone else was. She made checklists that no one else ever checked. She frowned a lot. I was slightly afraid of her, even though I knew that she loved me. And though I knew the divorce had messed her up, it had also seemed to relax her, like the bad thing had finally happened and she didn’t have to keep waiting for it. She chilled out. The triplets, if they burned down the Dairy Queen, well, that was someone else’s problem. If I invited some strange boy into our house and made out with him, who was she to intervene? We were eating pizza on a weekday. She was the coolest mom in Coalfield.

One by one, like a Xerox had spit them out, the triplets trudged into the house, each of them reeking of weed and french fry grease. We told them that we had pizza, and they just grunted and disappeared into the room they all shared. The smell in that room, the air. I cannot describe it.

Mom put the pizzas in the oven to keep them warm and Zeke and I started setting the table. “What happened to your hand?” she asked me.

“What now?” I asked, dropping a fork onto the table, so much noise.

“And your hand?” she asked Zeke, pointing at his tiny, laughable wound.

“Hmm,” Zeke said, like she’d asked him a philosophical question.

“Did you guys do a blood oath or something?” my mom asked, like she’d heard about this from Phil Donahue.

“No!” I said, too loud. “God, Mom, we didn’t do any kind of blood oath.”

“It’s unsanitary,” my mom offered very gently.

“I sliced my finger cutting up some apples for a healthy snack,” I finally told her. Zeke nodded, though he looked a little pained, like he wished he’d thought of that.

“And this,” Zeke said, holding up his finger for my mom to inspect, “was, like, a previous accident. I came here today wearing this Band-Aid.”