I was morphing into something I didn’t want to be. My nose was growing bulbous, my neck was elongating, my hands were thickening into fleshy paddles that batted against door frames and knocked over drinking glasses. When I looked in the mirror, every part of me was out of proportion to whatever it was attached to. I would wake up in the middle of the night freezing beneath the unremitting current of the central air unit—humping the mattress, desperate for contact, like the last animal of its species.

Frankie was two years younger than me and infinitely better-looking. Because he slept with his door open, I could listen to his breathing—hear the back of his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth each time he inhaled, a sound he’d been making in his sleep since he was a baby. My sister, Karen, kept her door shut. Clawing out of another warm, slick dream, I stepped into the refrigerated hall and stood between their two rooms and Matt’s old room—now mine—an erection lifting the front of my pajamas and the blood pounding in my ears. I wanted something I believed was not of this world. Beyond that, I wanted to be someone else, getting it.

My father left during the summer of the bicentennial, when I was eleven. His name was Roy and he was Frankie’s father too, but not Karen’s or Matt’s, and he had moved out so abruptly that he hadn’t even taken most of his things. He was married to another woman now, less than fifteen miles away, at the north end of Merritt Island near the Space Center, and within a year we understood not only that he wasn’t coming back but that he wasn’t very interested in knowing us anymore. Trace evidence of his existence had remained in our house for a while after he’d left—including not only the smell of his cigarettes but the Pall Malls themselves, along with his lighter, an arrangement my mother preserved on the lower level of the end table next to the couch. She’d told us he would be back by that first Thanksgiving, and by that first Christmas, and by Easter, and then by the time Matt, who was the oldest, graduated from high school. Finally I came home one day to find my father’s picture extracted from the faces on the dining room wall. His coffee mug was missing from the cup tree in the kitchen, and his cigarettes and lighter—along with the ashtray my mother had dusted for a full year—were gone, in their place a candy dish and a copy of the Florida Catholic.