“Well, you don’t wear it to school, do you? I’m just afraid the other kids will … that the other kids might …”

“Beat him up?” I offered.

Through a mouthful of spaghetti Karen said, “If he wore that to my school, I’d beat him up.”

But Frankie was unfazed by whatever we had to say about him. He would be fifteen and starting high school next August. In one corner of his room, he’d hung a model of the Millennium Falcon and suspended on fishing line around it a little cluster of foam rubber asteroids. On the back of a sheet of butcher paper taped to the inside of the aluminum foil that covered his bedroom windows, he’d drawn with an El Marko a picture of Yoda, the Close Encounters alien, dwarfs, wizards, the cookie-tin-shaped robot Dr. Theopolis from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Starbuck, and Apollo, all gathered around a long conference table with Luke Skywalker at the center, his hands outstretched like a clean-shaven Christ. There was a drawing taped to the closet door of the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, clinging like a pilot fish to the back of a 747, piloted by a tiny figure who looked a lot like Frankie. He had yet to throw out the light saber he’d made from a gift wrap tube when he was ten. He walked around in Matt’s old karate vest and called the backyard Tatooine. There was less than a two-year difference between me and Frankie, and while Karen made me feel like a child, around my little brother I became an abusive adult.

“Give me the pencils,” I said with as much venom as I could put into my voice.

He said, “ ‘What has roots as nobody sees, is taller than trees, up, up it goes, and yet never grows?’ ”

I kicked the side of his leg.

“Ow! All right!” He made a few clicks and whirs out of the side of his mouth and moved his arm like a robot’s, his fingers clawing at the colored pencils. He gathered them back into their clear plastic sleeve and held them up to me.

I took them. “What are you drawing?”

“I was drawing a nebula. But I really needed the pencils for the gravitational study I’m presenting in front of the council.”

He turned his smooth, narrow face up toward me. There was no hint of cuteness, sarcasm, or lunacy in his voice; he could just as easily have been talking about his homework.

“Well, I have to fill in a chromosome chart for biology. You can use them after that.” I started out of the room.

“Roger,” he said. “Would that be alien, or pure human?”

“What?”

“Some of us are one or the other, some of us are a mix,” he said, blending the nebula with his finger. “The mixed ones have the most complicated chromosomal structure.”