Our mother’s somewhat pronounced cheekbones had grafted themselves onto the four of us. Beyond that, we took after our fathers. Matt and Karen were of Dermot stock; I’d seen the snapshot Matt used to carry around in his wallet, and there was the blond hair, the slightly flattened bridge of the nose, the full lips that distinguished my two older siblings. On Matt these features looked masculine; on Karen, somehow, feminine. As for Frankie and me, we were children of Roy: faces narrow, noses sharp. Our hair was wavy and nearly black, and our ears were smallish and round, like side mirrors on a toy motorcycle. That’s how I’d been up to the age of twelve, anyway, and I kept waiting for Frankie to start mutating as I had, to start growing ahead of himself in some misshapen way, or at least to start getting acne. We were of the same blood; it only seemed fair that we should suffer the same disfigurements. But it wasn’t happening, which only made me feel like more of an aberration.

At school, Karen had begun making a project out of denying I was her brother. This was done in the style of a grand joke, a running gag that no one in her clique ever got tired of hearing. I stepped out of English class one day to go to the bathroom, and when I entered the commons area of C wing, there was Karen stretched out in one of the benched recesses along the wall with Seth Colby across her lap. Another girl sat on the floor in front of them. And leaning against the wall was one of Colby’s followers, a guitar-playing pothead named Wes Markham.

They were all focused on Colby. He was folded into the recess, his sneakers against one side and his shaggy head against the other, his blue-jeaned butt cradled in the valley between Karen’s thighs. As I approached them, Colby finished whatever he was saying and the rest of them finished laughing at it, and the commons fell silent. One of my shoes screeched on the terrazzo floor.

“Not my brother,” Karen said, “these are people. People, this is not my brother.”

The girl sitting on the floor bent her head backward to look at me upside down. Colby peered at me with one eye squinted shut. He said, “Nice hall pass.”

“Oh—yeah, really.” I hefted the piece of plywood that was larger than a dinner plate and strung with a rope handle. “Mr. Watley’s been going crazy in shop. I’ve got Mrs. McInerney, and he calls her ‘Mac,’ so he made her this hamburger-shaped thing, like a Big Mac, that everybody’s supposed to carry around. It’s total bullshit,” I added, in an effort to sound like someone they’d want to listen to—but Colby had already turned away and was looking up at Karen, who rolled her eyes.