“As you can see, there’s no family resemblance whatsoever,” she said.

The girl on the floor stretched her legs out in front of her, kicked off a sandal, and worked her toes over one of Wes Markham’s white-socked ankles.

I knew Wes Markham because he was in two of my classes. He was long and lanky and had thick red hair that rose up from his forehead like the bristles of a push broom. He walked like the Pink Panther, with a spring in his knees and a swing to his hands—the hands that were now buried in the pockets of his corduroys. His elbows were locked, lifting his shoulders so that the hem of his T-shirt rode high and revealed a quarter-moon of bare stomach. When I looked up, he was staring at me, his mouth crimped into a slightly lopsided grin as if he were piecing together a punch line.

“You’d better get going,” Karen said. “McInerney times you when you’ve got the hamburger.”

“Right.” She was making that up, I thought, but I wasn’t positive, so I walked with my best what-do-I-care shuffle to the other side of the commons, the plywood disk bouncing off my thigh and then banging loudly against the door as I entered the boys’ bathroom. Before the door closed behind me, I heard them break into a laugh.

“Am I the ugliest person in the family?” I asked my mother the following Saturday. We were in the station wagon on our way to Divine Mercy for confession. We’d left Karen at home because she’d told us she wasn’t handing her sins over to anyone, and we’d left Frankie because he’d started confessing things that weren’t real—hoarding spice mélange on the planet Arrakis, or breaking flight patterns on Y-wing patrol missions—which had finally prompted Father Gillespie to pull my mother aside (in the same manner he used when she tried to crash the Communion line) and ask if this wasn’t some sort of code for larger and more relevant sins.

She took her eyes off the road and stared at my face for a moment—maybe to see how much it had changed since the last time she’d looked at it. “No,” she said leadenly, turning forward. “None of my children are ugly. None of them look like me, and none of them are ugly.”