“I do mean your mom is smarter than Nana, too,” Nora told me. “The conformity begins with Nana. My mother and Martha go along with it—they’re conformists. They’re sheep!” Nora insisted. “But not your mom—she doesn’t do what she’s supposed to do, and she’s still not doing it. It’s stupid to do only what’s expected of you. Your mom has balls, Adam—big ones,” Nora assured me.

Nora was my confidante, my most trusted informer, and my ally in a common cause: we both hated the imposed trips up north, though for different reasons. In my case, I had to share a bedroom with Henrik—Uncle Johan and Aunt Martha’s one and only. Two years younger than Nora, four years older than me, Henrik had been bullied by Nora, and—without Nora around to protect me—Henrik bullied me.

That I was always wearing Henrik’s outgrown underpants seemed to be reason enough for him to revile me. I wore both Nora’s and Henrik’s hand-me-down clothes, but not Nora’s underpants. While Nora was a tomboy, and she dressed like one, Aunt Abigail had made her wear girls’ panties. Henrik thought I should have worn girls’ panties, too—“especially the ones Nora bled in,” as he put it. When I pointed out that Nora’s panties had no hole for me to pee out of, Henrik said I had “no penis to speak of.” In Henrik’s view, I was a mama’s boy—I should have sat on the toilet and peed like a girl.

In Nora’s case, she shared a bedroom up north with various Vinter girls—her female relatives among those North Conway Norwegians. These blonde girls were not tomboys; they were girly girls, around Nora’s age. The blondes dressed to seduce boys. “Ski sluts,” Nora called them. When the blondes made fun of her for dressing like a boy, Nora beat them up.

“We should share a bedroom,” Nora told me. “We’re not going to fool around; if you tried, I’d beat the crap out of you. This is more of the Brewster conformity business; this is more of the shit concerning what we’re supposed to do. Your mom would know better—your mom would let us sleep in the same room. I bet she’d let us sleep in the same fucking bed.”

“My mom’s not around enough to make the rules,” I pointed out.

“You have to get over the part that she’s ‘not around enough’—that just goes with who your mother is,” Nora told me.