23.

Audrey grew up separately from her siblings. They attended St. Monica’s while Audrey was sent to North Park.

Everyone knows this already. It’s been documented in fifteen books and a low-budget CBS miniseries. Audrey’s public school education is always mentioned as evidence of her spiritual and moral deficiency. As in, “See! This is what made her eat that city! I’ve found the solution!” The number of ex-schoolmates who’ve been handed obscene wads of cash by fly-by-night media outlets for a personal recollection of the time Audrey ate licorice in the first grade is now approaching triple digits.

What people don’t know, what they haven’t yet speculated on, is why Audrey went to a public school in the first place. It’s one of the basic questions, and it’s not even asked. People are so focused—I almost wrote “ fuckassed,” but that would’ve cost me a Hail Mary—on describing the lurid image of a young woman swallowing a stop sign that they ignore how she might have gotten to that point.

She grew up alone.

While she snuggled with Misty on the queen-sized mattress, the sunlight beams angling through the blinds and warming her bare infant thigh, Audrey was alone. When she lay prone on the living room carpet while Murray’s cold fingers gripped her ankles, testing the softness of her stumps and the sturdiness of her shin-bones, Audrey was alone. When Grandma Pencil stooped to peel crusted snot from Audrey’s upper lip, exclaiming, “Dirty, dirty girl. Who is going to love you with a nose goblin face?” Audrey was alone.

Her siblings were five years older, a gap too wide. They treated her like a roadblock, a toy, a petting zoo goat. Through her elementary years, adept as Audrey was at maneuvering with her crutches and padded stump socks, she couldn’t keep up with McKenna and Toby. They sprinted across the yard, bicycled through the streets, played baseball at the park. She couldn’t keep up with her peers, either. Her footlessness excluded her from sports, cheerleading, and Girl Scouts.

When Audrey was in the fourth grade, Misty urged her to try out for concert band. No Mapes had ever played an instrument. Audrey loved the idea but wanted to play the drums. Misty insisted on the flute. She even bought one for Audrey (made of real silver, with open holes—top-of-the-line).

“Where did the money come from?” “Who picked this thing out?” “Why wasn’t I consulted on this decision?” Murray asked these and many other questions, around which Misty’s answers danced.

No matter how expensive it was, though, Audrey refused to assemble it. She wouldn’t put it to her lips. She wouldn’t even look at it.

Horrible fights followed, with Audrey screaming and Misty sitting in front of the TV, knitting a sweater. God love her, the girl wanted to break that flute. Audrey shook with anger. She trashed her room, scattered clothes everywhere, upset lamps, toppled toy-boxes.

McKenna talked to Audrey. Night after night, she tried to calm Audrey with distractions in the form of board games or surreptitious snacks (a pair of washed handkerchiefs, a pile of rubber bands) smuggled to Audrey as she lay crying on her bed. Audrey kept up the rage longer than anyone expected, and Misty kept up the nonchalance with equal fervor.

Murray was incapable of mediating. When Audrey knocked bowls of peanuts and pretzels onto the carpet, he stepped into the living room, frowned, and shook his head in disappointment. “Toby!” he said. “See if your sister wants to take a walk. McK-enna, get the vacuum.”

He tried, didn’t he?

Audrey spent her entire fourth-grade year drumming. She drummed on tables, floors, walls, crutches—every surface within reach. She was determined to prove that, drums or no drums, she was going to play the drums.

Misty was unflappable. Her halcyon grin could not be altered, and so she chewed her Gordon’s fish sticks with hardly a blink, hardly a dip into the tartar sauce, hardly a batted eye for the still-frozen middles as Audrey tap-tap-tapped.

The drumming affected everyone else. “I swear, I’m going to make your arms match your legs if you don’t cut that noise,” Murray barked.

But it was all bark, and Audrey knew it. Murray threatened in this way three times a week. Each time, the kids debated if he even knew he’d spoken aloud.

In the end, Audrey lost. Her tapping faded. Her dream of playing the drums vanished. She ate the flute, but this was only a symbolic victory. Misty had won.

Audrey had grade school friends, to be sure. There was the porker Sally Vance, who had the odd habit of not flushing. There was the pallid Mickey Leach, who sported a two-inch-wide part down the middle of her spaghetti hair. A severe case of psoriasis on her arms made her smell like tar. There was Betsy Frost, a redheaded girl freckled like a blizzard. Even her eyeballs were freckled. Audrey’s friends were the class rejects, girls who rarely ventured out of their houses and whose histories meant that they were exquisite at entertaining themselves. They didn’t visit often.

Mostly, Audrey stayed home and painted with Misty. And ate what Misty painted.

Undoubtedly, Grandma Pencil had saved Audrey’s legs from amputation when she’d forced Murray to throw away the Dr Pepper prosthetics. In doing so, however, she also killed Audrey’s social life.

A girl with pop cans for feet is a curiosity, perhaps even a source of admiration and envy. As in, “Why can’t I have Dr Pepper feet?”

But a girl on crutches, if you’ll pardon the pun, is pedestrian. There’s no sex appeal to those armpit sticks. The only thing crutches say is, “Keep your distance—you might catch it.”