29.

By the time McKenna and Toby were twelve, the nuns were regular dinner guests.

They never came all at once; they never came alone. Like Noah’s precious cargo, they arrived in pairs, stepping gingerly up the cracked walkway, arms linked, appearing not so much pious as geriatric and scared outside the bubbles of their sanctimonious classrooms. Once they’d climbed the four concrete steps, their knock rattled the metal door with all the force of a dried sponge tossed by a Farm League reject.

Two or three times a month they descended, always unannounced to the family. Grandma Pencil figured that no one would mind. After all, she was doing 95 percent of the cooking these days.

A couple of Mapeses minded, though. The nuns were Mc-Kenna and Toby’s teachers, ex- teachers, future teachers. For the twins, the dinners ranged from uncomfortable to mortifying. The only choice they had was to hide in their room until the last possible moment, doing (or in Toby’s case, pretending to do) homework.

“Fucking penguins!” Toby said.

He’d seen The Blues Brothers on his friend Tommy’s HBO (Tommy was Toby’s friend, not McKenna’s, you’ll notice). Toby loved to say the f-word in all its provocative and hilarious incarnations. He used it like a claw hammer on unsuspecting victims. Like the time he told a mentally handicapped kid at school, “Fuck a fencepost, you fucking retard.” Grandma Pencil had given up on scolding Toby about his gutter mouth, except when he occasionally let one slip in front of the nuns, at which point she flushed with embarrassment and told him to do fifty push- ups. Toby was happy to oblige, and Grandma and the nuns always cheered him to the finish.

“Dad says they’re lousy cooks,” McKenna said. “That’s why they come over.”

“Of course they are,” Toby answered. He lay on his bed with a Fitness magazine held above his face. “They’ve been sucking Bro-phy’s thingy so long, everything else tastes like cardboard.”

“Why doesn’t it surprise me,” McKenna said, “that you know what Father Brophy’s thingy tastes like?” She was seated at the writing desk.

An empty Coke can hit the back of McKenna’s head. It landed on the carpet without a sound. These were the pre- divider days, before a floral- patterned chintz provided each twin an 8' × 9' empire to rule.

“AUDREY! SNACK!” Toby yelled, returning to an article about gluteals and quads and the rest of his oily dementia.

“Don’t,” McKenna said. She tried to concentrate on her English worksheet. Pen poised, no answers came. Identify the indirect object in the following sentence:

“SNACK, JAWS!” Toby hollered.

The door creaked open. Audrey, on crutches, entered. Her hair was pulled back into a knot and fastened by a barrette that was braided with red and blue ribbon—her “rainbow barrette.” Very trendy, very 1984. McKenna hated to see her sister being sucked into the fashion vortex. The barrette matched Audrey’s shirt rainbow, which arched across her chest from three- quarter sleeve to three-quarter sleeve.

Audrey stooped to pick up the Coke can, then opened wide and jammed it in. It popped in her mouth like it a Flintstones vitamin. The can was probably half- digested in her gut before she made it out the door. McKenna could hear her singing on the way to her room, “Our house! Is a very, very, very fine house!”

Toby’s eyes were still on his magazine. “You gotta look at this,” he said. “This chick is built like you. Oh wait, it’s a dude.”

“You shouldn’t feed Audrey trash,” McKenna said. She penciled in the answer to number seven: me.

“She shouldn’t eat trash.”

“But she does. And you should know better than to give it to her. She’s only seven.”

“So it’s my fault she’s a freak?” He sat up and unsnapped the shoulder buttons of his cham shirt. He yanked off the sleeves and tossed them in the corner by his dresser, thereby revealing the upper arms he’d stopped calling “guns” and was now calling “my babies.” Typical Toby, beating his gorilla chest. He thought cam-ouf age pants, Van Halen pins, and biceps would distract attention from the swaths of acne on his cheeks and forehead.

“Audrey’s special,” McKenna said. “She’s got a gift.”

“You believe that crap? Mom only says that cuz she doesn’t know what else to say.”

“You believe Grandma’s crap.”

“All I know is ‘we aren’t supposed to tell anyone.’ ” His fingers made careless quotation marks in the air. “That sounds like hiding a freak to me.”

“You would know.”

“Yep. I share a room with one.”

From downstairs, Grandma Pencil called them to dinner.