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From that moment on, the taunts and torture began and didn’t end for more than a year. That night I pulled down the bedspread and found a photograph taped to my pillow: a mutilated body on a battlefield with a soldier looking at it indifferently. In blood-red ink the soldier was labeled Bobby, and I was the corpse. A lot of that sort of thing went on, but the most frightening moments were when Ross would casually say to Bobby, “Want to know what my brother does, Bobby? ” Looking straight at me, a gleam smeared across his face, he’d pause for millenniums, making me wish I was either in Sumatra or dead, or both.

I thought about it for a while and, sitting down at the typewriter one afternoon, opened the story with those same words addressed to an adoring little brother who sat on the edge of the bathtub watching him prepare for … I had no idea of where to go from there. It took me two weeks to write. It was about a bunch of toughs in a small town who are getting ready to go to a big party at a girl’s house. Each boy has a little section of the story, and in turn tells you about their lives and what he thinks will happen tonight when the party gets going up at Brenda’s.

The reason I’m mentioning the episode is that it was the first time the two of them really knocked heads over something. Ross burned the chair, Mother spanked him and threw the thing in the garbage. When she was gone he took it out of the garbage and carefully burned holes in the bottoms of her expensive new leather boots. She discovered them an hour later and, to my horror, asked me if I’d done it. Me! I was the dullard who watched these titans with awe and trembling. No, I hadn’t done it. Of course she knew that, but needed to hear it from me before she took action.