9.

“It’s a medical record,” Toby said, on the eighteenth day of mea-suring. “For science.”

He scribbled numbers. He was irritated, indignant at being questioned. He promptly closed the notebook, snapped a thick rubber band around it, and thrust it under a pile of pants in the bottom drawer of his dresser.

This was a young boy trying to justify his obsessive need to compare every one of his and his “little” sister’s body parts during the summer after their kindergarten year. Kindergarten had made Toby a king, and he needed to make it clear that he was the only king of this house hold.

He forced the drawer shut with his foot and said, “If you touch it, you’re dead.”

“Why would I touch your crappy book?” McKenna answered from her seat at the card table, where she doodled a woman robot melting a man’s head with an optical laser beam. She, too, was indignant. But she’d never felt indignant before, and because she was unused to managing this particular emotion, she’d actually said, “crammy book.” She hoped Toby hadn’t noticed.

“You’ll change the numbers,” Toby answered. “You hate that I’m bigger than you.”

“Three centimeters? Big whoop.”

The height difference was one of seven documented disparities between the twins. The yardstick measurements had shown that Toby’s hands, feet, kneecaps, waist, spinal cord, and skull were ever-so-slightly longer and/or wider than McKenna’s. McKenna’s only advantage was neck length, but these results were circled in red crayon because Toby claimed that Mom had fudged the fig-ures so McKenna wouldn’t cry again.

McKenna hated the ritual, but even worse than enduring the ritual was being called a coward, so she succumbed to the weekly assessment, standing pole-straight and facing forward. She studied the crude Winnie the Pooh mural her mother had painted on their wall. Misty held the yardstick and yawned into the back of her free hand. Toby recorded the data, smug, satisfied.

Audrey, the footless one-year-old, crawled with confidence along the carpet in the middle of the bedroom, searching for something, anything, to stuff in her mouth.

Dad stood at an assembly line eight miles south, his feet aching, earplugs and safety glasses pushing the world away while the dust of steel and iron slipped into his nose with each breath.