21.

Toby’s transformation was a wonder to behold.

Both twins grew, of course. Their bones stretched. Hair sprouted. Feet strained against shoes. Pencil marks on the wall beside the bedroom door crept upward like the rungs of a ladder.

By age eleven, Toby needed a longer bed. Between fourth and seventh grade, his height increased by nearly a foot. McKenna grew a “measly” five inches. Toby’s weight doubled, to 170 pounds. He was quick to point out that it wasn’t fat. It was muscle. McKenna weighed eighty-nine pounds, just six pounds heavier than she’d been at age ten.

Toby was clearly Grandma Pencil’s favorite. While she defended and babied McKenna—doted on her, pitied her, coddled her like a puppy—she worshipped Toby. Here was a fine, robust young lad who could finish three cobs of corn, two helpings of mashed potatoes, and a pile of roast beef, and still have room for apple cobbler. Grandma’s memories of Toby as a finicky child, being bribed to eat his hot dogs, had long been forgotten. At age five, around the time physical measurements became an obsession, Toby had begun to love food. Or, if he didn’t actually love food—the taste of it, the sensuality of the morsels upon his tongue, the delicate popping of corncob kernels between his canines (and McKenna was certain that he didn’t; he didn’t love these things at all)—he definitely loved what food gave him. It made his body grow.

“I’m too skinny,” he said one evening. “A bean pole.”

Briefed in cotton tighty-whities, he flexed, shirtless, in front of the bathroom mirror. McKenna brushed her teeth at the sink. Thin but noticeable striations bulged like buried cables along Toby’s rib-cage, back, and neck. He was two years away from being a teenager, but he had the body of an adult.

“Feel my thigh,” he said. He turned from the mirror and propped his left foot on the lidded toilet.

McKenna spat noisily (although if Toby had been listening carefully, he would’ve noticed that nothing came out of McKenna’s mouth) in part to make Toby think she was expelling her toothpaste, but also to show her displeasure. Every other night it was “Grab this,” “Mea sure that,” “Check out how hard this is.” McKenna was reaching some sort of resolution on the matter of her brother’s demands, although it wasn’t formulated yet in her mind. The overarching sentiment, though, was this: Toby frightened her.

Talking around the toothpaste, McKenna answered, “I’m sure it’s fine.” McKenna turned on the water, the hiss. She watched the foamy spittle that Toby had left in the sink being lifted and carried, swirling, down the drain.

What did the toothpaste feel, McKenna wondered, when it was so violently disturbed? What did it feel like to be devoured by the drain? Did it thrill in that moment of surprise? Or did it shudder at the horror of the unknown, the awaiting darkness?

She swallowed her toothpaste. Then she burped it back up, burning her throat.

“See if you can get your fingers around it,” Toby said. He squeezed his thigh. “I can, and that sucks. But you got normal little hands. Mine are huge. Come on.”

“No, thanks,” McKenna said.

“No, thanks !” Toby peeped like a songbird. “God, you’re so gay.”

“Takes one to know one.” McKenna pressed the newly regurgitated Aim under her tongue. She could smell the bile on her breath. The taste, though, was pure mint.

Toby stepped off the toilet. From behind, he wrapped his forearm around McKenna’s neck. He forced her to the floor.

“What does that even mean ?” Toby growled. He lay on top of her, squeezing the air out of her. “Why are you such an ass?”

McKenna’s cheek was flattened against the cold tiles.

“There’s-a-cook-,” she rasped. She could see, in the slight gap between the wooden cupboard and the floor, half of a Chips Ahoy. Why was it there? From when? She suspected Audrey. McKenna knew—it was their secret—that Audrey often stashed uneaten food around the house.

Toby released McKenna’s neck. He lowered his head until his face was inches from hers, his breath heating her eyes. “You’re talking about a goddamn cookie?”

“Half,” McKenna said. “Under there.”

Toby drew the cookie out, rolled off McKenna’s back, and stood. He wiped the Chips Ahoy on his underwear before popping the whole thing into his mouth. He reached down and helped McKenna to her feet.

“Ah wu jush ki’in,” he said.

The wedge garbled his words, but McKenna knew what he was saying; she’d heard it before. She nodded, rubbed her throat.

Toby swallowed. “Friends, Kenny?” He was waiting for eye contact. “You know I just mess with you because I can.”

McKenna lifted her gaze. Looking Toby in the eyes always felt like a worse defeat than the physical domination itself. He attempted a tender expression, which manifested as strain, as something like constipation.

“It’s fine,” McKenna said. “What ever.”

Toby punched her shoulder. “See? We’re friends. My sista.”

McKenna studied the boy in front of her. What had once been a reflection of her own face and body was now a fun house mirror. Unwashed, scraggly hair that hung over his ears. Fists like massive walnuts at his sides. A bloated face. A body twice as heavy as her own. His chest thrust out like a baboon’s, showing the beginnings of hair.

The coming years would see this monster distort, bulge, and ripple in ways McKenna couldn’t have even imagined at that moment in the bathroom, at age eleven, standing under a yellow bulb in the increasingly grimy Mapes home on that early August day weeks before starting the sixth grade, weeks before Audrey began first grade at the public school, months before Misty’s first real break from reality, and years before McKenna learned the name of the disease that had made her swallow and regurgitate the toothpaste before, during, and after her brother had choked her on the floor.

“Seriously, though,” Toby said, as they left the bathroom. “Feel my thigh.”