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boyhood, which began to swell under the force of her gaze until it stood at attention like a link sausage. I fl ushed in an instant.
    Lulu tilted her head and inspected it from different vantages, but she didn’t touch it.
    “I think it’s pretty,” she said, with a smile.
    Is it any wonder that Lulu earned my undying devotion? She had only to read my goose pimples, or the furrow of my brow, to know precisely what I was hoping or dreading. We sat side by side on the school bus, we ate lunch together, we made covert trips to the bathroom for the purpose of exchanging intelligence, and when we arrived home from school we passed the afternoons together in the trophy room, or in the backyard where the wind stirred the pampas grass.
    Did our friends think we were odd? We didn’t have any friends. I was friendless by de fi nition, and Lulu was friendless by choice. Don’t you see? She chose me. And for that, I was forever grateful.
    Even as the fabric of my new family began to show signs of wear—even as Willow and Big Bill began to fi ght over everything from
    Reaganomics to Ragú, as the twins learned by painful degrees to covet their precious autonomy—Lulu and I grew together like two stalks into one plant. We invented our own language, in which every word was spelled out so that only we could understand it, and when spoken aloud the vowels were repr esented by a succession of exag gerated blinks, or squints—one blink for A, two blinks for E, and so on through I-O-U, and the consonants were symbolized by the fi rst letter of the most beautiful words we could think to begin sentences with, sentences that sounded like spells or incantations, made up of English words and Spanish words and French words we didn’t even know the meaning of, and it didn’t matter, so long as they rolled off our tongues. If ever I were to summon the courage to tell Lulu I loved her, I would tell her like this: Blink squint blink, lullabies from the womb, blink squint blink squint, velvet throne of the goddess Inana, squint blink, Yoruba’s black as night. Blink, squint squint blink. Blink squint blink blink blink.
    The twins thought we were insane. Willow had our eyes examined, and as it turned out I was badly in need of glasses.
    Big Bill wasn’t surprised in the least. “Meat needs meat,” he observed. “Why should the eyes be any exception?”
    Soon I was out fi tted with a pair of thick black safety frames—the only frames substantial enough to accommodate the telescopic lenses I required. The frames were hopelessly outdated, a relic from the mid-’60s. Not even Devo could save me. They had a fi shbowl effect, so that my eyeballs looked huge, Martian-like. The sheer weight of the things caused my neck to ache.
    The upside, of course, was that I could see Lulu better.
    “Tell me again about sandhill cranes,” I said, one gray Saturday in the pampas grass.
    Lulu lay stretched out upon her back, staring up at the low sky.
    Moments before, she’d permitted me to cup my hands once more over her breasts through her cotton blouse, and with the blood pounding in my temples I had discovered, as per the foretelling of my vivid imagination, that they were now more than a handful. She had a dreamy cast about her now, as she did whenever she talked about birds, a faraway look, as though she herself had once tasted the thrill of fl ight. “Every year they gather on the banks of the North Platte River. They nest in the same spot.” She plucked a foxtail and placed the stem between her teeth. “And when they meet their mate, they mate for life. And they do the most incredible mating dances. Leaping and jumping and craning their necks. And they do this thing where they stretch their wings way out like they’re doing tai chi. The mates do these things called unison calls, which are different from all the other calls they make. I saw them on KCET. They’re long and lovely and heartbreaking. Someday I want to go there,” she said.
    “Before