Dopey got all red in the face. He is a wrestler. His neck is as thick as my thigh. When his face gets red, his neck gets even redder. It's a joy to see.

"What are you talking about?" Dopey demanded. "I don't even like Debbie Mancuso."

"Sure, you don't," I said. "That's why you sat next to her at lunch today."

Dopey's neck turned the color of blood.

"David!" Andy, over by the stove, suddenly started yelling his head off. "Jake! Get a move on, you two. Soup's on."

Andy's two other sons, Sleepy and Doc, came shuffling in. Well, Sleepy shuffled. Doc bounded. Doc was the only one of Andy's kids who I could ever remember to call by his real name. That's because with red hair and these ears that stick out really far from his head, he looked like a cartoon character. Plus he was really smart, and in him I saw a lot of potential help with my homework, even if I was three grades ahead of him.

Sleepy, on the other hand, is of no use whatsoever to me, except as a guy I could bum rides to and from school with. At eighteen, Sleepy was in full possession of both his license and a vehicle, a beat-up old Rambler with an iffy starter, but you were taking your life into your hands riding with him since he was hardly ever fully awake due to his night job as a pizza delivery boy. He was saving up, as he was fond of reminding us on the few occasions when he actually spoke, for a Carnaro, and as near as I could tell, that Camaro was all he ever thought about.

"She sat by me," Dopey bellowed. "I do not like Debbie Mancuso."

"Surrender the fantasy," I advised him as I sidled past him. My mom had given me a bowl of salsa to take to the table. "I just hope," I whispered into his ear as I went by, "that you two practiced safe sex that night at Kelly's pool party. I'm not ready to be a stepaunt yet."

"Shut up," Dopey yelled at me. "You … you … Fungus Hands!"

I put one of my fungus hands over my heart, and pretended like he'd stabbed me there.

"Gosh," I said. "That really hurts. Making fun of people's allergic reactions is so incredibly incisive and witty."

"Yeah, dork," Sleepy said to Dopey, as he walked by. "What about you and cat dander, huh?"

Dopey, in out of his depth, began to look desperate.

"Debbie Mancuso," he yelled, "and I are not having sex!"

I saw my mom and Andy exchange a quick, bewildered glance.

"I should certainly hope not," Doc, Dopey's little brother, said as he breezed past us. "But if you are, Brad, I hope you're using condoms. While a good-quality latex condom has a failure rate of about two percent when used as directed, typically the failure rate averages closer to twelve percent. That makes them only about eighty-five percent effective against preventing pregnancy. If used with a spermicide, the effectiveness improves dramatically. And condoms are our best defense – though not as good, of course, as abstention – against some STDs, including HIV."

Everyone in the kitchen – my mother, Andy, Dopey, Sleepy, and I – stared at Doc, who is, as I think I mentioned before, twelve.

"You," I finally said, "have way too much time on your hands."

Doc shrugged. "It helps to be informed. While I myself am not sexually active at the current time, I hope to become so in the near future." He nodded toward the stove. "Dad, your chimichangas, or whatever they are, are on fire."

While Andy jumped to put out his cheese fire, my mother stood there, apparently, for once in her life, at a loss for words.

"I – " she said. "I … Oh. My."

Dopey wasn't about to let Doc have the last word. "I am not," he said, again, "having sex with – "

"Aw, Brad," Sleepy said. "Put a sock in it, will ya?"

Dopey, of course, wasn't lying. I'd seen for myself that they'd only been playing tonsil hockey. Dopey and Debbie's fiery passion was the reason I had to keep slathering my hands with cortisone cream. But what was the fun of having stepbrothers if you couldn't torture them? Not that I was going to tell anyone what I'd seen, of course. I am many things, but not a snitch. But don't get me wrong: I would have liked Dopey to have gotten caught sneaking out while he was grounded. I mean, I don't think he'd exactly learned anything from his "punishment." He would still probably refer to my friend Adam as a fag the next time he saw him.

Only he wouldn't do it in my presence. Because, wrestler or not, I could kick Dopey's butt from here to Clinton Ave., my street back in Brooklyn.

But I wasn't going to be the one to turn him in. It just wasn't classy, you know?

"And did you," my mother asked me, with a smile, "feel that the student government meeting was as bitching as Brad seems to think it was, Suze?"

I sat down at my place at the dining table. As soon as I did so, Max, the Ackerman family dog, came snuffling along and put his head in my lap. I pushed it off my lap. He put it right back. Although I'd lived there less than a month, Max had already figured out that I am the person in the household most likely to have leftovers on my plate.

Mealtime was, of course, the only time Max paid attention to me. The rest of the time, he avoided me like the plague. He especially avoided my bedroom. Animals, unlike humans, are very perceptive toward paranormal phenomena, and Max sensed Jesse, and accordingly stayed far away from the parts of the house where he normally hung out.

"Sure," I said, taking a sip of ice water. "It was bitching."

"And what," my mother wanted to know, "was decided at this meeting?"

"I made a motion to cancel the spring dance," I said. "Sorry, Brad. I know how much you were counting on escorting Debbie to it."

Dopey shot me a dirty look from across the table.

"Why on earth," my mother said, "would you want to cancel the spring dance, Suzie?"

"Because it's a stupid waste of our very limited funds," I said.

"But a dance," my mother protested. "I always loved going to school dances when I was your age."

That, I wanted to say, is because you always had a date, Mom. Because you were pretty and nice and boys liked you. You weren't a pathological freak, like I am, with fungus hands and a secret ability to talk to the dead.

Instead, I said, "Well, you'd have been in the minority in our class. My motion was seconded and passed by twenty-seven votes."