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asked. Buster nodded. “I didn’t tell him to do that,” she said. “It’s an amazing story,” Buster said, and Suzanne finally looked up from the sidewalk. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.” Buster told her that he would love to read anything else she had written and she said she would think about it. “Let me give you my e-mail address,” he said, and he tore off the first page of Lucas Kizza’s story and wrote his address on the back of the paper. Suzanne took the paper and nodded and turned to walk back to the entrance, but by then about a dozen students, led by the office aide, were standing in the way. “There she is,” the girl told them. “She’s famous.” The students walked forward, slowly, as if moving toward a cornered animal. “Get in the car, Buster,” Annie said, and Buster ran around to the passenger side of the car and shut the door. Annie drove off as the students now stood at the curb, surrounding Suzanne Crosby. Buster looked back at the scene and waved to Suzanne. Just before the car turned onto the street, he watched Suzanne waving back.

Back home, the car rolling to a dead stop in the gravel driveway, Annie and Buster found the house empty, a note left on the kitchen counter. It read:

A & B,

We have art to make in North Carolina. We’ll be back in a few days. Don’t go into our room.

Love,

Caleb and Camille

The thought of going into their parents’ room terrified Annie and Buster. The things that had spilled out of the room and into the common areas, the fake knives, the plastic bags of chicken livers and fake blood, scrawled notes for future art projects that all required some form of explosives, were enough to make them wary of what their parents would then deem so strange that it must be kept hidden in their room.

The house to themselves, unmonitored, they popped some popcorn, mixed some drinks, and it was nearly thirty minutes into a flimsy Edward G. Robinson noir that Annie turned to Buster, frowned, and then said, “You never put your eye patch back on.” Buster touched his eye, perfectly adjusted to the light, his spatial dexterity returned to him, and resisted the urge to retrieve the patch from his room. “I guess I don’t need it,” he said, and Annie kissed him on the cheek and smiled. “We’re taking care of each other,” she said. “We’re getting better,” Buster replied, and the two siblings watched with glee as some poor sap on the TV screen walked unknowingly toward his own doom.

more woe, 1995

artists: caleb and camille fang

On the opening night of the Hazzard County High School production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Buster was going to play Romeo. His sister, Annie, was to play Juliet. Other than Buster, no one backstage seemed to understand that this was a problem. “Let me ask you something, Buster,” said Mr. Delano, the high school drama teacher. “Have you heard of the phrase the show must go on?” Buster nodded. “Well,” Mr. Delano continued, “this is the kind of moment for which that phrase was coined.”

The original Romeo, Coby Reid, had driven his car into a tree only a few hours earlier, though no one was sure if it was on purpose or not, and no one seemed interested in knowing for certain. Since Coby was not dead but merely in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung and spectacular damage to his wonderful smile, the cast and crew decided that the show need not be canceled but rather recast. That Buster, the stage manager, had memorized every line of the entire play seemed to make the decision fairly obvious. That his sister, two years his senior and in her final performance as a high school student, would be playing the role of Juliet was seen as only a minor inconvenience.

“I’m an actor, Buster,” his sister said to him when he went to her dressing room. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and carefully brushed her hair, dyed from its normal golden blond to a deep brown for the role. She looked, to Buster, as if she had been drugged or hypnotized. “I won’t be kissing you,” she continued, “I’ll be kissing Romeo, my one true love.” Buster