Teaser File: I Can Explain

I clearly remember the first time I looked to the right and then to the left and then straight into the inquiring eyes that were looking at me with that pained what in the world have you done expression. 

I was seven.

My brother Rodney, two years my senior, was hanging by his feet, which were duct taped to the garage rafters.  I was standing on the concrete pavers just in front of the open garage door with a half empty container of cool whip in one hand and a rubber chicken in the other.  A record player was hanging halfway out of the dormer window above the garage playing an Earth Wind and Fire album that kept skipping, repeating half the chorus of “Boogie Wonderland” over and over.  My dad pulled our station wagon into the driveway and, in dazed bewilderment, stepped outside the car and uttered those words, the words I would fatefully hear so many times in my life,

“What the hell is going on here?!”

“Dad-let me explain.” 

Because there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, there always was.  Well, that’s not true-when it involved Rodney there was a fifty fifty chance it was reasonable…..70/30...Ok, Rodney was behind a lot of the more inexplicable moments.

“Hey Bobby, bring me a book of matches.” 

Considering the options with him were usually do it or get swirlied, I usually acquiesced.  Within thirty seconds of bringing the matches to Rodney he had lit three bottle rockets on fire, then freaked out that they were lit, and pointed them into the bathroom toilet.  Did you know that toilets shatter when you shoot bottle rockets into them? Into millions of pieces? Did you know that if you had a bloody nose and dumped all of your bloody nose tissues into the toilet and what appeared to be half of a human body’s worth of blood that when the toilet shatters into a million pieces, it looks like a scene from Law and Order Special Victims Unit?  And in sprinted Dad, right on time, and there went Rodney out the basement bathroom egress window. 

“What the…”

“Hey, don’t freak out ok, let me explain.”

By the time I was twelve Dad had enough and talked mom into sending us to boarding school.  Rodney got shipped off to a boot camp type facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I was kind of relieved, thinking my days of being caught in strange, unintentional trouble were over.  But my mom, a well-meaning, but confused hippy who favored and babied me, dressed me up like a girl, doctored my birth certificate, and sent me to an all-female preparatory academy in Maine called Eden.  Despite my hopes, it was there that the biggest “I can explain ever” would take place.