Chapter 1
There was no suspicious upbringing here, none whatsoever. The clanging of pots at three a.m., signaling both her bedtime and our waking, was of the utmost normalcy. The fine-toothed comb, with which I was entrusted in order to go through our horse’s hair rug on a twice-daily basis to remove new lice eggs, symbolized nothing out of the ordinary, nothing whatsoever.
Granted, we had little to compare our life to: the friends we had were tasked with keeping silent and remaining motionless, all positions they were well-adjusted for, given their serenity of character and their limp, noddle-like arms, plus their sewed-on button eyes which never seemed to stop staring at us, either in wide-eyed ecstasy or supreme boredom, depending on their mood and ours.
It was all so normal that if someone were to come and call it otherwise, Miranda, Jerome, and I would have all tilted our heads back and howled in unison.
