This was my brother’s premature entry into a life of crime. Over the next couple of years he spent all of his after-school time with Bruno and Dave, and since Terry was too young to keep their kind of hours alone, I had to tag along. At first the twins tried to coerce me to run errands for them, but at Terry’s insistence I was allowed to sit under a tree and read, even during the street fights. And there were always fights. The gang couldn’t sleep well if they hadn’t smashed someone’s face in at some point during the day. Once they’d fought every likely candidate in our town, Bruno would steal his father’s Land Rover and drive them to nearby towns for the face-smashing. There were plenty of kids to fight. Every town has tough guys, a new generation of prison filler waiting to happen.

Each afternoon they taught Terry how to fight. They had constructed a whole philosophical system based on violence and combat, and as Terry’s fists formed bony bricks, Bruno and Dave became a double act, one asking a question while the other answered it.

“What are your hands for?”

“Curling into fists.”

“What are your legs for?”

“Kicking.”

“And the feet?”

“Stomping in a face.”

“Fingers?”

“Gouging.”

“Teeth?”

“Biting.”

“Head?”

“Head-butting.”

“Elbow?”

“Jamming into jaws.”

Et cetera.

They preached the human body as not only a weapon but an entire arsenal, and as I watched them drum this oily gospel into Terry’s head, I thought about my own body in comparison- an arsenal aimed inward, at myself.

When they weren’t fighting, they were stealing- anything and everything. With no discerning eye for value, they swiped junked cars, broken car parts, school supplies, sporting goods; they broke into bakeries and stole bread, and if there wasn’t any bread they stole dough; they broke into hardware stores and stole hammers and ladders and lightbulbs and showerheads; they broke into butchers’ and stole sausages and meat hooks and lamb shanks; they robbed the post office of stamps and uncollected mail; they broke into the Chinese restaurant and took chopsticks and hoisin sauce and fortune cookies; and from the service station they stole ice and frantically tried to sell it before it melted.

If you were unlucky enough to be around after one of their stealing expeditions, you’d have to get ready to go shopping. Their sales technique was impressive. For Bruno and Dave, business was always booming, because they’d found a niche market: terrified children.

Terry got in the thick of it too, crawling through windows and air vents, getting into those hard-to-reach places while I waited outside and pleaded internally for them to hurry. I pleaded so hard I hurt myself. Over the months, while Terry was developing muscles, agility, and hand-to-hand combat skills, I was degenerating again. My parents, fearing a return of my old sickness, called a doctor. He was stumped. “It looks like nerves,” he said, “but what does a twelve-year-old have to be nervous about?” The doctor peered curiously at my scalp. “What happened to your hair?” he asked. “Looks like some of it’s fallen out.” I shrugged and looked around the room as if searching for the hair. “What’s this?” my father shouted. “He’s losing his hair? Oh my God, what a child!” A Pandora’s box of angst opened whenever I witnessed my brother in mid-robbery, but when there was a street fight, I put my whole soul into fretting. Every day when we walked home I pleaded with Terry to break away. I was absolutely convinced I was going to watch my brother die right before my eyes. Because of Terry’s age and size, Bruno and Dave armed him with a cricket bat, which he waved in the air as he let out a war cry and fast-limped it to their enemies. Rarely would an opponent stick around to see what he’d do with the bat, although some did stand their ground, and during one fight, Terry got slashed with a knife. Gasping, I ran into the middle of the fight and dragged him away. Bruno and Dave slapped him around to toughen him up, then sent him back in while the blood was still flowing. I screamed in protest until my voice ran out, then I shouted air.

These weren’t schoolyard fights, this was gang warfare. I’d look at the snarling faces of the young as they flung themselves into battle, having the time of their lives. Their indifference to violence and pain mystified me. I couldn’t comprehend these creatures, rabid with joy, squashing each other into the dust. And the way they adored their injuries- it was baffling. They gazed at their gaping wounds like lovers reunited after a long separation. It was nuts.

Caroline couldn’t understand them either. She was livid at me for letting my little brother join these thugs, even though she was happy the gang was protecting me. Her furious words left an afterglow on my cheek: her attention was all I needed. I still admired myself for my friendship with Caroline. Our conversations were the best thing about me and the only thing I loved about my life, especially since every afternoon Bruno and Dave would flick lit cigarettes at me and threaten me with various ingenious tortures, my favorite being that they would bury me alive in a pet cemetery. They never followed up, though, because Terry had made it clear that if I suffered so much as one scratch, he would quit. Clearly the twins could spot talent. They figured he was a criminal prodigy; why else would these two thugs obey him? If you asked them, they might have said it was a mixture of his energy, his sense of humor, his willingness to follow every order, his utter fearlessness. Whatever it was, they felt good having him around, even if it meant putting up with his brooding older brother who’d do nothing but read. Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.

“How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?” Dave asked me once.

I explained that there was a line. “If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and-”

“All right!”

“All books are in some way about other books.”

“I get it!”

It was an endless search, and endlessly fruitful; the dead sent me hurtling through time, through the centuries, and while Bruno seethed at my wide-eyed reverence for something as inert and unmanly as a book, Dave was intrigued. Sometimes he’d flop down beside me after a fight, and with blood streaming down his face he’d say, “Tell me what you’re reading about.” And I’d tell him, keeping an eye on Bruno, who burned with white-hot ignorant hate. More than once he tore my books into shreds. More than once I sat horrified as one of them flew off the edge of a cliff. There goes Crime and Punishment! There goes Plato’s Republic! The pages may have spread like wings as they fell, but they wouldn’t fly.

The boys demanded that while reading, I keep one eye out for police and tourists. Terry nudged me in a way that said, “Do this one small thing to keep the peace,” so I acquiesced, though as a lookout I was terrible. I was too busy observing the gang and coming to conclusions that I was burning to share. Bruno, Dave, and Terry had smashed their way into supremacy of the district and now were undefeated and bored. They had big plans for themselves; they wanted to climb the underworld ladder- which I suppose is a descent- but they were aimless and drowning in the tedium and didn’t know why. I knew why, and I couldn’t stand it that nobody asked me. After raiding my father’s shed, I had even worked out the solution.

One day, despite myself, I spoke up, and pushed my brother in a new terrible direction.

“I know why you’re bored,” I said.

“He speaks!” Dave shouted.

“Yeah,” Bruno said. “Now shut up!”

“Hang on,” Dave said, “I want to hear what he has to say. Go on, you sorry sack of shit, tell us why we’re bored.”