Thorn in My Side Read Free Page B

down?”
    Kirk had never liked children. I suppose this came from the high volume of cruelty children had leveled at us when we were ourselves children. And, it must be said, as adults we still come across a lot of rude kids. They’ll scream in terror. They’ll run away from us. The worst will come up and poke at me, as if I’m some Halloween costume. Some of them kick. Some of them punch. A few have even bitten like dogs, clamping their incisors on my arm. It must be a primal urge that compels them to think Kirk is afflicted with some sort of tumor that needs to be chewed off him. Or maybe their parents are just rude, Big-Gulp-guzzling, flip-flop-wearing cretins who haven’t bothered to raise well-mannered children.
    If Kirk hated the children, I hated their parents. These were idiots who’d raised their kids to behave as they like, not as they should. There was no such thing as an “inside voice” for these monsters. There were no manners, no loyalty, and no sense of being but a cog in the greater wheel of society. These were the spoiled idiots who’d bought million-dollar homes on their thirty-thousand-a-year salaries. These were the ones who’d leased Porsches when they should’ve been driving Camrys. They were ticks sucking off the fat of the American dream. And their children were worse, because at least the parents knew better. The kids would be nothing but parasites.
    Just like me.
    “Wayne.” Kirk had been fiddling with the radio. He was looking at me—staring, really. I wanted to smack him for the expression on his face.
    I said, “Just keep your foot away from the gas pedal, please. We can’t afford for both of us to lose our license.”
    He stared at me for a beat longer, then went back to the radio.
    We weren’t meant to read our medical records, but when we were seventeen, Kirk had perused our charts while we waited for the doctors to come poke and prod and scan and magnetize and radiate and all the other horrors medical science rains down upon the conjoined.
    “You’re a parasite,” he’d told me, but I was already reading the words over his shoulder.
    Through extensive testing, Drs. Shelby and Lovett have concluded that subsequent to his lack of full heart and intestinal function, combined with the obvious inability of twin number two to survive without twin number one, the designation of “parasitic twin” should be used going forward to describe Wayne Edgerton.
    This was 1990. We didn’t have computers where you could WebMD something awful about yourself in the privacy of your own home. We went instead to the university library, where we had to pull from the card catalogue the stack number for a book entitled The Psychological Dysnomia of the Parasitic Twin , written by a man with the jackassian name of Bonneau F. Von Heffinger.
    Our hands shook as we opened the first page.
    Dysnomia, from the Greek for “lawlessness.”
    “Sounds more like me than you,” Kirk had said—the most generous statement that has ever come from his mouth before or since.
    The parasitic twin , wrote the esteemed Dr. Von Heffinger, also known as an unequally conjoined twin, is created when twin embryos in utero do not fully separate. As is often found in nature, there is the Darwinian dichotomy; one must struggle against the other for both hormonal support as well as the limited sustenance available in the womb. Thus, one embryo becomes dominant at the expense of the other.
    “Now, that really sounds like me,” Kirk mumbled, licking my finger so I could turn the page.
    In stark juxtaposition is the parasite, which cannot survive without the host. The underdeveloped twin is completely dependent on the dominant twin, also called the autosite. This uneven relationship will often create a lifelong pattern of dependence and hostility.
    Kirk had closed the book on that last sentence. His reading comprehension had never been good, but I could tell he got the gist of the passages. I braced myself for the expected