So that’s how it went from then on. Every birthday night—July 29—there we were, at the old train station, in our pajamas, waking up from the same dream, the blinding light of the oncoming train, the smell of pickles. We weren’t worried about our power ditching us anymore. We knew it was there. We knew it would come and go on its own schedule, not ours.
I was happy to call it our “thing” or “power.” But that wasn’t good enough for Lily. She kept saying it had to have its own one-of-a-kind name. Then one school morning I felt something pressing my nose. I opened my eyes. Lily’s face was hanging upside down from her upper bunk. “Goombla,” she said. I just stared. “It’s goombla.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. We finally had a word for our special thing. Goombla. I just didn’t like her timing. It was five o’clock. “Go to sleep,” I growled, and turned over.
Every birthday I gave Lily a train car. Every year she gave me a stone. But there were no more parties at the house. Lily was afraid Bump Stubbins would show up again, so she begged our parents to do our birthdays at The Happy Hippo.
One thing was the same for every birthday: we got twin presents from Grandpa Dooley (our mom’s dad). We call him Poppy. Poppy and Grandma Dooley lived in California. Dad says they were flower children left over from the seventies. They were hippies. They lived over a garage and drank green tea, and Grandma wore a flower in her hair every day like it was still the seventies. In pictures we saw, Poppy’s hair was as long as Grandma’s. The only shoes they had were sandals.
Grandma died trying to save the redwoods. She was perched in a giant redwood two hundred feet up for eight days and refused to come down until they stopped cutting down the trees. But something broke up there and she fell. And then, in a way, so did Poppy.
“Poppy went off the deep end,” Mom and Dad told us. He tried to be a regular person. He got a haircut. And socks. He got a job in a supermarket and then an office and then a bank. But he just couldn’t do it, not without Grandma. One day he walked out of the bank and never came back. He walked clear out of California. He was gone by the time of Uncle Peaceboy’s wedding and our birth on the train. Nobody heard from him until a strange box came to the house the day before our second birthday. It was from Mexico and inside it were two sombreros. Even though they were kid-sized they were still too big for us, but we wore them anyway, down over our faces, because we loved them so much.
Poppy sailed to every continent. He worked on freighters and tankers. Every birthday a box arrived from a different country. We got bolos from Argentina, tiny silver elephants from India, emu feathers from Australia, voodoo masks from Haiti. The two gifts were always identical.
“Why doesn’t Poppy ever come see us?” We were always asking that. The only answer we ever got was, “He’s trying to find himself.” That made no sense. When we got old enough to have our own email address, we kept sending messages to his BlackBerry: “Hurry up and find yourself so you can come see us.” He always answered us, but the only thing that showed up on our porch was a birthday box every July 29.
Bump Stubbins kept showing up too. Lily kept telling him to get lost. He was a real clown. He would crash his bike into a telephone pole. He would pretend to walk into a wall. He would reach into his nose with the tip of his tongue. For a while there he had a new act every day. I guess he figured if he could make Lily laugh, she would let him join us. But she wouldn’t even look at him. Me? I just thought he was funny.
He was especially funny the day Lily and I were on the porch wearing our sombreros and practicing our Mexican: “Si si!” and “Muchos gracias!” Bump comes along, and before you know it he snatches my hat and plops it on his own head. I was mad at first, but when I saw how funny he looked, all I could do was laugh. But Lily went after him. He jumped down from the porch and started running. That’s the day he found out how fast Lily is. She caught him and grabbed for the hat. But it didn’t come right off because it had a string that went under the chin, and when she pulled at the hat the string caught his neck and he jerked to a stop. Lily grabbed the hat and brought it back to me. Bump staggered home whimpering, and we figured that was that.
That day after dinner Bump showed up with his mom. She showed our parents the mark on his neck. And here’s where it got surprising for Mrs. Stubbins. Before she had a chance to say anything else, Lily squeezed out from between Mom and Dad and piped up, all cheery, “I did it!” Mrs. Stubbins first looked shocked, then disappointed because she didn’t have a chance to complain or accuse anybody. She glared at Lily, glared at me, glared at our parents. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re going to punish her for choking my son.”
“Oh, we will,” our father said.
I guess Bump still wasn’t satisfied, because then he snarled at Lily, “And you ain’t twins neither. Twins look exactly alike.”
Lily went for him, but Dad caught her by the shirt collar. He smiled at Mrs. Stubbins. “We have it covered.”
After Bump and his mom stomped off, Dad said one simple word to Lily: “Room.”
Lily put a grump on her face and slumped upstairs. She wasn’t going to our room but to the Cool-It Room. Lily will explain that in a minute.
See, what Mrs. Stubbins didn’t know is that Lily confesses. (I already told you that she lies, but she never lies when the question is, “Did you do it?” She steals my pumpkin seeds but never denies it.) Confessing is very rare among kids. And she didn’t mind getting punished, especially when punishment was the Cool-It Room.