There are cops at my house. Yeah. Whoops.

Here’s what I don’t know—are the cops here because I’ve been gone all night? Or because of what I just did with David and Rory? I consider turning around and driving away, but that would just be worse.

Yes, it’s six forty-five in the morning, and no, I’ve never stayed out all night before, especially not at the request of a guy I keep a scrapbook about. No, I will never show him my scrapbook. Yes, it was completely amazing. If there are articles in this weekend’s paper—and there will be, because people love and hate Uncle Epic—I will put them in my scrapbook, and will possibly draw stars and smiley faces and exclamation points all over the clippings, even though it’s entirely juvenile, and I might write HELL TO THE FUCKING YES on them just because I was there and I am still freaking out that my truck carried stuff to make Uncle Epic’s art. THE Uncle Epic. The one who’s doing new pieces for the next month as a warm-up for his show at the Walker Art Center and who wants to use my truck because his niece liked my Abominable Water-Skier. Yes, THAT Uncle Epic.

All I want to do is sleep, but the police might frown on that before I talk to them, plus my parents’ delivery truck is still in the driveway, so they won’t leave for work until I explain where I’ve been. Why are there two delivery trucks in my family? My parents own a cleaning service, and mine used to be their work truck. Now they have a new one, which is deep purple with sparkles and a wand on it, and the words MAGIC WIZARD CLEANING SERVICE on it. Since the old one was painted white, all I had to do was take a roller and paint over the words on the side. My truck looks totally low-rent, but at least it’s not purple with sparkles. It just looks like I stole it from FedEx and gave it the world’s crappiest paint job to disguise it.

I try and sneak in the back door, taking off my shoes and everything. Nope. They’re sitting at the kitchen table: a blond young cop, an older cop with curly gray hair, and my parents, drinking coffee and watching me come in. My dad’s in his best pink bathrobe, and my mom is dressed like a Jersey mob boss who just got up—ratty bathrobe, white ribbed tank top, striped pajama pants. In my house, you can be a boy, a girl, neither, or both—all on the same day. The cops don’t seem too fazed by either outfit.

My dad, Brett, is the fill-in Frank-N-Furter at the Hennepin and Broad Dinner Theatre’s production of The Rocky Horror Show, which runs every Friday and Saturday night at midnight. If you’ve never seen the movie or the show, Frank is the sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, as Frank’s first song says. So some nights my dad wears makeup, fishnet stockings and heels, and a bustier. Evidently last night was one of those nights, because he usually wears his pink bathrobe on after-show mornings, when he’s still feeling like Frank.

My mom, whose real name is Bridget, is a female Frank Sinatra impersonator, and she works on Friday and Saturday nights at a cabaret show in St. Paul. She met my dad in some theater thing back in college. Even then, Dad was Frank-N-Furter on the weekends, and she said she couldn’t get enough of him in his bustier. I don’t know which one of them has a lower voice.

You can see why I’m named Frankie.

“So, young man, what’s up? Suddenly become a vagabond and forget where you live?” My mom tries to act casual, but she’s got her legs crossed and she’s not so casually kicking the table leg. Her tense body language isn’t matching up with her casual voice. “Why haven’t you answered our texts since one thirty this morning?”

The cops take a look at me. The older one writes something down in his notebook. “Is this your son, Mr. Neumann?”

My dad draws his bathrobe around his chest. “Yes, it is. Frankie, where were you?”

“I was . . . helping a friend. With a big project.” Maybe that will make a difference. The adrenaline is still flowing from what we did, so I work to keep the shakes out of my voice.

“Come here and let me smell you.” My dad beckons me to him, and I walk closer. He stands up, and the cops stand up, too, like they might go after me if he doesn’t. He sniffs me. “Breath?” I breathe on him. He sniffs around me again. “You smell clean, which is lucky for you.”

“What friend?” My mom sips her coffee again, but the kicking continues.

“Just a girl in my class. You don’t know her.”

“What’s her name?” She looks at my dad. “We need to know her name, don’t we?”

The blond cop nods after they sit back down. “A name would be useful.” The older one writes something down in his notebook again. Why would a cop care what my friend’s name is?

“We weren’t doing anything illegal. Just hanging around and looking for location shots for her documentary.” It’s the first thing I think of. “She had a lot of equipment to carry around, cameras and stuff, so I helped her.”

My mom wrinkles her nose. “What’s her documentary about? I hope it’s something worthwhile.”

Seriously, whose parents have a purple sparkly delivery truck, gender-bender performance jobs on the weekends, and stuck-up attitudes about documentaries?

My dad turns to the cops. “Thanks for coming over. I think we can take it from here.”

They look him up and down, at his pink bathrobe and his hairy chest. Thank god he doesn’t have on his fishnets. The older one flips his notebook closed. “Sure thing, Mr. Neumann.” They stand up again and walk out the door without looking back.

My mom yells after them. “Thank you!” She’s always polite to authority figures. Then she turns to me. “It doesn’t change the fact that you were out all night.” When she’s wearing pajamas, she’s not a particularly menacing figure, but I can tell she means business. She stands up and takes her cereal bowl to the dishwasher. “You need to help us wash the truck before we go to our first job. After that, you can vacuum. And then you can be grounded for two weeks.” She shuts the dishwasher door after she puts the bowl and a coffee cup in it. “Does your creative friend have parents we can talk to? Can we call and find out if you were with her?”

“That’s just embarrassing. No.” I have David’s number, but I have no idea what he’d say to them.

She levels a stare at me. “You realize we’re cutting you some pretty enormous slack here. You’re seventeen, and if you’re doing something wrong, it’s our heads. We’re responsible for you if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I know. I won’t do it again. Thank you.” I muster as much humility as I can.

Dad walks toward their room. “Get your truck-washing clothes on. We’ve only got about an hour before Mom and I have to leave.”

“Be right back.” I bound up the stairs as fast as my shaky legs will carry me. I’m so tired I could sleep standing up.

While I look for an old pair of jeans and a ratty sweatshirt—it’s only fifty degrees out there—I think about what we just did. David and Rory made me help them pack up my truck with ten posters that were at least five feet tall, then ten pieces of plywood to build backs for the posters, plus two-by-fours, hammers, nails, cinder blocks, a bunch of wallpaper paste, and some huge brushes that look like brooms. We also had a couple of staple guns and tape, for good measure. Then we drove over to the capitol in St. Paul. Epic didn’t go with us, and David and Rory didn’t say where he was. But they said this was a teaser for his show. How an anonymous guy has a show, I don’t know. I need to ask.

Obviously Epic has a printing press, or a humongous copy machine, because the posters were all the same—it was a photograph of Rory’s eye, just one, which kind of creeped me out once there were ten of them lying around, with the words WE’RE WATCHING, GOVERNMENT PAWNS. Rory and I spent two hours pasting up the posters on the boards, then another two and a half hours hammering on the two-by-fours and placing the boards in various locations in the grass. Her eyes kind of overpowered everything, which was cool.

It took forever, but it was phenomenal when it was done. All over one side of the capitol lawn, the posters were tilted up from the ground, so it looked like there were ten eyes peeling up from the ground and looking at the capitol. It was incredible, and it felt like we were—well, Uncle Epic was—saying something that needed to be said.

Plus, as art goes, it’s easily broken down and hauled away. It’s not like we spray-painted on the capitol itself. Epic’s a little smarter than some artists in that way. According to the law, even Banksy is a vandal—amazing anonymous street art god that he is—when he spray-paints on public buildings. Epic just leaves shit around, which is annoying and qualifies as illegal dumping, but isn’t technically much of a crime. This is the first time Epic’s been back in the Cities for a while, so he wants the public to think about their homegrown son.

When we finished around five forty-five, there was a thin line of sunrise in the east. But then we saw flashing lights coming at us, which scared the crap out of me, even though Rory and David told me not to sweat it. The truck was loaded, and we looked like delivery people. All we had to do was get in it, casually, casually, and drive away. And that’s what we did. Rory and David told me being casual is the key—to always be able to hide your materials, and to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. It’s a lot harder for cops to arrest people who look like they’re just standing around. It’s not hard to arrest people with suspicious-looking stuff in their hands. David said they’ve been helping Epic for the past couple summers, when they’re not in school and Epic’s doing art in other places, and they learned the act-casual-but-hide-stuff trick when they were in LA with him.

The lights just sped by and didn’t stop, thank god. Then I had to take Rory and David back to the garage. When I asked them if I was going to get to meet Epic, they didn’t say anything. But when I was helping take stuff back inside the shop, I saw a guy leaning against the back wall of the garage. He had on a hoodie, so I couldn’t see his face. But he waved at me. I waved back. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know if I should and I probably would have said the dumbest thing ever. I don’t want him to fire me after my first job.

Once I got back in the truck to come home, that’s when the adrenaline shakes hit. I kinda, sorta defaced public property—state property, even, a lot of it. I helped Uncle Epic make art. Me. ME. And I stayed out all night and I hung out with Rory Carlson for approximately six hours, though it’s not like she cares. She wouldn’t give me her phone number, but she said I could reach her through David. David didn’t look pleased.

By the time I get downstairs again, my dad is wearing his regular cleaning-guy uniform, and he’s soaping the truck wheels. He makes me run the power washer, and he tells me to scrub the stars extra well. Like purple glitter stars get really dirty. My mom supervises for a while, but then goes inside to take a shower and change into her work uniform, which is pretty much the same as my dad’s. When they do their cleaning stuff, they look like regular people. But it’s not like my mom and dad are secret about their theater lives. They invite their employees to their shows all the time.

I’m almost finished vacuuming the back of the truck when my mom appears again. Somebody spilled Ajax powder in there, so now my nose and eyes are coated in this fine white gritty stuff.

When I’m done, she gives me a big hug and wipes off my face with a clean rag. “You scared us, you know. You’re only seventeen.” She’s shorter than me now, and right at the moment she looks more like a mom than a New Jersey mob boss.

“I know. I’m sorry.” And I am. A little.

“We’ll take away your truck if you do it again.” She sighs. “We probably shouldn’t let you have it anyway. There’s room in there for a bar—or a bed.” My parents trust us a lot, which is why Lou and I don’t have curfews or take vitamins or go to the dentist, because they figure we’ll come home, eat right, and brush our teeth. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I sigh back at her. “I’m not going to put a bar OR a bed in there. I put camera supplies in it last night. That’s all.” Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

“Can you get me a still shot?” She’s getting insistent.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I could send her a shot of the capitol, without Rory’s eyes, but if Epic’s art makes the news, she’ll put it together.

“You might want to do that.” She’s stern again. “See you later.” She gives me a kiss on the cheek and climbs into the van after my dad, whose been loading up floor wax and that huge buffer thing that looks like you can ride on it. I’d better not tell David and Rory we have one of those, or we’ll do floor wax art somewhere just so they can test the ride-on-it theory.

I go inside and flop down on the couch, and I’m almost asleep when something hard hits my foot.

When I open my eyes, she’s standing there in her tulle skirt, plaid pajama top above it, looking like I’ve personally offended her. “Tallulah’s always in tulle, you know,” she says to her friends, and they say, “Oooooh,” like it was some sort of genius artist statement.

She’s frowning and giving me her indignant face. “Where were you last night? Mom and Dad were totally worried.” Her washed-out blond hair looks like she electrified it.

“They were not.” I close my eyes again. “They have too much other stuff to do, like sing Frank Sinatra songs and prance around in a bustier.”

“They didn’t sleep at all.”

I open my eyes again and sit up. “So?”

“So you freaked them out. I got home at one, and nobody was here. Then I got up at three to get a drink, and they were sitting in the kitchen, waiting for you. Then I got up at five because I was hungry, and they were still up. And they were smoking.”

First of all, my parents quit smoking about five years ago, which is kind of an uncreative thing to do, nicotine helps the brain and all that. But they’re singers, which makes a difference. Gotta preserve the pipes.

“The house doesn’t smell like it.”

Lou frowns again. “They used almost a whole bottle of Febreze before they called the cops. They were worried, butthead. Don’t do that to them again.”

“Whatever, brat.” I lie back down.

“So where were you? You were out with a girl, weren’t you? Or maybe just friends.” She won’t go away. “But then again, you don’t have friends.”

“I have friends you don’t even know about.”

“You were out smoking weed.”

“You’re thinking of your friends.”

She smacks my foot again. “My friends don’t smoke weed. At least not much.”

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“Guess what I did after I left Pizza Vendetta?” She’s staring at me, daring me to ask so she can tell me that her adventure was better than mine.

“You and all your theater girls sat in a circle and brushed each other’s hair and recited Shakespeare.”

“No.” Smack on the foot for emphasis. “Guess again.”

“You broke into the Guthrie Theater and performed a soliloquy from The Glass Menagerie on the main stage.”

“Ha!” She hits me again. “It was illegal, but it wasn’t that.”

Why does she want me to know this? “Whatever. Get out of here.”

“You are a rude, unimaginative jerkwad who has no soul.” She crosses her arms.

“You are a fluffy, overly emotive drama queen who bores the crap out of me.” I pitch a couch pillow at her.

“Stick it up your ass.” Lou hits me one more time and goes into the kitchen. I hear the soundtrack to Chicago start up, and she sings along while she makes toast. Then the floor starts shaking, so I know she’s dancing, or at least practicing the stage blocking—with emphasis—that she still remembers from when she saw the Broadway show three years ago.

She’s relentless. And so freaking special. Everyone in this house is artistic and soulful and deep and special—everyone but me. And everything is meaningful, and people are always practicing their routine, which is always special. Drama is everywhere, all the time.

Lou can draw, dance, sing, and act. And she’s beautiful, with her wavy hair and her classic face and her dancer’s body. Lou and my parents treat the whole world as a stage. Me? I’m just an average-as-hell audience member.

I go upstairs to my room but I can still hear the stupid music. So I go up the back stairs to the ballroom.

Our house is one of those big old mansions that were built in the early twentieth century. It’s enormous. There are still two junk rooms on the floor with my room and Lou’s room, and the main floor has my folks’ bedroom, an office for their business, and a living room, which is where we watch DVDs of everybody’s performances, yawn, plus the kitchen. Since there’s so much space on the other two floors, nobody ever comes all the way up here, so nobody knows about my art. Which is exactly how I like it.

My latest hobby is buying big old couch paintings from thrift stores—not paintings of couches, but horrible paintings that hang above couches—and adding monsters to them. Right now I’m working on a blue-and-purple blob with googly eyes and lots of tentacles who’s eating a bunch of peaceful sheep in a very peaceful field.

The monster gets a few more tentacles, plus a few swirly places and contours, and then it seems done, so I lean it against the wall to let it dry. My next monster is a Sasquatch-looking dude, but with a kind face, sitting on the top of a cottage in one of those picturesque villages in England somewhere—at least that’s my guess where it is, since there’s grass or reeds or something on the roofs instead of shingles. His fur blends in with the grass roof. I’m going to paint some villagers running away while he relaxes and drinks a beer. His name is Sid.

I paint Sid the Sasquatch’s legs and think about Rory. She is way too cute, which she knows, and she stomps guys into the ground. I watched her do it with Max Ledermann, an orchestra dude who’s also in our Spanish class. She turned him into a pet. He brought her lunch and carried whatever she made him carry, and all she ever gave him in return was a smile. Maybe they were doing it every other night when none of us could see them, but in school it looked like she used him for her lunch slave, and when John Marshall, a choir guy, took the spot at the lunch table that Max Ledermann used to have, I watched Max cry in the corner of the cafeteria, which of course he never lived down.

I’m not letting that happen to me. Maybe we can pretend we don’t know each other at school, since I sit behind her in Spanish, so she doesn’t have to look at me or anything. I have no idea if doing work for Epic will ever happen again. Maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. But secretly? I’m hoping we’ll be together all day every day and she’ll stop her evil ways because she’ll know my love is pure and she’ll want me for her very own true romantical dude.

Right? Riiiiiiiight.

Instead of working some more on Sid’s legs, I lie down on the pile of blankets and pillows Mom stashed up here years ago. I don’t even put my paints away. I’m such a rebel.

I dream about Rory’s eyes all over my ballroom, huge paper eyes, and they’re all looking at me. Blinking at me, as if to say, “Me, date you? Think again, dumbass. You’re just an audience member.”

When I wake up, the sun is low on the wall, which means it’s late afternoon. The west sun is the only kind that comes into the window. When I open the stairwell door and wander into the hall, the house is quiet. I go down the next flight of stairs to the main floor. It’s definitely time for some food.

Mom, Dad, and Lou are sitting in the living room watching TV. Nobody looks up when I go by, because it’s a DVD of Pippin, from a long time ago. Maybe the early eighties? It’s one of their faves.

I make a sandwich and stop by the living room. They’re all singing “Corner of the Sky” at the top of their lungs, and nobody sees or hears me. Gotta find my corner . . . yeah, the whole freaking world is your corner.

When I get back up to the attic, I sit on the floor and stare at Donna Russell while I eat my sandwich. Donna’s a sculpture. Sort of.

Back in college, my mom used to sew, and she had these things called dress forms—basically, they’re torsos on sticks, made of wire so you can mold them to be different sizes—and they were in the corner of the ballroom when I started coming up here. One form was female and one was male. I say was because they’re joined together now, mashed into a big blobby body. Donna Russell is kind of unisex, and her torso is a big circle with boobs on one section.

Her arms are broom and mop handles, with a broom for her right hand and a mop for her left, and her legs are made out of old blankets rolled up and tied with ribbons from Lou’s dance costumes that got shoved up here. She has wing-tip shoes from my dad’s days when he worked in an office. That didn’t last long. She also has a vajayjay and a wiener, just because I didn’t know which love bits were more appropriate, both made out of old socks. She’s got a head I made from some stuff in my dad’s shop—wires and bolts and things, with more wire sticking out for hair, kind of like a metal Medusa. All of it is stitched together with blue string.

Donna Russell’s face is my favorite. It’s a magazine collage. I made eyes, a nose, and a mouth out of ads and pasted them on the front of the metal head. I made her look kind of stern and kind of tender at the same time, like she likes me but she doesn’t necessarily approve of what I’m doing. That seems fair.

Lou has never made anything that’s like Donna Russell, which is also why I like Donna. And I’m the center of Donna’s world, unlike Lou, who’s been the center of my parents’ world since she showed up when I was two. When they came home from the hospital, they put Lou’s car seat in the middle of the kitchen table and told me not to touch what was up there. I climbed up on a chair so I could see what I wasn’t supposed to touch, and it was a baby. Then I slipped and knocked myself off the chair, and almost pulled Lou off the table when I fell. I had to go to my room for a long, long time—at least it seemed long to me. When you’re that little, everything seems long. But it told me who she was—someone who kicked me out of my parents’ lives and promptly set up shop there.

A couple months after that, I remember my mom was changing Lou’s diaper, and she yelled for my dad like something was wrong. He dropped everything, including me and the trains we were playing with, and came running. I did, too.

My mom pointed to the crease where Lou’s left leg met her body, and I remember her saying, “Look! She’s the one! We should have saved it for her!” In the crease of her leg were seven freckles (what baby has freckles?) in the shape of an F. My dad, who thought someone was dying the way my mom had hollered, started to laugh instead, and said, “Yep, she’s the one. She should have been the Frankie in the family.”

I know my parents don’t remember this, and I have no idea how I do, considering I was so little. But I remember seeing their joy at the F, and then feeling like I’d been fooled. I remember thinking, If she’s the one, I must not belong to them. It was a brain-popping discovery for a two-year-old.

So, when I was four, I tried to give back my name, and I remember them being confused when I told them it belonged to Lou, not me. She was the Frankie, remember? They said it when they saw her freckles. Of course, they had no idea what I was talking about. I said I wanted to be named Owen, who was the one kid I talked to at my day care—I was so shy, I never talked to anyone else. They said no, I was Frankie. End of story.

I remember being very pissed, but also confused. If they knew Lou was supposed to be their Frankie, shouldn’t they be glad I was giving the name back? Kid logic makes no sense, but the problem is, ideas get burned into your brain. It was very clear they loved the real Frankie, who was actually Lou. She belonged to them. They only tolerated the fake Frankie, who was me, thus I didn’t belong to them. So why not change my name to Owen?

Life went on, of course, and she was a bratty little sister while I was your basic introverted kid who didn’t think he belonged anywhere. Then she did the worst thing she could—worse than burning my Tinkertoys, or wrecking my skateboard and my bike and the million other little things she did to make my life suck. She stole my work. You don’t do that to an artist, not even a kid artist. This wasn’t “You’re awesome, so I’m going to copy you” stealing. This was outright theft.

When I was twelve and Lou was ten, we both wanted to go to the Split Rock Summer Art Splash, up in Duluth. It’s a weeklong camp, and it’s got everything—theater, music, painting, drawing, whatever arty-farty thing a kid wants to do. It costs a crap-ton of cash, and double that price when you have two kids who want to go. Lou’s best friend at the time was going, and Lou was crying every night, bugging my parents about going with Elizabeth—whose parents have lots of money—and getting on everyone’s nerves. My parents were pulling out their hair.

The camp gives away a scholarship to the kid who designs the best poster on the camp theme, and the year we both wanted to go, the theme was “Go bananas for art.” And my brain exploded. When I was a little kid, my dad had a bunch of really cool albums, and I was fascinated with his Velvet Underground album that had a banana with a peel-off sticker. In my head, that cover got combined with the Rolling Stones album cover that had a zipper on it, and presto! Zip-up banana bus with happy, art-crazy kids spilling out of it, all with Split Rock Lighthouse looking over us in the background. Frankie wins! It was a done deal.

I made all sorts of sketches before I did a final, and—of course, because this is how it works in my house—Lou saw my idea on my desk and then, line for line, she drew the same poster I did. My parents sent hers to the contest two days before I brought them mine to mail, and when they saw it, they were sure I’d copied her. No matter what I said, they didn’t believe me, and they wouldn’t send my poster. Guess who won the scholarship? I still got to go, since my folks suddenly had enough money to send both of us, but Lou got the glory, with my zip-up banana bus.

I pinned her down for twenty minutes when she got the letter saying she’d won, trying to get her to swear she copied me. She wouldn’t fess up. My parents grounded me for a week for doing it. That summer, her poster with kids and the banana bus was everywhere at camp—they were all so proud of Lou! So much talent, they said—she sings, she acts, she draws, she dances. She’s the real deal. She’ll go far.

That camp was the worst five days of my life. I was so pissed I couldn’t do anything, not even build funky little models out of balsa wood. Everywhere there was evidence of Lou’s superiority—she won the contest, she was obviously the better Neumann sibling, she got to hang out with Elizabeth, and all I got was heartbreak. So I quit making art. I came home from that camp and didn’t do anything for two years, and when I did start again, I never showed anyone my work.

In my head, I know it’s silly to still be pissed, or even annoyed. She was ten, and when you’re ten, you do dumb stuff, especially when your best friend’s going to camp and you want to go, too. But it hurt, down to my core, so my heart overrides my brain on this one. You don’t steal someone else’s art. You just don’t.

And she never got caught, and she never stopped being awful, and she does shit like calling me Pepperoniangelo, and it just never ends. The true Frankie is loved, because she’s just like my parents—outgoing and talented and wonderful. The fake Frankie is tolerated. That’s just how it is. Do I belong in this family? Not at all.

I get a text from David: Thanks for the help. E thinks you’re a keeper. Then a winking emoji. Something I didn’t recognize as a knot in my stomach is suddenly unknotted. Maybe there really will be more art with Epic.

I text back: Glad he likes it. I don’t text a wink.

Donna Russell is at the end of the room, slumped under the big high window. I swallow the last bite of my sandwich, stand up, and go to her. I think of her as the guardian of the ballroom, and I always imagine she could stomp on someone if I needed her to, even though she looks pretty relaxed. Nobody knows Donna Russell is up here, and I like that. She protects me. She’s my monster mash-up safe person.