Moonface Read Online Free Page B

nodded.
    â€œBreathe deeply for me,” she said, as she touched my shoulder blades. And I let out a slow deep breath.
    â€œWell,” she said, tossing her hair back and pushing her hand into my hips, “at least you’re learning some anatomy.” She laughed to herself, trying to make a joke out of all this. But it just didn’t seem all that funny.

Chapter Three
The Movie Classic Noly Brother of God, Complete with Beautiful Lighting Effects
    L ater that summer, I woke in a hospital room in Pltts-burgh from a mid-afternoon nap. My mother stood over me with a half-empty plastic bottle shaped like the Blessed Virgin Mary. I thought to myself that somewhere in China there was a factory where small Asian women were melting plastic, pressing it into a mold shaped like Mary, pressing it again and letting it harden until her arms stayed outstretched without drooping or falling, and until you could see each individual fold in her gown. We always had little bottles like this around our house, and ever since I was little, I had always likened them to Mrs. Butterworth, also a woman in bottle form, a vessel for her own product.
    My mother splashed me with Holy Water that she shook off her fingers with force, the way superheroes throw fire with their hands.
    â€œIt’s getting in my eyes,” I said.
    â€œThen you close them,” she said. She, in fact, had her eyes closed, and under her breath, she was mouthing a Novena.
    I listened for the sounds in the hallway: someone wheeling a metal laundry cart, a nurse scolding a patient, a woman crying out in pain. I imagined that this was the woman I would be tomorrow, after they had opened me up, attached my brother’s kidney to the wiring inside me, and sewn me back again. I would be the one waking up and screaming, holding my hand over my side.
    A sharp pull in my hair, and I opened my eyes to see my mother pulling through the knots the way she sometimes pulled loose threads from the hem of a skirt.
    â€œMom!” I yelled, but she didn’t stop.
    The old loud hospital phone rang, shaking the movable table on which it sat. “Channel 3. Siamese twins who’ve never been detached, ” my brother said. They had put my brother in another room and on a different floor, something about separating us to keep our names straight so they didn’t have to switch the medications, and since our check-in, he had been calling me every time he saw something funny on TV. This time, it was a gross sight, really. On the wall-mounted television, there was one normal-sized woman, and attached to her at the hip (literally) was her sister, her smaller version. A side effect of sorts, clinging to her as they moved and talked. My brother had always been obsessed with the gross and absurd. Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Planet of the Apes .
    â€œHow do they get dressed in the morning?” he said.
    â€œOr go to the bathroom?” I asked him.
    The things that made me retch were the things that enthralled him. Once, when we lived in Queens, he collected dead flies stuck in our bedroom window, and then took a needle and thread out of my mother’s sewing box and made a fly necklace.
    â€œOw!” I yelled.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” he said.
    â€œMom is pulling my hair out in large chunks.”
    â€œI’m not!” she yelled into phone.
    â€œTell her to lay off you.”
    â€œLay off me!” I told her.
    â€œDon’t talk to me like that,” she said to me, the line between her eyebrows deepening. She grabbed the phone from my ear and said the same thing to my brother, only, when he responded with something I couldn’t hear, she laughed with him. He always won her over, though she didn’t like to admit it.
    A memory: I stood on a chair in our living room. A crickety wooden one that sounded like it was going to pop under my feet. My brother’s back was against the white-painted wall and his arms were