“This party gets better every year.” Rosie was sitting on a camping chair she was beginning to suspect she’d have trouble getting out of and trying to seamlessly reattach two egg halves.

“It’s the s’mores.” Marginny poked Rosie’s elbow lovingly with her toe. “Actually, it might be the sangria.”

“Hey, I’m performing surgery here. Your feet are filthy.”

“Yours are worse.”

Rosie pigeon-posed to affirm the truth of this then high-fived Marginny’s begrimed foot with her own.

The kids were mostly gathered around the fire pit, eating sugar in a variety of guises, and contriving ways to be touching one another. Penn could hear Rigel and Orion arguing with Harry and Larry. It hadn’t seemed to Penn at first like that quadratic friendship would last. In the beginning, Harry and Larry had been wigged out by Orion’s costumes, by Rigel’s knitting, by their whole slightly odd, off family. Harry and Larry were a little normal for the Walsh-Adams clan. But it seemed instead that twindom was enough to keep them all together, that having another being in common was more common than anything else.

“Remember when that dude turned into a bug?” Larry was saying.

“That’s what the whole movie was about,” said Orion.

“Yeah, but I mean the moment when he changed. He was all, ‘Aaaahhh, my arms, my legs, aaahhh.’”

“Yeah?”

“That was epic.”

Penn winced. While he had to admit Captain Cockroach had turned a whole new generation of kids into Kafka fans, the resulting travesty bore so little resemblance to the original as to be a different thing altogether.

“That happened to our dog,” said Larry.

“Your dog turned into a cockroach?” Rigel sounded skeptical rather than awed, for which, from across the yard, Penn was grateful.

“Other way around,” said Larry. “There was this huge spider in the kitchen, one of those really hairy ones, and when we tried to trap it, it crawled under the dishwasher, and the next day when we got home from school, there was a dog in the front yard, and she didn’t have a collar, and we posted signs around the neighborhood, but no one claimed her, and we never saw the spider again.”

“So you think the dishwasher transformed the spider into a dog?” Rigel just wanted to make sure he was getting this.

“Duh,” said Larry.

“That’s stupid,” said his brother.

“How else do you explain it?”

“That’s like saying Mark used to be a bicycle,” said Harry. Mark was Harry’s iguana, which their father bought him when he accidentally ran over his bike.

Then they all started laughing. “My skateboard used to be a potato,” said Larry, “because we stopped for French fries on the way to pick it up at the store.”

“Orion’s butt used to be a tuba,” said Rigel, “and that’s why it makes those noises.”

“Rigel’s feet used to be a porta-potty,” Orion countered, “and that’s why they smell like that.”

“Harry used to be a monkey”—Larry was laughing so hard he was using a marshmallow to dab tears from his eyes—“and that’s why he’s so hairy.”

“We all used to be monkeys, you moron,” Harry said.

And Orion said, “Poppy used to be a boy.”

Rosie and Penn froze. Marginny and Frank froze. Roo, Ben, Rigel, Orion, and Poppy all froze. They were spread all over the backyard—by the grill, by the keg, by the dessert table, by the fire pit, by the sprinkler. They were each in their own conversation, their own world, but like dogs who listened, perpetually and without trying, for those few words they understood in the cacophony—sit, stay, walk, good girl—their ears all pricked for what would happen next. To Penn, it seemed like the whole party held its breath. To Poppy, it seemed like not just her family but the entire world had frozen, crystalized here in the very last moment in which it would be okay, and with the next breath, the next one, the next, her entire world would thaw apart. She wondered only at her slamming heart when everything else in the universe was so still. But Rosie saw. Rosie saw that Harry and Larry were laughing like the monkeys they used to be, that Harry and Larry were continuing to compare things to other things, that no one was paying any attention to their quadsome anyway, that Rigel, bless him, had jumped onto the back wall and was acting out Captain Cockroach’s transformation scene with great enthusiasm, that Orion, bless him too, face blanched white as his Snoopy hat, had leapt up alongside his brother, one of his many brothers, to play Captain Cockroach’s devastated fiancée, who had yet to learn to love the beast within. The world kept turning. The secret leaked but held.

It was late when they got home. Poppy stayed at Aggie’s. She had learned to protect her own secret for her own self, and maybe she felt safer there where the only person who could out her was under her control. The boys, all four of them, lingered in the living room, waiting for what would happen next. Rosie felt too tired to figure out what was appropriate here: comfort or castigate, clutch or shame. Did they dodge a bullet together? Was this something to recast as family lore, all relieved smiles, all head-shaking awe at their great escape? Or was this a moment for there-but-for-the-grace upbraiding? She remembered scolding Roo once for leaving scissors where just-walking twins could reach them. “But Mama,” Roo had turned a tearful face to her to wonder, “why are you mad?”