Dad sings along to the CD. He sings to Mom into the microphone of his thumb with an intense look that makes her laugh. While the CD moans on, I catch Dexter’s eye and pretend to stick my finger down my throat. “What’s wrong, Edie?” Dexter says sweetly, and I can’t get the finger out before our parents see. I’m thirteen (today!), Dexter is fifteen, and sometimes we’re allies but more often we’re enemies, like those knights in Elizabethan times, the ones with the white roses and the ones with the red, like on the front of my Collected Shakespeare Volume III: The Histories and Non-Dramatic Poetry. The first volume, The Comedies, has a guy with a donkey’s head, some fairies, and a bearded guy in a big starry cloak glowering at an enormous book. Volume II: The Tragedies is my favourite. It has the dressed-in-black guy, and the hunchbacked guy, and the crazy-looking red-haired woman, and the old guy sadly patting the head of a boy with bells on his hat. Hamlet, Iago, Lady Macbeth, King Lear.
