Born Weird Read Online Free PDF

first.”
    “What is it?”
    “We have to visit Mother.”
    “Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll do it.”
    In the kitchen the kettle began to whistle. This was a trickLucy had been using since high school, to interrupt moments precisely like this one. It got louder and louder and higher in pitch. But Angie didn’t loosen her grip and Lucy did not try to break it.

T HE MOST IMPORTANT THING the Weird siblings ever did together was Rainytown. It was a city made entirely out of cardboard boxes that they built in the half-storey attic of their family’s cottage. It was a project they worked on every summer, whenever it rained. Two factors contributed significantly to its genesis: that it rained for seven straight days during the summer of 1994, and that several weeks earlier Kent had found numerous cardboard boxes, big and small, in a neighbour’s garbage.
    Kent had dragged the boxes back to the cottage with the intention of playing girlbots. This was a game that Lucy and Abba were disinclined to join. It was forgotten until the grey dismal morning of the seventh day, when they looked outside and saw that the rain continued to fall. Lacking fresh ideas, they followed Kent up to the attic, where conflict began almost instantly.
    “Hold on there, Kentucky,” Richard said, using the nickname he knew Kent hated. “I’m obviously the mad scientist since I can’t be a girlbot and I’m older than you.”
    “That’s not fair!” Kent said. A small trickle of blood began to leak from his left nostril.
    “Truth isn’t fair,” Richard said, invoking the expression that was the unofficial Weird family motto.
    “You know that isn’t going to work with us,” Abba said. Kent’s nosebleed ceased.
    “Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t be the mad scientist,” Lucy said. She began collecting boxes. Richard tried to pull them out of her hands. Fighting ensued. Their voices rose in volume and pitch and soon their mother’s head poked up into the crawl space.
    What she saw disturbed her. Abba appeared to be crying, although it was hard to tell because of the box that covered her head. Angie was also in tears—but then again when wasn’t she?—because she couldn’t remove the Kleenex boxes that had been duct-taped to her feet. Lucy repeatedly hit Richard on the head with a long cardboard tube.
    “Stop it,” their mother screamed. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
    Nicola, who was not prone to losing it, looked at her children. She looked at the boxes scattered on the floor. “What are you people trying to do?” she asked.
    “Make robots,” Kent truthfully answered.
    “Robots? Surely the five of you can come up with something better than that. Something more …”
    A silence followed. The sound of the rain striking the roof could be heard. Their mother’s eyes seemed to be focused on something quite far away. The silence captured theirattention, and the look on Nicola’s face, wistful and sad, cracked their self-absorbed shells.
    “More what?”
    “Just more. Larger. A bigger scale,” Nicola said. “Not a mimic of some movie. Something original. Something that can be all your own …”
    “Okay …”
    “But like what?”
    “What, Mom? Tell us!”
    “Like a city!”
    “That’s a great idea!”
    “From Mom!”
    “Why so surprised?”
    “How should we start?”
    “A town hall?”
    “A TV station!”
    “A motorcycle speedway!”
    “You choose, Mom,” Richard said. “What would you start with?”
    “A hair salon,” she said, instantly. “A beauty parlour.”
    And so they got started. That very afternoon they designed and built the It’s About Time Hair Cutting Saloon, situated in what would become the heart of Rainytown, the first of many buildings to follow.
    If it hadn’t been for Besnard there were many things Nicola would have done with her life. But after he vanished shedidn’t do any of them. She didn’t even try. Two days after her husband’s crumpled Maserati was pulled